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REVIEW: Eoin Colfer kicks off Doctor Who 50th anniversary with new 1st Doctor adventure

320921_582666958414002_1737952903_n-290x446-3066346Some things we now know about the Doctor thanks to Eoin Colfer, writer of the Artemis Fowl books:

The Doctor hates Blakes 7.

The Doctor has lost a hand before.

The Doctor’s first stop on Earth was not 1963.

Colfer’s e-book, A Big Hand for the Doctor, is the first of eleven monthly releases, each featuring a different Doctor.  Eoin (“Owen”) chose the first Doctor, as played by William Hartnell, and takes advantage of that by doing an end-run around continuity and setting his adventure before the first adventure of the series.  In it, he is in Victorian London, recuperating from a battle with a band of organleggers who kidnap children from their bedrooms, wasting “not a molecule” of their biomass, resulting in their fearful moniker, the Soul Pirates.  The Doctor lost a hand in a sword fight with their leader, and while a new one is grown for him, a helpful alien surgeon fits him with a functional if unattractive metal claw.  His granddaughter Susan has disobeyed (of course) and set off after the Soul Pirates herself, only serving to get herself caught in their glittering tractor beam.  The Doctor must fight off the hordes of slow-witted pirates to save the children, as well as match wits with their leader, a young man who has chosen to wear The Doctor’s severed hand around his neck.

The short story (only about 5,000 words) is witty and charming, with wonderful tossaway details of still more adventures unseen and yet to come.  The story is laced with parallels to a certain classic of children’s literature, all tied up with a cameo by the author at the end, once again showing that even when he’s not aware of it, The Doctor can’t help but to help.

The authors of the rest of the anniversary adventures are a closely-guarded secret  Each will be revealed around the beginning of each month.  A number of names have been floated by numerous websites with little evidence or basis in fact, mainly to draw clicks to their pages.  The first book is available at many e-book dealers including Amazon.com.

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“Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes” wins Costa Book Awards biography of 2012

  • News
  • January 3, 2013

Dotter of her Father's EyesMary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes has won the Costa Book Awards biography of the year. They won the £5,000 biography prize for a book that interweaves the true and tragic story of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia with Mary’s own troubled relationship with her father, the eminent Joycean scholar James S. Atherton.

The Talbots have known of the win for several weeks. “It has been really hard keeping quiet about it,” said Mary. “We were astonished. Just being shortlisted was amazing and hearing we’d won the category was stunning. We’re delighted of course, both personally – it’s the first story I’ve had published – but also for the medium, I can’t believe a graphic novel has won.”

It is not the first graphic work to win a major literary prize – Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a Pulitzer in 1992 and Chris Ware won the Guardian first book prize in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth – but the Costa award is still a significant moment for the graphic medium.

“It is a good thing for graphic novels as a whole,” said Bryan Talbot whose prodigious output includes The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and Alice in Sunderland as well as strips for Judge Dredd and Batman. “Graphic novels are becoming increasingly accepted as a legitimate art form.”

The last graphic novel spike came about 25 years ago with the popularity of books such as The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus. The problem then, said Talbot, was that there were not enough books to feed this. “By the time you’d read a dozen or so of the best titles, there wasn’t enough left to keep this nascent interest going. Since then, there has been an increasing number of graphic novels published and now we have this whole canon of quality work.

“We are living in the golden age of graphic novels. There are more and better comics being drawn today than ever in the history of the medium and there’s such a range of styles of artwork, of genre and of subject matter.”

Judges called Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes “a beautifully crafted” work “which crosses the boundaries between literature and the graphic genre with extraordinary effect”.

via Costa awards 2012: graphic biography wins category prize | Books | The Guardian.

Congratulations to Mary and Bryan!

See the haunted opera “Lilith: Mother of Dreams” tonight!

  • News
  • December 20, 2012

There was a once-in-a-century storm that delayed the original premiere date. But Lilith will not be denied.

Join poet-violist (and ComicMix contributor) Alexandra Honigsberg, international artist composer-clarinetist Demetrius Spaneas, soprano Christina Rohm, and pianist-conductor James Siranovich at the premiere of Lilith: Mother of Dreams, a chamber opera of the iconic demon goddess. It’s debuting tonight at a historic haunted opera house, Flushing Town Hall.

