The winner of last week’s giveaway is …
Erin S. of Denton, TX
Congratulations, Erin! Your copy of The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron is on its way, courtesy of the kind folks at Orbit.
And, if you didn’t win this time, make sure to keep an eye on Far Beyond Reality in the future! In addition to the usual reviews and other SF&F-related ramblings, I’ll also have a few more great giveaways coming up in the next few weeks…
I haven’t exactly been shy about letting the world know that I’m enjoying Miles Cameron’s Traitor Son Cycle tremendously. With the recent release of The Fell Sword, the second book in the series, I thought it’d be a good time to share the fun, and happily, the kind folks at Orbit agreed! Thanks to them, I have one copy of The Fell Sword to give away to a lucky reader in the US or Canada.
If you’re not familiar with the books yet, here are a bunch of my posts about them: reviews of The Red Knight and The Fell Sword, last year’s interview with author Miles Cameron, and a recent guest post by the author about the (oft discussed) female characters in the series.
Interested yet? Then click below to get the details on how to enter this giveaway! (Please note: this giveaway ended on March 23rd, 2013.)
Despite some minor misgivings, I absolutely loved Miles Cameron’s debut fantasy novel The Red Knight, the gritty and stirring story of a mercenary company, led by the titular Red Knight, who gets drawn into an epic battle that turns out to have much wider implications than he initially bargained for. The Red Knight is a wide-ranging tale full of complex characters and some of the best medieval combat scenes I’ve ever read. As the story progresses, and especially in its final section, it becomes clear that there’s much more going on here than initially meets the eye, with the epic battle for Lissen Carak just an opening skirmish (or, maybe, just the latest flare-up) of a much wider-ranging conflict.
And now, just about a year later, Miles Cameron delivers Book Two of the Traitor Son Cycle, entitled The Fell Sword.
Miles Cameron in his natural element
When Miles Cameron’s first fantasy novel The Red Knight came out last year, I didn’t exactly make it a secret that I loved the book. Back then, I asked the author (who has, since then, confirmed that he is prolific historical fiction writer Christian Cameron) for an interview, which you can find here.
After reading and loving the new novel The Fell Sword, I grew a little bolder and asked Miles if he’d be interested in doing a guest post. Based on some discussions with other readers about how they perceived his female characters and the issue of gender in Cameron’s fiction in general, I specifically suggested that as the topic for the post.
With that brief introduction out of the way, here’s Miles Cameron’s guest post:
Kestrel is the daughter of General Trajan, the Valorian general who conquered the Herran peninsula and enslaved its people. She leads a comfortable, even pampered life in the subjugated Herrani capital. Her real love is music, but with her eighteenth birthday approaching, she will soon be forced to choose between enlisting in the army or marrying. In the first chapter of the novel, Kestrel finds herself purchasing a young male Herrani slave named Arin, who comes advertised as a blacksmith as well as a singer of some talent…
One of the signs you’re reading a good—or at least interesting—book is that you can’t wait to discuss it with friends. So it went with The Winner’s Curse, a promising new YA novel by Marie Rutkoski. I ended up reading it at more or less the same time as fellow Tor.com reviewer and all-round excellent critic Liz Bourke. In the process, we started chatting about it in great detail, and after a while we decided it would make more sense to turn this into a collaborative review of sorts.
So, here we go.
I’m currently working on my review of Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories, the new short story collection by Adam-Troy Castro. While re-reading the title story and trying to formulate my thoughts about it in one or two short paragraphs, I remembered that I’d already written a long review/analysis of the story, about two years ago now, as a guest post for the excellent Speculative Scotsman blog. I’m re-posting that article here, as a warm-up for my upcoming Tor.com review of the entire collection and, possibly, as a launching point for a series of full-length reviews/discussions/analyses of individual short stories I’ve been vaguely planning for a while now.
Important note: you can read the entire story for free here at the excellent Lightspeed Magazine. I strongly recommend doing this before reading the rest of this post, because, well, going about it the other way around will significantly reduce your enjoyment of both.
Last year, Justin Landon and Jared Shurin published Speculative Fiction 2012, a collection of the best non-fiction genre content originally published on the web. The book collected about fifty essays and reviews (including one of mine) and provided an excellent snapshot of the wild and wonderful world of SF/F bloggery in 2012. Upon completion of the project, Jared and Justin handed over the editorial reins to Ana Grilo and Thea James, better known as the team behind the excellent Booksmugglers website.
Ana and Thea have been collecting submissions and combing through the vast amount of online essays, reviews and commentary. And today, they revealed the list of contributors for Speculative Fiction 2013, including not one but two pieces originally published right here on Far Beyond Reality—one by me, and one guest post! Just for fun, I won’t reveal which pieces were selected, in case anyone wants to take a guess.
The cover illustration is another fantastic piece by Sarah Anne Langton, who also created the striking cover for SpecFic 2012. The anthology’s foreword comes courtesy of award-winning author Seanan McGuire.
Just like last year, all proceeds from this anthology will go to Room to Read, and just like last year, I’ve asked the editors to donate my payment directly to the charity.
Here’s the full list of contributors:
I don’t usually get this effusive about books, but I’ve rarely had as much fun with a Young Adult SF series as I have with Ian McDonald’s Everness—now up to three books with the brand new, shiny addition of Empress of the Sun, possibly the best book of the bunch so far.
Quick intro to the series: young Everett Singh is a math whiz who, early in the series, gets access to the Infundibulum, which is essentially a map of all the parallel universes and alternate Earths. Combined with the Heisenberg trans-dimensional gates, this allows for travel to the Nine Known Worlds: alternate versions of our planet where, for example, there’s no oil or everyone has a telepathic twin or there are five different species of mankind.
The winners of last week’s giveaway are:
Brittany S. of Oneonta, NY
Brad H. of Roy, UT
Chris H. of Apple Valley, MN
Congratulations to all three winners! Your copies of Shadow Ops: Breach Zone by Myke Cole will be sent out soon, courtesy of the good people at Ace.
And if you didn’t win this time, make sure to keep an eye on Far Beyond Reality. In addition to the usual slew of reviews and other SF&F-related ramblings, I’ll also have a few more juicy giveaways coming up in the next few weeks…
Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons is presented as the (fictional) memoir of Isabella, Lady Trent, who is the world’s preeminent authority on dragons. In these pages, Lady Trent looks back on her early life and career from the vantage point of the experience and maturity she has gained over the years.
Isabella’s family expects her to pursue the life and hobbies of a typical girl in Scirland’s landed gentry—sketching, maybe the piano, definitely a well-to-do husband from an appropriate family. Instead she finds herself drawn to such unladylike hobbies as building a collection of the tiny insect-like dragons known as scarlings.
The self-professed “ink-nosed” girl (love that term) doesn’t read romances and adventures, instead raiding her father’s private library for books about natural history. Filled with an indomitable curiosity about all things scientific (but dragons in particular), she wants to lead “the intellectual life of a gentleman” in a time when women are expected to stick to their households, child-rearing and idle gossip.
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