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This week: Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott

Last week: Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Cherie Priest

Next week: Starfish by Peter Watts

At this point, I have all of them except Spirit Gate and Starfish saved to my hard drive in PDF format.

This week, Tor has kindly provided us with links to last week's book - The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove - as well as this week's book and two pieces of artwork related to the Wheel of Time. One is a big image of the snake-and-wheel. The other is the full, uninterrupted cover art for The Dragon Reborn. Very pretty. The Wheel of Time covers have always been wrap-around, but the back matter gets in the way sometimes. I've just noticed some new things about the art-work. I knew the three ta'verenm, Ba'alzamon, and the Aiel were prominentl featured, but I'd never before noticed the three Defenders of the Stone in the background looking really, really overwhelmed. I'd be overwhelmed, too, if hundreds of Aiel suddenly appeared inside an assumedly inpenetrable fortification. They look very 1550 with their conquistador helmets and breastplates worn over doublets. They're all armed with rapiers and main gauche.

The book is Reiffen's Choice by S.C. Butler. Next week, they'll be sending us Suns of Suns by Karl Schroeder. Interestingly, they've hinted that they might make Mistborn available again.

This is just too interesting to ignore. I think I even have a useful idea to explore. Please pardon the internal rhyme.

http://www.nss.org/news/releases/pr20080229.html

RETURN TO LUNA -- STORY GUIDELINES
Please read entire guidelines before submitting to ensure your story fits the requirements!

REQUIREMENTS:
* Previously unpublished stories only -- no reprints.
* No simultaneous submissions (that is, don't send your story to us and to other publishers at the same time).
* Multiple submissions are okay (you may send us more than one story).
* Set entirely on the Moon.
* Realistic stories showing very possible futures.
* No gratuitous sex or excess violence or anything beyond mild language (these stories will be read by space enthusiasts of all ages).
* Science Fiction (no fantasy, horror or other genres).
* No aliens or faster than light travel.

LENGTH: 2000 to 6000 words.

ENTRY FEE: None.

PRIZES: All winning stories will be published in the anthology RETURN TO LUNA with a potential readership of thousands; the book will be submitted to well-known science fiction editors to consider each of the stories for inclusion in their "best of the year" anthologies, and the book will be sent out for review. All winning authors will be eligible for royalties and will receive free membership to the NATIONAL SPACE SOCIETY for one year. GRAND PRIZE WINNER will also have a review of his or her winning short story featured in NSS's magazine AD ASTRA, and on the NSS and Hadley Rille Books websites.

ELECTRONIC SUBMISSIONS ONLY: Send as an attachment to an email message with subject line "NSS CONTEST" to subs [at] hadleyrillebooks [dot] com. Microsoft Word .doc file is preferred, or .rtf is okay (please contact us if you need to make arrangements for another format). Please virus scan your document before sending. Story will be stripped of author name and assigned a number before forwarded to the jurors. You will receive a confirmation email back from us. (If you do not receive a confirmation email then that means we did not receive your story.)

FORMAT: We prefer the standard manuscript format as shown here: http://www.shunn.net/format/story.html, except that we prefer single-spaced rather than double-spaced. Please don't do any fancy formatting such as right-justifying, etc. -- leave that to us. Please don't hit Enter (or Return) at the end of each line. Let your word processor wrap the text.

SUBMISSION PERIOD: From now through June 15, 2008.

SOME IDEAS:
* How have we set about establishing a lunar base, and then a colony?
* What are living conditions like?
* What is the lunar wilderness like? What kind of exploring to settlers do?
* What are the buildings like and how do people get around the lunar surface?
* What kinds of transportation do they use to travel to and from the Moon?
* What kind of society lives there? What are the challenges to human social structures?
* Are lunar colonies self-sufficient or do they depend on Earth?
* What kind of industries exist and how do the colonists make use of lunar resources?
* Does the colony resemble Las Vegas or is it more like a science outpost?
* Will there be settlements on the far side -- a radio telescope array, perhaps?
* Is the colony located near one of the poles where miners extract ice from the permanently shadowed areas?
* Why have we established a colony on the Moon?

This week, the nice people at Tor sent us Jane Lindskold's Through Wolf's Eyes

I haven't yet looked closely at the two wallpapers. The one appears to be cover art for a mid-fifties edition of The Green Hills of Earth by Robert Heinlein. It looks cool in a very retro-future sort of way. I can't guess from the art what moment they're trying to capture, but the general theme is spacemen with spearguns, complete with scuba tanks, as if space is like the deep ocean, but with less pressure. It's also amusing. One of them has his weapon pointed at another's head, but the guy on the business end of the speargun is looking someplace else entirely and seems not the least bit worried.

Next week, we get The Disunited States of America by Harry Turtledove.

So, just a recap

Lord of the Isles by David Drake
Crystal Rain by Tobias Buckell
Farthing by Jo Walton
The Outstretched Shadow, book one of Mercedes Lackey & James Mallory's Obsidian Trilogy
Robert Charles Wilson's Spin
John Scalzi's Old Man's War
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn.

I'm chuffed. It's a big, free library of author's I've never read and in many cases have never even encountered before. I have all of these in pdf, if anyone wants a book but didn't get them in time. My personal plan of attack goes like this:

Sanderson
Turtledove
Drake
everyone else as the mood strikes me

I figured out at least one or two levels of joke in this year's Thinkgeek shirt. Some of their other offerings are in questionable taste, but the labyrinthine chain lock, the Betamax to HD-DVD recorder, and the caffeinated breakfast cereal are all fun.

The shirt purports to be encrypted at some very high level, so I decided to try decoding it with ROT13 first. The plaintext actually makes sense, so either the joke is that the NSA encryption is just rot13, or the plaintext I decoded is actually a cipher within a cipher. Not sure which. But, as usual, the encoded thinkgeek shirt insults either the wearer, the reader, or both. In this case, the wearer:

BUJUNGNSBBYVNZ decrypts to
OHWHATAFOOLIAM

Fun.