The Lilith Project is conceived as a modern American suitcase opera, a chamber monodrama: intense, human, universal, compact in form and forces, accessible.

Before there was Eve, there was Lilith: Adam’s first lover, once human, made from the same dust, sensuality’s queen, bride of the Angel of Death, mother of opposing cosmic forces – strong, willful, unstoppable. She rules the storms of the skies and the heart – night owl, holy woman of power. From ancient tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, to Greece’s Lamiae and Daughters of Hecate, to Native American lore and Victorian Gothic Horror, Lilith looms large in the minds of men and women when the lights go out and they enter dream time. Some call her demon, vampire, child killer – others mother, lover, elder, friend. But whatever the appellations, she persists in the realms of our imaginations, from holy books and high literature to popular feminist concert series, TV shows, and Japanese anime. Child of Light? Daughter of Darkness? Both? Neither? You decide.

Composer Spaneas is a long-time professional, curator of Cornelia St. Café’s Serial Underground award-winning new music series’ 25th year, and Fullbright Specialist of the State Department’s musical diplomats. Librettist Honigsberg is a veteran violist, award-winning songwriter, long-time published poet, and this year’s winner of the Mayor’s Poetry Prize. Both Rohm and Siranovich have established opera careers all over the US and cities abroad.  Long-time colleagues in many configurations over the years, Lilith marks this creative team’s debut.

There will be a talk by the artists before the performance and then time for questions and answers, afterwards, and a reception to which all are invited. Come as you are, but gala premiere attire, period dress, and other unique finery is encouraged!

The production is fiscally sponsored by Composers Collaborative, Inc. $10 suggested donation/FTH members free, all welcome.

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MARK ELLIS TAKES UP THE CHALLENGE

  • News
  • November 9, 2012

On his Facebook page, New Pulp Author Mark Ellis posted the cover and a tease about his upcoming project.

From Mark Ellis:

In…a world…(I always wanted to write that)

In a world almost identical to this one, all the characters from Victorian and early 20th century literature existed…there was Nemo, Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty, and even the War of The Worlds.

Some of the descendants of these famous–and in many instances, infamous–people carry on the work of their distinguished (and not so much) ancestors.

Two of these descendants are Professor Edward George Challenger and Major Loveday Brooke, operatives of the Diogenes Club, a freelance adjunct of MI6.

In ISLANDS OF DR. MOREAU, they face the terrifying threat of Sirocco Moreau, who has harnessed the secrets of selective mutation to give dominion of the Earth to the Akhakhu, neogods modeled after the ancient Egyptian pantheon of deities–with her as the immortal queen.

This is the first (hopefully) in an action-adventure series featuring the grandson of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor George Edward Challenger…it’s a blend of Doc Savage and James Bond, with a pinch of Torchwood and a sprinkling of The Avengers and The Man From UNCLE.

I’m having a lot of fun working in this universe, so by following Rex Stout’s dictum, everybody should have a lot of fun reading it.

I’ll have more details about the release date soon.

#####

And we’ll share that here on All Pulp when it becomes available.

FORTIER TAKES ON ‘ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA’!

