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cherita · 7 years

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11 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Deluxe Edition Books for Gift Giving

Books make for great gifts, don't you think?

Except . . . book lovers have probably already bought or read most of the books they want. Enter the deluxe edition: those fancy, illustrated editions designed especially for gift giving — I mean, I assume that's what they're for, with their gilded edges, pretty pictures, and fall release dates.

If you're searching for the perfect book to give your favorite sci-fi or fantasy reader, elevate your giving with a deluxe, anniversary or collector's edition of a beloved book. Or a hardcover edition instead of a mass market paperback, or a series collected into one volume. Here are 11 such deluxe edition books to get you started in these trying holiday shopping times...

Jump to: Sci-Fi Books || Fantasy Books || Young Adult Books

For Science Fiction book lovers...

Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy

Jeff VanderMeer

In time for the holidays, a single-volume hardcover edition that brings together the three volumes of the Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance — perfect for fans of dark sci-fi films and books alike, as the Annihilation movie adaptation starring Natalie Portman is set to hit theaters in February.

SYNOPSIS: Area X — a remote and lush terrain — has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer. This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers — they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding — but it's the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.

Ender’s Game (Hardcover Reissue)

Orson Scott Card

This engaging, collectible, miniature hardcover of the Orson Scott Card classic and worldwide bestselling novel makes an excellent gift for anyone’s science fiction library.

SYNOPSIS: Once again, Earth is under attack. An alien species is poised for a final assault. The survival of humanity depends on a military genius who can defeat the aliens. But who?

Ender Wiggin. Brilliant. Ruthless. Cunning. A tactical and strategic master. And a child.

Recruited for military training by the world government, Ender's childhood ends the moment he enters his new home: Battle School. Among the elite recruits Ender proves himself to be a genius among geniuses. He excels in simulated war games. But is the pressure and loneliness taking its toll on Ender? Simulations are one thing. How will Ender perform in real combat conditions? After all, Battle School is just a game. Isn't it?

Old Man’s War (Hardcover Reissue)

John Scalzi

A perfect gift for an entry-level sci-fi reader and the ideal addition to a veteran fan’s collection, John Scalzi's Old Man’s War will take audiences on a heart-stopping adventure into the far corners of the universe.

SYNOPSIS: John Perry did two things on his 75th birthday. First he visited his wife’s grave. Then he joined the army.

The good news is that humanity finally made it to the stars. The bad news is that, out there, planets fit to live on are scarce―and alien races willing to fight us for them are common. So: we fight. Far from Earth, the war has been going on for decades: brutal, bloody, unyielding.

Responsible for protecting humanity, the Colonial Defense Force doesn’t want young people; they want people who carry the knowledge and skills of decades of living. You’ll be taken off Earth, never to return. You’ll serve two years in comb

For Fantasy book lovers...

The Broken Earth Trilogy

N.K. Jemisin

For the Kindle lover, get the complete New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with The Fifth Season (2016 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel) and The Obelisk Gate (2017 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel), and concludes with this year's highly acclaimed The Stone Sky.

SYNOPSIS: This is the way the world ends...for the last time.

A season of endings has begun. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester. This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy.

Edgedancer

Brandon Sanderson

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Brandon Sanderson, a special gift edition of Edgedancer, a short novel of the Stormlight Archive (previously published in Arcanum Unbounded).

SYNOPSIS: Three years ago, Lift asked a goddess to stop her from growing older--a wish she believed was granted. Now, in Edgedancer, the barely teenage nascent Knight Radiant finds that time stands still for no one. Although the young Azish emperor granted her safe haven from an executioner she knows only as Darkness, court life is suffocating the free-spirited Lift, who can't help heading to Yeddaw when she hears the relentless Darkness is there hunting people like her with budding powers. The downtrodden in Yeddaw have no champion, and Lift knows she must seize this awesome responsibility.

The Name of the Wind 10th Anniversary Edition

Patrick Rothfuss

This deluxe, illustrated edition celebrates the New York Times-bestselling series, The Kingkiller Chronicle—a masterful epic fantasy saga that has inspired readers worldwide.

The anniversary hardcover includes more than 50 pages of extra content; a beautiful, iconic cover by artist Sam Weber and designer Paul Buckley; gorgeous, never-before-seen illustrations by artist Dan Dos Santos; detailed and updated world map by artist Nate Taylor; and more.

SYNOPSIS: My name is Kvothe. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me.

So begins a tale unequaled in fantasy literature—the story of a hero told in his own voice. It is a tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man’s search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend.

Neverwhere Illustrated Edition

Neil Gaiman

The #1 New York Times bestselling author’s dark classic of modern fantasy, beautifully illustrated with strikingly atmospheric, painstakingly detailed black-and-white line art by award-winning artist Chris Riddell, and featuring the author’s preferred text and his Neverwhere tale, “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back.”

SYNOPSIS: Richard Mayhew is a young London businessman with a good heart whose life is changed forever when he stops to help a bleeding girl—an act of kindness that plunges him into a world he never dreamed existed. Slipping through the cracks of reality, Richard lands in Neverwhere—a London of shadows and darkness, monsters and saints, murderers and angels that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth.

Neverwhere is home to Door, the mysterious girl Richard helped in the London Above. Here in Neverwhere, Door is a powerful noblewoman who has vowed to find the evil agent of her family’s slaughter and thwart the destruction of this strange underworld kingdom. If Richard is ever to return to his former life and home, he must join Lady Door’s quest to save her world—and may well die trying.

For Young Adult book lovers...

City of Bones 10th Anniversary Edition

Cassandra Clare

Celebrate the tenth anniversary of Cassandra Clare’s City of Bones with this gorgeous new edition, complete with new cover art, gilded edges, over thirty interior illustrations, and six new full-page color portraits of everyone’s favorite characters! Also includes the Clave’s official files on some of the series’ most beloved characters, written by Cassandra Clare.

SYNOPSIS: This is the book where Clary Fray first discovered the Shadowhunters, a secret cadre of warriors dedicated to driving demons out of our world and back to their own. The book where she first met Jace Wayland, the best Shadowhunter of his generation. The book that started it all. A perfect gift for the Shadowhunter fan in your life.

A Darker Shade of Magic Collector’s Edition

V.E. