Because E-Reads’ stock in trade is reprints of out of print books, particularly fantasy and science fiction, we tend to overuse the phrase “long awaited” as we bring back books that have been inaccessible for decades.  But John Norman’s Time Slave, published in 1975, has truly been long awaited by his discerning  fans. Indeed, with publication of this work we complete the reissue of his back list, an achievement of which we can unapologetically say we are inordinately proud.

The time slave in the title is Dr. Brenda Hamilton, a Ph.D. mathematician from Cal Tech. She is beautiful, though she does not know her true beauty. She is a woman, though she does not know her true womanhood. Deep within herself she is sensual, though her senses have been dulled by this modern world.

Hamilton has come to Africa to work under the brilliant Danish scientist Herjellsen, a man who speaks of reaching the stars. But what does the ancient stone axe lying on his lab table have to do with space travel? Soon, it becomes clear that Herjellsen’s experiment is much larger than Hamilton or Herjellsen or even space travel, itself. It is about correcting a mistake made tens of thousands of years ago in human evolution.

Thrown back in time, Hamilton must be shown her place in a tribe known simply as “the Men,” Stone Age hunters who take what they desire and know their true manhood. Will Hamilton survive in this savage land? Will her lover, Tree, teach her what it truly means to be a woman? Can the spark between them put mankind back on its proper path toward the stars?

In Time Slave, John Norman brings the same keen philosophical acuity and passion for storytelling that enrich his classic Gor novels. Fans of his work will love the fresh – indeed, timeless – take on his theories and the bold adventure that brings them to life.

In July of 2010 Science Fiction Writers of America, responding to member complaints against Night Shade Books, put the publisher on probation. At that time John Scalzi, the organization’s president, wrote the following:

This week, we became aware of three recent instances of Night Shade Books acting against the contractual and legal interest of authors, specifically by not reporting royalties when contractually specified or reporting them inaccurately and/or distributing books in a medium for which it had not legally secured rights. (Details here)

Since that time Night Shade has made an earnest effort to get back into the graces of SFWA and its members and today was rewarded with full restoration of its former good standing.  The text of SFWA’s announcement follows:

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Dear SFWA members:

As many of you are aware, on July 8, 2010 the SFWA board of directors voted unanimously to place Night Shade Books on probation for a period of one year, following concerns about contractual issues with their authors.

SFWA asked Night Shade to meet a series of benchmarks as a measure of a good faith effort to return to a solid standing. After a review of Night Shade Books and after requesting information from our members about the publisher’s activities during the period of probation, based upon the information currently available, the board believes that Night Shade has met the following conditions for it to remain on the qualifying list after its probation period:

* a. That it examined its catalogue to ensure it is no longer offering fiction in formats for which it has no rights, and makes whole those authors whose rights it has violated;
* b. That it instituted procedures and hired sufficient staff to ensure accurate record keeping for contracts and payments, both for previously published and future authors;
* c. That there are no instances of contractual violations on the part of Night Shade Books against authors signed to publishing deals after the start of the probationary period.
* d. Night Shade Books fulfills its contractual and financial obligations to the authors it has already published, including full and accurate accounting of royalties per contract, with payment of any royalties outstanding.

Therefore, the term of probation for Night Shade is lifted. Fiction contracted during that term is acceptable for qualification for SFWA membership. It may remain on the list so long as it continues to fulfill its contractual obligations to its authors and meets SFWA’s qualifying market standards. SFWA remains interested in the health of Night Shade books and will act at any time to deal with a member complaint against Night Shade.

We look forward to working with them and are glad that SFWA is able to retain Night Shade Books as a SFWA qualifying market.

When you start dating someone you will naturally want to know if he or she uses drugs.  It’s less likely you’ll want to know if he or she uses semicolons – unless you believe that the answer will lead to marriage. We can’t recall if it started that way for Virginia and Leonard Woolf or Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but we know from a recent wedding announcement in New York Times that that’s how it started for Jennifer Miller and Jason Feifer.

“Both were blasting through the often less-than-literate listings of online dating sites,” writes Andrew L. Yarrow, “when Mr. Feifer’s e-mail message on OKCupid.com caught Ms. Miller’s eye for reasons less romantic than grammatical. ‘He used a semicolon correctly; that was reason enough to get a drink with him,’ the 31-year-old author of Inheriting the Holy Land recalled.”

The rest is history, as you will see if you care to read details of their wedding announcement.

So, if you’re entering into a relationship and suspect your love object is scrutinizing your emails for solecisms, you might want to refresh your understanding of this subtle point of grammar.

