John Ringo, however, has now put every other ZA book, movie and video game to shame. There is a reason the man is the master.

Part horror novel, part techno-thriller that would make Tom Clancy bow down in envy, UAGS is superb.

Ringo takes a hard look at how a real ZA might happen, and his undead aren’t. Ringo uses the familiar trope of the “Zombie plague,” but turns it on it’s ear, using real science to show how it might happen.

He then takes a close look at how someone might survive a real biological disaster and what steps a logical person would take.

The story follows one family of survivors who take to the sea to survive and then step back and try to rebuild, saving as many people as possible from the cannibal hordes.

It’s been a long time since a book forced me to read it in one sitting and my only real complaint is I’m now having to wait for the second book. Ringo originally planned just three in the series but has recently been snippeting the fourth book.

This is seriously the best book in the genre I’ve ever read.

Look, just go buy it already!

Currently only available as a $15 eARC from Baen, the regular edition should be out later this summer or early fall.

The book is Guild Wars: Edge of Destiny, and it’s unlike most game tie-ins that I’ve read. Rather than telling a story about characters that you’ll never meet in the game, and dealing with events that really don’t have much to do with your game experience, Edge of Destiny tells a large chunk of the backstory of the world as you find it in Guild Wars 2.

It also introduces us to a group of characters, at least one of which you’ll have the chance to not only meet in the game but even take on some quests with. There’s one for each of the five races in GW2, which of course means that if you play an asura (my favorite), you get to adventure with the asura member of Destiny’s Edge, the adventuring team that is highlighted in the book.

More than just a story, Edge of Destiny explains what happened not too long ago in Tyria, the world of GW2. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but it’s connected with the rise of several dragons in Tyria and how Destiny’s Edge comes together and starts to fight against the dragons by defeating their champions and minions.

There’s a good bit of humor involved in the story as well, as the members of Destiny’s Edge, particularly Logan, the human, and Rytlock, the charr, banter with each other pretty much all the time. Reading it, you also get a good sense of the personality of each of the five races, as exemplified by their representative on the team. But, more than that, it helps you understand the game and why certain things happen (don’t want to spoil the game for you either).

If you play GW2, if you’re considering playing it, or if you just want a good story, I can pretty confidently recommend Guild Wars: Edge of Destiny. If you’re not planning on playing it, it might even change your mind.

The Sims 4 page has just a bunch of simlish and a sign-up for updates right now, but at least now we know that it will be coming, though not exactly when… it could be January or it could be December 2014.

I would imagine that means that Island Paradise will be either the last or the next to the last expansion for Sims 3. Just my luck, they always seem to bring out the best expansions right before they introduce the next version, and Island Paradise has me quite intrigued.

Update: According to The Sims Wiki (which has been reading websites I was unaware of), the release date is “early 2014.” There are some more details on the Wiki, and I’m pretty sure it’ll be updated as more info comes out, so head on over there. Just tell ‘em OG sent ya.

It’s easy to understand why a fledgling author would skip an editor.

For a full-length manuscript a professional editor can cost a thousand dollars or more, and many fledgling authors just don’t have that kind of money. But even with the expense, I wish more independent authors would have their novels edited. I’d be able to spend my time talking about how much I enjoyed the story, not how much the avoidable errors made reading it difficult for me.

The Written, by British author Ben Galley, suffers from many of the same problems I found in Inborn, and several of the same strengths. Namely, the lack of commas where required. Not only are the commas missing from dialogue, but in many other places where they should be. I know British English differs from American English in many respects, even in at least one rule of punctuation*. However, as far as I can determine, the rules for commas should be the same.

Call me a perfectionist, but things like repeated small errors really get in the way of my enjoyment of an otherwise good story, and in this case, The Written had a heck of a good story hiding behind the errors. The story centers around a powerful book of summoning magic that is found, then stolen, and one Written mage who is attempting to deal with the problems that involved. The system of magic in The Written isn’t really that different from most other fantasy novels, except for one notable and fairly unique feature: the Written, for whom the book is named, have magical glyphs tattooed on their backs. The tattoo is on their back so it can be hidden, even from themselves, because reading it causes most people go mad.

How the tattoo artist himself stays sane, or even if he is still sane, isn’t well explained, but that just adds to the mystery, and makes me want to read the explanation someday. About the only other fantasy series I’ve ever encountered with magical tattoos are the Death Gate series by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman of Dragonlance fame. However, in Death Gate the tattoos are all reachable by the mage and are used in spellcasting, not hidden from even the mage’s own eyes. (Editor’s note: The Grimnoir Chronicles by Larry Correia use something similar as well.)

The Written also has dragons, which to me is a plus in any book, and as an added bonus they’re friendly dragons except, of course, if you’re at war with their people. The people who live and work with the dragons are called Sirens, and they tend to take on dragon-like qualities themselves, including some magical abilities different from those of the Written. There is a third race mentioned, but very little information about them is given, most of the book deals with the Written and the Sirens.

