Whoa! All four Murderbot books by Martha Wells are being given away as freebies.

NB: this giveaway is US and Canada only, because legal reason blahcakes. But if you are in those places, grab these books! And if you're not in those places, just buy them. These are fantastic, short tight SF reads, and I love them and am looking forward to the novel with happy anticipation.

Murderbot is a quiet sarcastic artificial person who just happens to have guns built into their arms, is brutally efficient at their job, only likes drama when it's on TV, and certainly doesn't care for any of the people they protect, whatever some of them may say.

(Murderbot is also people, but doesn't get treated that way, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.)

marthawells posted: Murderbot Ebook Giveaway

Last week janeturenne posted a wonderfully evocative overview of her personal top 10 favorite and top 10 least favorite canon Sherlock Holmes stories -- part 1, part 2.

She reminds me how much I love seeing people talk about their beloved fandoms in detail, and I've been immersed in the Holmes stories, Granada TV series, and BBC audioplays for years but I haven't actually posted about them much myself. So here's a start! *g*

I'm going to take janeturenne's approach but simplify it a bit, so that I manage to actually post these instead of just think about it: I've picked out five of my favorite Holmes short stories and their adaptations, and will post about each of them in turn over the next few days. Story links go to the University of Adelaide Library, which has all the Holmes stories as well as many other Arthur Conan Doyle works available.

My first favorite is The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

( I love the atmosphere of this story )

Please do comment and tell me what your Holmesian favorites are, or how you feel about this particular story and its radio/TV versions!

You know, I am really tired of fantasy novels where all the heroes and villains and almost all of the colorful side characters are men, except for

( small spoiler for the book ahead )

Rar.

Going back to reread naominovik's Empire of Ivory, which I recommend, and wherein both men and women are capable, clever and interesting, and some of the best minds belong to the dragons. *g*

Today is Shakespeare's birthday AND absolut3destiny's birthday. Wow. Good day! Ian, a very happy birthday, and a belated but very sincere THANK YOU for finding me a boatload of Sherlock Holmes radio play mp3's on Usenet. You rock.

Today is also, fittingly, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

If you want to know where this comes from, the long version is here, with a followup here. The short version is that Howard Hendrix, a writer and vice president of Science Fiction Writers of America, posted an ill-thought-out rant about SF&F authors publishing their work for free on the internet.

He called this development "the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch" and writers who publish their stuff online "webscabs", who "claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work. "

Naturally this didn't go over well with ... just about everybody, and in response Jo Walton has proclaimed today International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, "when pixel-stained technopeasants everywhere are stretching and smiling and putting down their technotools to celebrate their existence by releasing their works into the wild, or at least the web."

She links to a number of SF&F authors who have put new works online for this day, including herself ("The Prize in the Game"), Diane Duane, Dave Langford and Sean Williams. And there's an entire community for more free reads from pro authors: ipstp

And there's a suggestion that non-writers could post about writers they've discovered online, which I really like.

So. Whose books have I bought because I discovered them online? Probably more than I can think of right now, but here are a few names:

marthawells, who has put her excellent first novel "The Element of Fire" online for free, along with chapters from her other books and several complete short stories. The Element of Fire is a must-read if you like intelligent, witty sword & sorcery. I have a longer review of it here and of a later book, "The Wizard Hunters" here. She also writes SGA tie-in books, o lucky SGA fans.

naominovik, who has excerpts of her Temeraire series and two short stories online for free. I think pretty much everyone in fandom has already read the Temeraire novels, but if you haven't, you're missing out. Dragons and 18th century sailing ships! It's a fantastic idea, and the books are well written and hugely entertaining. Peter Jackson has optioned them, and I really hope something comes of it.

papersky (Jo Walton), whose posts on the writing newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition were always so thoughtful and entertaining that I knew I wanted to buy her first book when it came out, and I was glad I did; it's now online for free here. The story goes that Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a senior editor at Tor, liked her Usenet posts too and asked her to send him her novel when she was done. So it goes.

Patricia C. Wrede, who doesn't have any work online that I can find right now, but I bought several of her Dragons books for young adults purely because her writing advice on rec.arts.sf.composition was so excellent, well-written and often funny. Her Regency fantasy-of-manners book "Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot" (with Caroline Stevermer) is a big favorite of mine, and was recommended so many times on r.a.s.c. that I bought it the moment I found it in a secondhand bookshop. It was rare then, but has since been republished.

Every now and then, I make an attempt to find an author who writes historical romance as entertainingly as Georgette Heyer. So far I haven't had much luck.

Right now, I'm reading a novel that won the 1997 RITA award for best Regency romance, Lady's Companion by Carla Kelly, and the heroine has just told her wastrel aristocratic father to 'get a job'.

Not seek employment, or find work: get a job.

And then, when the heroine considers talking to a nursemaid about her personal concerns, she thinks that the nursemaid 'would only wonder what planet I had dropped down from'.