Melissa Donovan in WritingForward.com has this to say about it:

#The semicolon establishes a close connection between two sentences or independent clauses.
#A semicolon can replace conjunctions and or but.
Semicolons indicate a stronger separation than a comma but weaker than a period.
#A semicolon is often used in lists to separate items when some of the items in listed subsets require commas.
#The semicolon is always followed by a lower case letter with proper nouns being the only exception (proper nouns are always capitalized).
#Semicolon use can be applied to separate two clauses or sentences that are saying the same thing in different ways.
#As with other punctuation marks that denote the end of a clause or sentence, there is no space between the semicolon and the word preceding it; there should be a single space after the semicolon.

Example:
#I love music; however, I haven’t played my own guitar in several years.
#I’m fascinated by names and their meanings; Melissa means honey bee.
#There’s nothing like the gentle drum of water hitting against the window pane; I love the rain.

So, lovers, remember this: when you email your beloved, pay heed to those semicolons; they could save your relationship.

Richard Curtis

Eric Pfanner of the New York Times writes that “The highest court in the European Union said on Thursday that Internet service providers could not be required to monitor their customers’ online activity to filter out the illegal sharing of music and other copyrighted material.”

The decision, handed down by the European Court of Justice, rebuffed a group of composers and musicians suing an Internet Service Provider facilitating file sharing. A lower court had compelled the file sharing outfit to filter out copyrighted songs. The higher court thought the lower court’s decision would violate  “the freedom to conduct business, the right to protection of personal data and the freedom to receive or impart information.” Or, to put it less elegantly, the license to steal.

European Court Overturns Rule on Illegal File Sharing

Richard Curtis

Many publishers of medical, health and fitness books are reissuing them as e-books without requiring them to be updated.  This is a potentially dangerous practice that may sooner or later get a publisher or author in trouble.

Book contract boilerplate commonly has language warranting that the book does not contain any harmful formulas, recipes or instructions. At the time of the book’s original publication all medical claims should have been completely valid.  Yet there are innumerable examples of foods and medicines considered safe and efficacious ten or twenty years ago that turned out to be the very opposite after research upended assumptions or discredited earlier findings. Margarine once recommended as a substitute for butter was discovered to contain harmful trans-fats. Some artificial sweeteners that seemed like a perfectly safe alternative to sugar have come to be suspected of being potentially carcinogenic. A diet heavy in certain kinds of fish may now also be heavy in mercury, and even the popular food pyramid that dominated dietary thinking for decades was heavy in carbohydrates and a serious contributor to today’s obesity crisis and has been reformulated.

Assuming that the publishers of those older titles have the right to put them into e-book format, the easy option is to reprint the content in its original form.  I’m not a lawyer and can’t say whether or not a publisher incurs liability for reissuing a book that contains debunked information.  But that would not prevent an aggrieved plaintiff from making a claim that the publisher should have known better than to promote a food or drug demonstrated to have adverse health effects.

I can personally testify to several instances where a publisher, contemplating an e-book edition of an old health book, asked the author to revise it but offered no compensation. When the author said he or she would not or could not update the book without being paid, the publisher asserted its right to release the original  edition, putting itself and the author in legal jeopardy. This is a disservice to author and reader alike.

If medical information is stale or has been disproved it is the publisher’s obligation to pay for an update. If it can’t afford to do so, it should let the book go out of print and give the rights back to the author.

Richard Curtis

Air Force lieutenant Rick Walsh has just gotten off a twelve-hour flight from Guam at the Tucson Airport. All he wants right now is too see his girlfriend Maia and maybe have a short rest before reassignment. What Lieutenant Walsh finds instead is a month-old infant and a mystery that spans two universes.

Maia has disappeared, leaving behind her newborn, Gus, a baby with Walsh’s eyes. It seems that a disturbing number of Tucson residents have gone missing as well and the authorities don’t have a clue. As Walsh races to track down Maia and her possible kidnappers, a conspiracy unfolds as the search leads him deep into the desert and then on to someplace…else. What awaits Walsh in this other land proves sinister and dangerous, and it seems to have its eye on our world.

In Dragon Season , author Michael Cassutt weaves classic suspense and modern fantasy into a wild ride that readers won’t soon forget.

While George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen novel When Gravity Fails is perhaps his most famous work, his lesser known novel The Wolves of Memory remained his favorite. In it, he introduced readers to Sandor Courane, an Everyman and Effinger stand-in who struggles as he swims against the currents of Fate. In life and in his multiple deaths, Sandor Courane serves as the unifying force in this collection of Effinger’s stories, starting with The Wolves of Memory and getting ever cleverer and more off-the-wall from there.