As with Inborn, if the author would go back and fix the technical errors, I’d be honored to count this as one of my favorite stories and recommend it. However, the sheer number of errors means that I really can’t. I found myself wanting to finish in a hurry so I could move on to my next book, with hopefully fewer technical errors.

* The difference in punctuation between British and American English deals with quotation marks; the British use a single quote where us Americans use a double, and vice versa. So if I was to write, for example:

John said, “Hi, Bob!”

a British author would write it as:

John said, ‘Hi, Bob!’

Probably more than you ever wanted to know about British punctuation, I know, which is why I put it in a footnote.

If I couldn’t self-publish I probably would not have sought to become published. When I first started to study writing about ten years ago, I started to hear the stories about traditional publishing, and I figured out fairly quickly that I had little to no chance of ever being published. Maybe it was because I was also struggling with the other parts of my life, but I put aside any thoughts of publishing and just wrote when I could.

About two years ago, now, I started to hear about self-publishing, and indie publishing. I started to write again after a hiatus of a couple of years, and sent stories out to short-form markets. I’d never been able to finish a full-length novel, and had decided that my natural length was about 2500 words. Two things happened in 2010, I sold my first story, and I wrote a short story for my daughter, mailing it to her in sections while she was at summer camp.

The short sale would eventually be my first work in print, appearing in, of all places, a South African anthology. The short story my daughter loved, and asked me to try NaNoWriMo to make it into a novel. At the time I thought 50K in a month was a lot of words, more than I could possibly do. I surprised myself and got it written, though. Then I set the manuscript aside. I’d been told that it would take years to get it published, and I knew very well that the way I had written it would never fly with traditional publishers.

Sarah Hoyt and Dave Freer had been mentors of a writing group I was involved with for a couple of years (until ‘life happened’ and Critical Evolutions faded away), and I reconnected with Sarah on FaceBook in the new Diner. Through the Mad Genius Club I started to hear about self publishing, and met Amanda Green. I took her workshop on digital publication, and started to put my stories up on Amazon.

The biggest challenge to self-publishing, I found, was creating covers for my stories. Using the native Mac word processor Pages, formatting stories for epub version is a one-click process. Even doc files are easy to produce cleanly. From the things I am told, it’s harder to make a clean file using Word, and I know from experience that Open Office files are difficult at best to work with. I have used both Sigil and Calibre for formatting, but find that I can get the files prepped without them, especially when it came to Smashwords.

When I started out, I made the decision to create an imprint, and set up Stonycroft Publishing, naming it for the farm I live on currently. Self-publishing is slowly becoming more acceptable, but as a micro-publisher I can possibly coax my father into writing some of his anecdotes and gardening stories and I can publish them for him. I maintain a wordpress site for the publisher, which is cheap enough at less than $20 a year, and should anyone google me, they will find it and it might lend weight to my writing. As you can see, it’s not something I worry a lot about.

Creating covers continues to be a challenge. I’ve had a little training in graphic design, and in marketing, but neither come as easily to me as writing fiction. Designing the cover for Vulcan’s Kittens was my biggest challenge, as I didn’t want to use the fractals I had been using for the SF short stories. Fantasy, which VK technically is, ought to have art on the cover. After starting the editing process on the novel, I went on to write more short stories and novellas, and published one recently with my own watercolor art for the cover. For Vulcan’s Kittens, though, I wanted something more contemporary to match the story. I wound up using a photograph I had taken of one of our cats and making digital adjustments to it, including a digital painting of a volcano on it (Never again. Painting with a mouse was an exercise in frustration) and I have gotten good feedback on the cover, so I think I succeeded in my goal.

Covers are important. We really do judge a book by it’s cover, and each genre has its built-in expectations. SF is usually photorealistic, slightly digital art, fantasy is more classic art. Only if you are writing contemporary genres can you get away with photographs. An ebook appears first as a thumbnail, so a less-detailed cover is better, with any text on the cover oversized for better visibility. So many little things to remember and incorporate.

(Second editor’s note: Now go buy the book.)

Wearing the Cape, the debut novel by Marion G. Harmon, begins with a bang (the aforementioned bomb) and ends in tears. Along the way we take a fascinating tour of a few months in the life of a brand new superhero, codenamed Astra. We learn that it’s not all as wonderful as you might think to be able to fly, lift cars, have super-senses, and heal at many times normal speed.