  • News
  • November 2, 2012

ALL PULP REVIEWS- Reviews by Ron Fortier
ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA
By Balogun Ojetade
Meji Books
MV Media LLC
145 pages
Since the advent of Sword & Soul, a subgenre focusing primarily on African mythology, we’ve seen many wonderful anthologies and novels come along that are breathing new life and welcomed vigor into fantasy literature.  The two biggest proponents, creators if you will, of this new classification are authors Charles Saunders and Milton Davis.  Saunders is known for his lifelong achievements in authoring some of the finest black fantasy fiction ever put to paper to include his marvelous heroes, Imaro and Dossouye.  Whereas Davis, beside his own amazing fiction, has been the driving force behind MV media, LLC, a publishing brand devoted to Sword & Soul.
Now, from that house, we have ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRICA by Balgum Ojetade; a sprawling, colorful and fast moving adventure that defines the best of Sword & Soul.  It is a tale of whimsy, love, magic and war told with such comfortable ease as to pull the reader along effortlessly.  Now in all fairness, this reviewer was challenged to keep the many characters separate due to their exotic foreign names that twists one’s mental tongue in a variety of unique vowels and consonants.  Thankfully Ojetade does provide a glossary of names at the book’s conclusion which was most helpful.  Despite this minor annoyance, he does distinguish each figure in unique ways that did allow us to enjoy the action without getting overly concerned about proper pronunciations along the way.
Alaafin, the Emperor of the Empire of Oyo wishes to marry off his beautiful but mischievous daughter, Princess Esuseeke.  Seeke, as she is referred to, is very much a “tomboy” who prefers studying martial arts rather than learning sewing or poetry in the royal palace.  It is Alaafin’s prime minister, Temileke who suggest Alaafin sponsor a Grand Tournament to feature the best fighters in all the land brought together to battle for the hand of the princess.  The emperor approves of the idea and dispatches Temileke to the furthest corners of Oyo to recruit only the greatest warriors in the kingdom to participate.
Meanwhile, Seeke, frustrated by her role as the prize in such a contest, accidently encounters her father’s chief general, Aare Ona Kakanfo.  Or so she believes. In reality the person she meets wearing the general’s combat mask is actually Akinkugbe; a young warrior wishing to enter the contest disguised as the general.  When Akin manages to win Seeke’s heart, things start to get complicated.  All the while the real Kakanfo is commanding the forces of Oyo in the south against their enemies the Urabi, desert people whose singular goal is to conquer Oyo.
As the day of the tournament fast approaches, Akin is trapped having to maintain his disguise and somehow figure a way to defeat the other fighters to win the hand of the woman he loves.  While at the same time, the Urabi, unable to defeat Kakanfo’s troops, desperately recruit the services of a brutal demon and a deadly female assassin to help turn the tide of battle in their favor.
All these various plot elements converge dramatically at the book’s conclusion wherein Akin and Seeke not only must overcome overwhelming odds to be together but at the same time rally their people to withstand the calamitous assault of their fiendish enemies and save the empire.  ONCE UPON A TIME IN AFRIKA is a rousing, old fashion adventure tale that had me wishing Hollywood would pick it up and film it; it is that captivating an epic.  Ojetade is a writer worth taking note of, he delivers on all fronts and this reviewer has become an instant fan. 

See the haunted opera “Lilith: Mother of Dreams” this Sunday

  • News
  • October 25, 2012

Join poet-violist (and ComicMix contributor) Alexandra Honigsberg, international artist composer-clarinetist Demetrius Spaneas, soprano Christina Rohm, and pianist-conductor James Siranovich at the premiere of Lilith: Mother of Dreams, a chamber opera of the iconic demon goddess. It’s debuting on Halloween Weekend (this Sunday at 7 p.m.) at a historic haunted opera house, Flushing Town Hall.

The Lilith Project is conceived as a modern American suitcase opera, a chamber monodrama: intense, human, universal, compact in form and forces, accessible.

Before there was Eve, there was Lilith: Adam’s first lover, once human, made from the same dust, sensuality’s queen, bride of the Angel of Death, mother of opposing cosmic forces – strong, willful, unstoppable. She rules the storms of the skies and the heart – night owl, holy woman of power. From ancient tales of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, to Greece’s Lamiae and Daughters of Hecate, to Native American lore and Victorian Gothic Horror, Lilith looms large in the minds of men and women when the lights go out and they enter dream time. Some call her demon, vampire, child killer – others mother, lover, elder, friend. But whatever the appellations, she persists in the realms of our imaginations, from holy books and high literature to popular feminist concert series, TV shows, and Japanese anime. Child of Light? Daughter of Darkness? Both? Neither? You decide.

Composer Spaneas is a long-time professional, curator of Cornelia St. Café’s Serial Underground award-winning new music series’ 25th year, and Fullbright Specialist of the State Department’s musical diplomats. Librettist Honigsberg is a veteran violist, award-winning songwriter, long-time published poet, and this year’s winner of the Mayor’s Poetry Prize. Both Rohm and Siranovich have established opera careers all over the US and cities abroad.  Long-time colleagues in many configurations over the years, Lilith marks this creative team’s debut.

There will be a talk by the artists before the performance and then time for questions and answers, afterwards, and a reception to which all are invited. Come as you are, but gala premiere attire, period dress, and other unique finery is encouraged!

The production is fiscally sponsored by Composers Collaborative, Inc. $10 suggested donation/FTH members free, all welcome.

Awards! Awards! Awards!

Aurealis Award for best illustrated book or gr...

The lingering memory of my year of blogging for the SFBC — which ended five years ago, so I really should be over it by this point — still compels me to post SFnal awards, even when I do so far too late to benefit anyone. What can I say? I’m a flawed person.

Anyway, here’s some recent awards that you probably already know about:

2011 Aurealis Awards

The Australian national awards for SF and other imaginative literature were given out three weeks ago (I know, I know!), and the full list has been available since then.

Here’s the novel-length awards, just because:

  • YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Only Ever Always, by Penni Russon
  • FANTASY NOVEL: Ember and Ash, by Pamela Freeman
  • SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL: The Courier’s New Bicycle, by Kim Westwood

(via SF Signal)

Analog and Asimov’s Reader’s Awards

The same weekend as the Nebulas (suddenly suspicious — did I blog about the Nebulas? Yes, I did!), the editors of Asimov’s and Analog announced the winners of their respective reader polls for the most popular features of the past year:

Analog’s Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) Awards:

  • Best Novella: “With Unclean Hands” by Adam-Troy Castro (11/11)
  • Best Novelette (Tie):
    • “Jak and the Beanstalk” by Richard A. Lovett (7-8/11)
    • “Betty Knox and Dictionary Jones in the Mystery of the Missing Teenage Anachronisms” by John G. Hemry (3/11)
  • Best Short Story: “Julie is Three” by Craig DeLancey (3/11)
  • Best Fact: “Smart SETI” by Gregory and James Benford (4/11)
  • Best Cover: December 2011 (for “Ray of Light”) by Bob Eggleton

Asimov’s Readers’ Awards are:

  • Best Novella: “The Man Who Bridged the Mist” by Kij Johnson (10-11/11)
  • Best Novelette: “All About Emily” by Connie Willis (12/11)
  • Best Short Story: “Movement” by Nancy Fulda (3/11)
  • Best Poem: “Five Pounds of Sunlight” by Geoffrey A. Landis (1/11)
  • Best Cover Artist: October/November, by Paul Youll (for “The Man Who Bridged the Mist”)

Note that Analog readers are scientists, carefully weighing the validity of each piece in their “Analytical Laboratory,” while Asimov’s  readers just vote for stuff they like.

(also via SF Signal — you really should read them, and get this stuff quicker)

Sturgeon and Campbell Finalists

Finalists for the Theodore Sturgeon and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards were also announced around Nebula time. These are juried awards for the best SF (generally interpreted broadly) story and novel of the prior year, and this year’s nominees are:

Sturgeon:

  • Charlie Jane Anders, “Six Months, Three Days,” Tor.com, June
  • Paul Cornell, “The Copenhagen Interpretation,” Asimov’s, July
  • Yoon Ha Lee, “Ghostweight,” Clarkesworld, January
  • Kij Johnson, “The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Asimov’s, Oct / Nov (Note: removed from consideration because Johnson is a Sturgeon juror, though it still appears on the official list of nominees.)
  • Jake Kerr, “The Old Equations,” Lightspeed, July
  • Ken Liu, “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” Panverse Three
  • Ken Liu, “The Paper Menagerie,” F&SF, March / April
  • Paul McAuley, “The Choice,” Asimov’s, Dec / Jan
  • Catherynne M. Valente, “Silently and Very Fast,” Clarkesworld, October

Sixteen (named) people nominated for the Sturgeon, many of them the editors of the short-fiction venues of the field. My eyebrow is cocked as I type this, but I really don’t know the process. I’m also surprised to see a story by a juror appear on the shortlist, even though it has a note saying it was removed from consideration.


Campbell:

Both awards will be given out during the Campbell Conference in early July.

Compton Crook Award

This award goes to the new SF author of the best novel of the prior year — not to the book itself, but to the author. (It’s also not quite clear if it has to be a first novel, or if newness persists in a writer for some extended period.)

This year’s winner is T.C. McCarthy, for Germline.

(via SF Scope, for variety)

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees, and thanks to all of the various nominators, judges, voters, and other functionaries that make these various awards run.

The Point Radio: FRINGE Is Renewed – Now What?