When we first meet Courane, he must face down TECT, the self-aware computer that has come to control the Earth and its colonial planets. Exiled to Planet D, Courane races to solve the debilitating disease that attacks each of the planet’s residents, even as his own memory begins to fade. Unfortunately, his only source of information about the illness is TECT, itself, and the computer’s agenda doesn’t seem to line up with Courane’s.

In the seven other stories contained in A Thousand Deaths, Courane becomes detached from what is reality and what is story as Effinger expertly plays with narrative conventions. However, these aren’t simply the whims of a SF writer; they are the frameworks the Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated author uses to answer questions about existence no one else even thought to ask.

Dave Duncan fans clamoring for restoration of the middle volume of his King’s Blades trilogy will get their wish.  E-Reads has just reissued Lord of the Fire Lands 

We asked Duncan to tell us about the writing of this book, and we got far more than we bargained for when he revealed an amazing secret to us. You can read it here.

To bring you up to date, Raider and Wasp have spent five years at Ironhall studying to become Blades, expert swordsmen whose talents stand unmatched. Magic both enhances the Blades’ fighting skills and binds them in lifelong duty. But, when Raider and Wasp are selected to protect the king of Chivial himself, they refuse, an act unprecedented in the living history of the Blades.

Now on the run for their “treasonous” act, the two gifted swordsmen must escape to the Fire Lands, where pirates, monsters, and mixed allegiances wait around every corner. As old hatreds and still-fresh tragedies come to light, these young swashbucklers must confront both harsh truths from the past and a present swarming with their would-be brothers at arms seeking vengeance and intending punishment.

Dave Duncan’s Lord of the Fire Lands serves as a splendid bridge between The Gilded Chain and Sky of Swords. Engaging and complex, it can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel or in combination with the rest of the trilogy. Either way, readers are in for a smart, thrilling adventure that cuts as sharp as the edge of a knife.

“Sophisticated structure and themes…will satisfy both fantasy fans looking for high adventure and those more interested in rich characterizations.” – Publisher’s Weekly.

We asked Dave Duncan to write something for us about Lord of the Fire Lands, the middle novel in his King’s Blades trilogy. When he did he revealed a secret that many readers may find incomprehensible but every professional writer will recognize.

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When asked how I write, I always stress the importance of knowing the ending of a book before writing the beginning. There are exceptions, though, and Lord of the Fire Lands was certainly one of them.

In its first version, it ended with the treaty negotiations, a scene that is still there. I was working well ahead of my submission deadline back then, so I put the MS aside to marinate while I worked on something else. When I came back to it to apply a final polish, I decided that the ending was too abrupt. So I wrote some more. That didn’t work. I tried again, with the same result. And again.

At that point Radgar, who is probably the most complex character ever to emerge from my word processor, completely took over. I have had characters awaken to a life of their own and try to upstage everyone else—Katanji in “The Seventh Sword” series, for example—but none quite as vividly as Radgar did then. He dictated the ending you will now find.

“You can’t do that!” I protested. “It’s barbaric. Moreover, you are completely ruining the final book.”

“The third book is your problem,” he replied, “and I certainly am a barbarian. This is my story, and this is how it must end.”

I argued as much as I dared, but Radgar was both armed and exceedingly dangerous, as you will see. Eventually he convinced me that this was indeed how he would act. The proof was that I did not need to change anything that had happened earlier, so “his” ending was correct for his story. I didn’t approve, but I had to let it stand. I took the dog for a long walk and worked out how I could salvage the rest of the trilogy. When the hardcover came out, I received so many protests from readers that we added a warning in the mass market edition, to the effect that you could read any book in the series, but not two, or you would have to read all three.
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E-Reads’ release of Firelands plugs a hole in the first series, “Tales of the King’s Blades”. The first book, The Gilded Chain, and the third, Sky of Swords, have never been out of print.*

The second series, “Chronicles of the King’s Blades” is also available in its entirety; these three books follow the Blades’ adventures after the reign of King Ambrose: Paragon Lost, Impossible Odds, and The Jaguar Knights.**

I also wrote a trilogy of YA novellas, “The King’s Daggers”, which E-Reads has re-issued as a single novel, The Monster War. That fills a story gap in the first series. So now you have all seven to look forward to.

PS: The Blades have been translated into at least seven other languages. Take a look at the cover of the French edition of The Gilded Chain and you will see how they struck a chord in the land of d’Artagnan.

Dave Duncan

November 23, 2011

* The Gilded Chain and Sky of Swords are available as HarperCollins e-books.

** Also available as HarperCollins e-books