For example, you still have to deal with your family, your friends, and that means learning to use a lot less force in normal activities, so you don’t, for example, bend your car’s steering wheel because you don’t realize how much stronger you are now. There’s also dealing with your new super-teammates, along with your love life. And, of course, there’s the real “job” of wearing the cape, which involves battling supervillians, responding to disasters, and… well, I won’t spoil it for you. We also laugh with Hope/Astra, we cry, and we learn little things… like even with a mask, wig and costume that changes your build, it’s darned hard to hide your secret identity from people who know you well, so it’s best not to meet people who knew you before your “breakthrough” in costume if you can avoid it. If you must, you’d better hope they can keep your secret (which makes me wonder just how unobservant Lois Lane is to have missed how much Superman looks like Clark Kent all those years). We also come to care about Hope/Astra and her fellow capes, and so we are touched when they fall in the line of duty. That’s the mark of a true artist of an author, that he can tug at your emotions with words.

We also find that some of the breakthroughs had what you might consider tragic outcomes, such as being turned into a being of light who cannot speak or ever touch another person again, or been turned into essentially living rubber, with all the problems that could cause.. That people who have had such unfortunate transformations still work as capes protecting the public from people who used their new powers for evil ends, speaks well of these people, fictional though they are.

There are, unfortunately, a few technical errors, such as using the wrong form of “you’re” in one place, and using a possessive form (with the ‘s at the end) when the plural was probably intended. However, being his first novel, and self-published, and given that the few errors I found are far less than the number of errors I’ve found in other self-published works, I can forgive him, because they didn’t really get in the way of reading the story.

And, to put it bluntly, it’s a heck of a story, a rollercoaster ride that has you turning pages far past the time when you should have been in bed or doing something productive (I’m lucky, even though I’m not getting paid to do this, I can count reading as productive time). Just when you think you have everything figured out, he tosses you a curve ball, and some of the curves are all but impossible to see coming, which I count as a good thing.

I would strongly recommend this book to any geek. Then again, I’d strongly recommend it to any non-geek or geek that doesn’t like superheroes (if such a thing exists), but who still wants an amazing story. It’s really a book about people… who just happen to have acquired super powers.

Forbes has a report out today regarding the fact that e-book growth slowed to “only” 41% for 2012. They explain:

According to the latest numbers from the Association of American Publishers, revenue for ebooks for some of the biggest categories grew by 41% in 2012. Ebooks now account for 23% of trade publishing revenues.

In any other industry for any other business, this would be eye-popping growth. For the world of ebooks, it represents a significant slowdown from years past.

The AAP has been tracking ebooks since 2002. That year, ebooks represented 0.05% of all trade publishing revenues. To get to the current 23% number, the biggest gains were made in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the years immediately following the 2007 launch of the Kindle. In 2008, ebooks were 1% of publisher revenue. In 2011, they were 17%. Those were the years of triple-digit growth numbers, a trend publishers thought would continue until ebooks were at 50% of revenue or more.

Note, however, that there appears to be a significant hole in those numbers… because they’re from traditional publishers, these numbers would appear to ignore independently published books, of which Kindle Direct Publishing from Amazon is only one; Booktango and Smashwords are two of the largest independent e-book stores, not to mention of course the Nook and Kobo stores, both of which allow authors to publish directly to their platforms.

Even so, it seems that the predictions of the death of dead-tree publishing may have been premature. Many people, including some of my closest friends, still enjoy the tactile feel of a real printed book, though I am working to win them over to ebooks at least for those books available in an electronic edition; so far there are still many good books that aren’t available for my preferred platform, the Kindle. Though I am sure Amazon is working to close those holes.Still, I’d be happier if the Forbes reporter had looked a little closer into the various independent publishing platforms before rushing to print (or, eprint, as it were) with the claim that ebook publishing is slowing down; it may be, but that’s hardly proven from the data the reporter used for this story.

WordFire Press books are already distributed in most eBook formats through major eBook retail channels. Becoming part of the Baen eBook Library will introduce those titles to a very large, dedicated, and specialized audience. In coming months, WordFire Press books will be featured in the Baen newsletter, which goes out to more than ten thousand very interested readers of SF eBooks. Baen Books has long been a pioneer and innovator in electronic publishing and distribution, with a highly devoted following. All titles are DRM-free.

Forthcoming WordFire Press releases include the never-before-published Frank Herbert novel ANGELS’ FALL and the second volume of FIVE BY FIVE—five military SF novellas by five military SF authors.

Kevin J. Anderson is the editor-in-chief of WordFire Press. Rebecca Moesta is the publisher.

