Fictional Worlds

Fields of Gold, short fiction, Rachel Swirsky, Eclipse 4

If you want to be friends with The Other Girls, you’re going to have to give something up; this is the way it’s always been, as long as there have been Ponies.

Overtime by Charles Stross

A contemporary tale of love in all its forms — and of one robot’s quest to know it, and himself, on his own terms.

Lethe Press has been a consistent source of queer speculative fiction for more than a decade now, with an ever-expanding catalogue of writers from diverse and engaging backgrounds. In fact, some of…

Fix the past. Save the present. Stop the future. 2080: at a remote site on the edge of the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists, engineers and physicians gather to gamble humanity’s future on one l…

The Future is Female! is a historically-oriented anthology collecting sf written by women that spans from the early pulps to the cusp of the New Wave. All but one of the stories included were origi…

Galactic Derelict is another Andre Norton novel I almost-remember reading. I remember the opening, with a Norton Hero(TM) riding into a camp in the desert. I very vaguely remember that this iterati…

When I read Steel Magic, I wondered rather plaintively if Norton would (or could) give her girl character a less trammeled role in the next book. It’s true that Sara gets to be a cat, which is cool…

The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City (Prologue) by John Scalzi

A contemporary tale of love in all its forms — and of one robot’s quest to know it, and himself, on his own terms.

In a universe of harsh interstellar conflict, the practice of interspecies diplomacy — when possible — is important. So being a Colonial Union officer attached to an interplanetary dipl…

Beautiful story, but painful. Sad.

The heroes are eager to sail to Troy for war, but the wind is still. To fill their sails and set out, they must sacrifice Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia — and how does a human girl beco…

Blackout and All Clear are one book, conveniently bound in two volumes. Don’t read them out of order, don’t read one without the other. In 1982, Connie Willis wrote a novelette called Firewatch. It…

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have announced the finalists for this year’s Nebula Awards, the Ray Bradbury Award, and the Andre Norton Award. Needless to say, Tor.…

The Daily Express is claiming today that a “mole” in the Doctor Who camp has revealed that we’re getting a female Twelfth Doctor in the form of Sherlock alum Lara Pulver after a M…

Concept artist Mark Molnar has been having some fun doing some Dune speed paintings as a personal project…. Makes us wish some studio would give the movie another go.

If the medium is indeed the message then it seems like the crossover of a prose writer into the world of screenwriting would be as extreme as a unicorn turning into a panda. And though we can conce…

The Hero and the Crown isn’t a title that leads you to expect anything unusual, but the novel attached to it is very different from a standard fantasy in some interesting ways. It was publish…

Tom Doherty Associates, publishers of Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape, and Tor Teen, today announced that by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free. “Our authors and re…

The title of this post is my considered response to Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It was my response when I first read it at twelve, and it’s still my response reading it to…

Charlie Stross writes: [W]hile working on the novel that was to become Space Cadet, Heinlein warned his agent that the inclusion of an ethnically diverse cast was not only deliberate—it was non-neg…

The latest Tweets from Tor.com (@tordotcom). Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects. NYC

Answering the question asked by innumerable readers of the author’s novel All the Birds in the Sky: what happened to Patricia’s cat?

“The Forest Girl” is a new short story set in the world of L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s Recluce novels.

Welcome to Tremontaine, where social advantage is best achieved through duels of wit and steel. A Duchess whose beauty is matched only by her cunning; a handsome young scholar with more passion tha…