I quite like the story so far, but I think I'm going to pretend the heroine is a time traveller who doesn't quite have the vocabulary down yet.

(That would make for an entertaining plot, too, come to think of it. Is there such a genre as timetravel romance?)

Regular reader and reviewer of PODs (printed-on-demand books, often self-published) answers the question: how can you tell from the first sentence that a book is bad?

Like this.

I particularly like the one that uses ten exclamation marks in one sentence.

marthawells is giving away ten signed copies of Wizard Hunters, the first book in her Ile-Rien trilogy. She says:

"Right now there are 51 entries, so the chances aren't bad.

To enter, send an email between now and February 15 to WebAdmin @ marthawells.com saying you want to be in the contest. (Only one entry per person, please, even if like me you have about ten different email addresses.) On the 16th of February, I'll put all the entries in a hat and pull out ten winners. The winners will need to email me their mailing address so I can ship them the books. And overseas entries are fine."

I love this trilogy, and the only reason I'm not entering the giveaway is that I have a hardback copy. Go enter!

That's all I was going to say, but now I find I have to talk about the book a bit, even though I usually worry too much about whether I'm doing a book justice to even attempt a review.

I find Wizard Hunters riveting, and yes, it's the first part of a fantasy trilogy but it's a strong book all on its own - this is not one of those trilogies where the main character slowly acquires a telepathic horse, a quest and an adorable sidekick and sets off for adventure on the last page of book one, leaving you to grind your teeth and hurl the book against the wall.

Tremaine Valiarde doesn't have a horse, a quest or an adorable anything; she gets by on a gun, her wits and a bar of chocolate. I fell for her immediately. She's sarcastic, pessimistic, clever and unconventional, her character shaped by her unusual upbringing, and she lives in a wartorn world whose technology level is close to our own - early '20s, say - and where scholars of magic perform their experiments to try and stop the war. One of those experiments sucks Tremaine and several of those sorcerer-scholars into another world, a seemingly primitive one where sorcerers are inherently evil and must be hunted and exterminated. The first people she meets, Ilias and Giliead, are the wizard hunters in the title, and the clash and mesh of cultures as they fight their common enemy is a strong thread in all three books.

Ilias and Giliead are great characters in their own right, foster-brothers who have spent their lives dealing with rogue sorcerers and their curses, with a painful, strong history together that is slowly revealed during the trilogy. I can't say how pleased I am that Giliead and Ilias are returning in several prequel stories in the magazine Black Gate; I was really disappointed that there isn't going to be a whole prequel novel.

I always want quotes in reviews, to see what the author's writing is like, and I'm going to quote the very opening of the book here, because it sucked me in immediately and I think it gives a good feel for the book as a whole.

It was nine o'clock at night and Tremaine was trying to find a way to kill herself that would bring in a verdict of natural causes in court, when someone banged on the door.

"Oh, damn." A couple of books on poisons slid out of her lap as she struggled out of the overstuffed armchair. She managed to hold on to the second volume of Medical Jurisprudence, closing it over her fingers to mark her place. The search for the elusive untraceable poison was not going well; there were too many ways sorcerer-physicians could uncover such things and she didn't want it to look as if she had been murdered. Intracranial hemorrhage seemed a good possibility, if a little difficult to arrange on one's own. But I'm a Valiarde, I should be able to figure this out, she thought sourly. Dragging the blanket around her, she picked her way through the piles of books to the door. The library at Coldcourt was ideal for this, being large, eclectic and packed with every book, treatise, and monograph on murder and mayhem available to the civilized world.

The entry hall was dark except for one single electric bulb burning in the converted gas fixture above the sweep of the stairs. The light fell on yellowed plaster walls and rich old wood and a blue and gold patterned carpet on polished stone tile. Coldcourt was aptly named and Tremaine's bare feet were half- frozen by the time she made it to the front door. She had let the housekeeper have the night off and now she regretted it, but she had had no idea it would take this long to arrange things. At this rate she wouldn't be dead until next week.

You can read the first five chapters of Wizard Hunters online, here.

Oh dear. I've been reading War For The Oaks, an urban fantasy novel by Emma Bull that I generally enjoyed, but at certain points I kept thinking, This book was clearly written in the '80s.

And it was, of course. But the reason I was so aware of it is that people's clothes were described in detail, frex, the heroine wears a beaded sweater with shoulder pads, or a violet shirt over green leggings. I think the intent was to show that the heroine and her friends wear pretty, somewhat bohemian things, since they are musicians and everything, but I kept visualizing those outfits and making faces. Worst of all, one of the male love interests, a gorgeous man who is really a phouka, is described as wearing nothing but a pair of tight paisley jeans.

Paisley jeans. Gah. So much for sexiness.

Of course, in another decade or three, this effect will probably fade, and the clothes of the previous century will just look quaint and interesting again. I hope.