A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com TOR, publisher of science fiction and fantasy books, has been a venue for new and upcoming speculative fiction writers, especially through its website, TOR.com. Not only have unknown writers made a name for themselves when publishing on the website but also when TOR has licensed the electronic version of their books to libraries. However, TOR has been doing less of that lately. They put an embargo on libraries’ lending of newly published e-books back in July and so a library cannot loan them out until four months after their release. The reason for this embargo is, as TOR claims, to test the impact on sales from library e-book lending . Librarians, however, have done their own study of such impact and say it is small and insignificant, according to Publishers Weekly . Publishers Weekly itself says that potential sales impact on an author-by-author basis is small. So not even the authors of these books are financially hurting. So maybe it has m...

Credit: Pixabay.com About two posts ago, in part one of my WorldCon 76 review, I mentioned that I attended a screening of a new space opera TV series in the making. I said I would do a separate post about it and so that’s what this week’s post will be about. If you missed my review of WorldCon, you can catch parts one and two . But then be sure to come back here for a preview of this new sci fi series, Space Command , a retrofuturistic space opera that, if it follows through, will bring optimism back to sci fi TV! For the past two decades, science fiction television has been loaded with darkly realistic and, in some cases, pessimistic TV shows. Two of these have been The Expanse , and the 2001s’ revived Battle s tar Galactica series that hardly brought back anything of the original 1970s show, including its message of hope for the future. Director Marc Zicree’s Space Command is a return to that hopeful message that the original Battlestar Galactica , Star Trek and...

Credit: Pixabay.com Last post of this two-part con report, I talked about the panels I attended on Saturday at WorldCon 76 in San Jose. I particularly talked about ones that I felt were most important to writers and readers of science fiction and fantasy. I also discussed how they reflected the growing racial and cultural diversity in the genres. If you missed last week’s post you can catch it here . This week I’m going to discuss the other events at the 76 th World Science Fiction Convention such as the masquerade (cosplay), the Hugo Awards and a special person I came across. The Masquerade The masquerade started at 8 PM and was held Saturday in the Grand Ballroom. As I said last post, many of the panels I attended earlier that day were so packed they sometimes didn’t allow for even standing room. The Harlan Ellison Memorial was in that boat and so I was not able to attend it as planned. After running around the entire McEnery Convention Center, where World...