Fox has granted a 13 episode “final season” to FRINGE, but what does that all mean? We talk to producers/show runners J.H. Wyman and Jeff Pinkner about how they are course correcting too be sure fans get satisfied. Plus TREASURE ISLAND comes to SyFy with Eddie Izzard as one of literature’s most famous pirates. Eddie talks aboutt life  as Long John Silver.

The Point Radio is on the air right now – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or mobile device– and please check us out on Facebook right here & toss us a “like” or follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

FORTIER TAKES ON TRASH ‘N’ TREASURES!

  • News
  • March 4, 2012

ALL PULP REVIEWS- by Ron Fortier

ANTIQUES DISPOSAL
A Trash ‘n’ Treasures Mystery
Barbara Allan
Kensington Books
230 pages

Vivian Borne is an eccentric antiques dealer who lives in Serenity, a small Midwestern  town situated on the banks of the Mississippi river.  She lives with her daughters, Peggy Sue and Brandy.  Together Vivian and Brandy solve murders that in one way or another deal with the business of antiquing.  Which is the simplest way to describe this series, of which this book is the sixth and has been described by other reviewers as being a “cozy” series if anyone really knows exactly what that means.
As a fan of hardboiled detective fiction, I’m assuming “cozy” refers to those mysteries wherein the protagonist is a little old lady ala Agatha Christie’s popular Miss Marple books or the old Angela Landsbury TV show, “Murder She Wrote.”  In other words, not my particular brand of tea; I prefer a headier beverage literature.  Still, every now and then one desires to try something different.  I decided I’d take a chance with “Antiques Disposal.”
It is probably one of the smartest things I’ve done in a while.  Why?  Well simply because the book is so damn funny, I honestly couldn’t put it down.  And the characters!  Oh, my God, is there a more dysfunctional group then the Borne girls?  Remember I said Brandy was Vivian’s youngest daughter?  Well she’s actually Peggy Sue’s daughter.  Yup.  Echoes of “Chinatown.”  You see Peggy Sue got herself “in trouble” as a young, unmarried girl and left her baby with her mother to raise figuring it was best for the child.  Did I mention Vivian suffers from a bi-polar disorder and is on medication?  Never mind that Brandy herself has a daughter….oh, forget it.  Its way too complicated for me to keep track of after only one visit with this eclectic bunch.  The thing is the writing is so clean and precise, even though you haven’t read those first five books  (something I hope to one day correct) the reader just goes with the flow.  There is a charm and decency to these characters that immediately grabbed me and had me caring for them from page one. 
Look, here’s what every true mystery fan knows as a fact, series fail or succeed not on how brilliant the crimes are staged and then solved, but on how appealing and original the heroes are.  Don’t believe me, give this some thought.   Early fans of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson came to demand more stories from Arthur Conan Doyle to read more about them and not the mysteries they dealt with, those became incidental.  The same can be said of every solid mystery series from Sam Spade, to Nero Wolfe and Nate Heller.  In fact one of those famous shamus plays a huge part in this book’s climatic dénouement finale in such a hilarious way, I will not spoil it for you.  It’s just too damn funny.
Okay, if you really need to know the plot, here it is.  Vivian and Brandy go to a storage unit auction, wherein the person who owned the unit stopped paying rental fees on it and the manager is legally free to sell its contents to recoup his or her loses.  These auctions have become very common among antique dealers and I believe there is even a reality show based on the practice.  So our two ladies end up winning the bid, begin transporting the boxed contents to their home and cataloguing them; everything perfectly normal and routine.  Until they return to the storage facility for their second trip and find the manager dead in the now empty unit.  The very next night someone breaks into Vivian’s home, attacks Peggy Sue leaving her unconscious and nearly kill’s Brandy’s loveable little blind poodle, Sushi.
From this point forward, both Vivian and Brandy are on the hunt for the killer and how they go about it so entertaining, pages simply fly by.  Sure, I was playing along and looking for clues too, but honestly, it was the ride I was enjoying to the max.  Bottom line, if all of the Trash ‘n’ Treasures Mysteries are as wonderful as “Antiques Disposal,” then sign me up for the long haul.
Hey, even if you end up not liking the book, did I mention there are recipes for chocolate brownies in it?  Now how can you go wrong with that? 

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