The Prometheus finalists for Best Novel recognize pro-freedom novels published in the last year. The finalists in the Best Novel category of this year’s Prometheus Award, for the best pro-freedom novel of 2013 are (in alphabetical order by author): * Arctic Rising, by Tobias Buckell (TOR Books) * The Unincorporated Future, by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books) * Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books) * Darkship Renegades, by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books) * Kill Decision, by Daniel Suarez (Dutton – Penguin)

• Arctic Rising, by Tobias Buckell (TOR Books) is about a near future in which global warming has made the Arctic region livable and allowed an economic boom based on its nearly ice-free ocean. The treatment of the effects of global warming appears realistic, showing some of the benefits, and that even the negative effects are not the total disaster that supposed authorities are presently using to scare us into giving up freedom. While the protagonist works for the UN Polar Guard, which enforces what little law exists in this mostly ungoverned region, the novel depicts government organizations as either corrupt or completely ineffective. The story shows (a little too briefly) many ways to organize society on a voluntary basis. Buckell makes this potential pro-government authority setting into a very libertarian story.
• The Unincorporated Future , by Dani and Eytan Kollin (TOR Books) covers a fateful fight for liberty and the tragic consequences of tyranny and war, with casualties on a staggering scale, marks the sobering conclusion of this suspenseful and intricate four-novel series about a solar-system-wide war between statist Earth and the more libertarian human traders (and A.I. intelligences) in the asteroid belt and outer planets.
• Pirate Cinema, by Cory Doctorow (TOR Books) educates the audience on current issues of copyright and government surveillance; advocates for a change in policies and attitudes toward transformative works; and explain ways in which the next generation can work around current obstacles and agitate for change. In a young adult novel that’s unapologetically optimistic and political, Doctorow gives his characters, led by the young pirate filmmaker “Cecil B. DeVille,” the opportunity to make a difference and fight back against entrenched interests and outdated forms of control. Audiences have been given a particular view of art and intellectual property day-in and day-out for many years from the government, and the media industry; in Pirate Cinema, Doctorow spins an often charming and compelling story around a different perspective, and in doing so he offers a challenge to all lovers of personal expression and artistic freedom.
• Darkship Renegades, by Sarah Hoyt (Baen Books) is an enjoyable sequel to the fascinating story begun with Darkship Thieves, involving a virtually government-free society, Eden, hidden among the asteroids from tyrannical Earth. When an unexpected problem erupts in the small community on Eden, a heroic foursome flees coercive forces on Eden to seek data on Earth that can reduce the power wielded by the cabal running Eden. Well-drawn, interesting characters and lots of clever plotting keep the reader turning pages.
• Kill Decision, by Daniel Suarez (Dutton – Penguin) delivers an international, multi-ethnic thriller that’s remarkably relevant to current developments in technology and policy, and well grounded in compelling science – not just about unmanned, weaponized drones and what they might mean for future warfare, but also about key characteristics of ant behavior (and how they might be used as a basis for warrior drones). In so doing, Suarez acknowledges that contemporary governmental power ultimately rests on coercive force and discusses how modern technology undermines and skews the democratic dialogue and process. Kill Decision stands as an action-packed adventure of particular interest to those interested in potential threats to human liberty that are disguised as protection and defense.

Twelve novels published in 2013 were nominated for this year’s Best Novel category. The other nominees were Hydrogen Sonata by Iain Banks (Orbit Books), In the Lion’s Mouth, by Michael Flynn (TOR Books), Rob Seablue and the Eye of Tantalus by Russell Hasan (Amazon Kindle), AI Apocalypse, by William Hertling (Liquididea Press), Chimera, by T.C.McCarthy (Orbit), Constellation Game, by Leonard Richardson (Amazon Kindle), andMidst Toil and Tribulation by David Weber (Tor Books).

For more than three decades, the Prometheus Awards have recognized outstanding works of science fiction and fantasy that stress the importance of liberty as the foundation for civilization, peace, prosperity, progress and justice. The Prometheus Hall of Fame award for Best Classic Fiction honors novels, novellas, stories, graphic novels, anthologies, films, TV shows/series, plays, poems, music recordings and other works of fiction first published or broadcast more than five years ago. The 2013 finalists for the Hall of Fame award are:

• Sam Hall, a short story by Poul Anderson published 1953 in Astounding depicts a regimented future American obsessed with security faces a revolution aided by cybernetic subversion.
• Falling Free, a novel by Lois McMaster Bujold published in 1988 explores the legal and ethical implications of human genetic engineering.
• ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman, a short story by Harlan Ellison published in 1965 in Galaxy concerns a satirical dystopia set in an authoritarian society dedicated to punctuality, where a lone absurdist rebel attempts to disrupt everyone else’s schedules.
• Courtship Rite, a novel by Donald M. Kingsbury in 1982 portrays an exotic human culture on a harsh desert planet, founded on the principle of applying optimization to biology, political organization, and ethics.
• As Easy as A.B.C., a short story by Rudyard Kipling published in London Magazine in 1912 presents an ambiguously utopian future that has reacted against the mass society that was beginning to emerge when it was written, in favor of privacy and freedom of movement.
• Cryptonomicon, a novel by Neal Stephenson published in 1999 has linked narratives set in World War II and the early 21st century that trace the development of computation and cryptography and their implications for a free society.