Tag: Books

Posted on
by

Cover: The Flash CompanionI just turned in final drafts for the last of three articles I’m contributing to TwoMorrows’ upcoming book, The Flash Companion by Keith Dallas.

The book covers the entire history of the Flash, from Jay Garrick through Barry Allen, Wally West, and Bart Allen. It’s full of articles, artwork, and interviews with writers, artists, with a cover by Don Kramer and Moose Baumann. My articles are part of the Rogues Gallery section.

The Flash Companion is due in June July* 2008, and is already available for pre-order on Amazon.

Also worth checking out: some interesting tidbits on a related Comic Bloc forum thread. [Edit] Sadly, these were lost when the board crashed in May 2008 and had to restore from a 7-month-old backup.

Now, off to celebrate. Happy new year, everyone!

*Update: (January 10) – I’ve just been informed that the release date has been pushed back to July.

Posted on
by

FirefoxFirefox 3 Beta 1 is out. Nice so far. Oddly enough, it runs better than the current Opera 9.5 previews on my old Linux box at work, though that mostly seems to be the fault of the find-in-history option.

I usually avoid any sort of shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, online included, but I’ve been getting email from various online stores that are trying to get into Black Friday. Amazon is advertising a Black Friday Sale, and Apple is promoting a “special one-day shopping event” on their website—and annoyingly, neither of them is giving any clue as to what sort of deals are involved. Amazon keeps forwarding me to today’s deals, and Apple just says something’s coming. And neither site lists actual hours. Is it midnight to midnight? What time zone?

Amazon KindleSpeaking of Amazon, their entire home page is currently taken up by the announcement of their new eBook reader, Kindle. At $400 I’m not going to rush out and buy one, but it looks like they’ve solved some of the main e-book problems: it’s small, light and wireless, and they even bring up the reading-in-bed issue in the intro. The real question is going to be compatibility & openness: It’ll read plain text, HTML, Word, and a few other document formats (and they’re promoting its access to Wikipedia), so it should be possible for other stores to sell books for the device. And what about the e-book offerings themselves? Will they be loaded down with draconian digital rights management like the Adobe ebooks of a few years ago, or are they following the model of Amazon’s MP3 store?* In a nice change, their music downloads are entirely DRM-free and they use it as a selling point. Edit: Per Andrea’s comments and further research, Kindle ebooks are locked down with DRM. No, thanks!

The name, however, makes me wonder how soon they’ll offer Fahrenheit 451.

Finally, the Internet Storm Center has an insightful response to the statement, “There is nothing on my computer that a hacker would be interested in.” Let’s leave aside the question of your personal data for the moment. Just the fact that you’ve got a computer with an internet connection could prove very useful to someone who wants to cover their tracks or just add more power to their own distributed system.

* Amazon’s MP3 store is also surprisingly cheap. I replaced my old tapes of the original cast recordings of Les Misérables (Broadway) and Phantom Of The Opera for $9 each—they run upwards of $30 on CD.

Posted on
by

Empire of IvoryI just found out that Empire of Ivory, the fourth book in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, came out today!

The series takes place in an alternate version of the Napoleonic Wars in which dragons exist, and are used in warfare. This results in an odd mix of naval battles and aerial dogfighting, with full human crews carrying bombs, guns, etc. Dragons bond with the first human they see (not telepathically, like in the Pern books, just emotionally), so captains in the Aerial Corps are given quite a bit of leeway—though the entire Corps is considered rather unsavory by the general public.

It focuses on naval Captain Will Laurence, who captures a French vessel just as an egg is ready to hatch. The dragonlet Temeraire imprints on him, and he is whisked away from the sea and into the world of air warfare. (Think of it as Master and Commander with dragons instead of ships.) During the first 3 books they go through training together, travel to China to discover Temeraire’s heritage, and find themselves called back to Europe in the thick of the war.

Our friend andrea-wot lent us the first three books last year, and we both really enjoyed them. In fact, Naomi Novik has joined the short list of authors whose new books I’ll pick up sight unseen (currently sharing that spot with Neil Gaiman and Greg Keyes), though for some reason I thought this one was coming out in October. I’m definitely going to be stopping by Borders or Barnes & Noble tomorrow to pick this up. If you’re at all interested, I highly recommend picking up the first book, His Majesty’s Dragon (in the US; in the UK it’s just called Temeraire) and giving it a test flight.

Posted on
by

I’ve held off on posting funny spam subject lines lately, but I just had to comment on this pair. First up:

Mazrim Taim was one of those, raising an army and ravaging Saldaea before he was taken.

It’s a quote from Lord of Chaos, the 6th book in Robert Jordan’s fantasy series, The Wheel of Time. The next one is a bit less obvious:

If Lan was attempting jokes, however feeble and wrongheaded, he was changing.

I wasn’t sure about this one, since there must be other stories with characters named Lan, but Google Book Search found it in book 5, The Fires of Heaven.

I’ve seen lots of spam that used filler from The Wizard of Oz and other novels old enough to be in the public domain. Project Gutenberg and the like have been transcribing them, making free plain-text ebooks for years, making it easy to snag a couple of lines of actual English text.

In theory this should be harder to identify as filler than randomly-generated text. Continue reading →

Posted on
by

Cover: Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever ToldToday DC Comics released The Flash: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, a collection of classic Flash stories ranging from 1947–1994. Back in February, when they announced the contents, I did a point-by-point comparison of the stories to be included and the stories that appeared in the 1991 book, The Greatest Flash Stories Ever Told.

When I picked it up, I noticed that the paper was lower quality. The 1991 book was printed on thicker, almost glossy paper. It wasn’t archive level, as it’s noticeably yellowed over 16 years. The new book is certainly above newsprint, but the paper is thinner and matte. Of course, it’s still better paper—and better printing—than the stories originally got!

It looks like Johanna Draper-Carlson (Comics Worth Reading) was right when she suggested that the new Greatest Stories books are aimed at another audience: not the fan who wants a collection of classic stories, but a casual reader who might be interested in a sampler.

Alas, no Bart Allen cameo. The final 2 pages of Flash v2 #91, which were really a teaser for “Reckless Youth” and not part of “Out of Time,” were left out. But speaking of that story, Mark Waid’s introduction to the book contains a statement that, given recent events, takes on an unintended poignancy:

That they chose “Out of Time”—one written by me—is, I insist, simply a lucky byproduct of their real intent: to showcase the artwork of Mike Wieringo, a most deserving comics superstar whose interpretation of Wally as the Flash set a standard unsurpassed to this day.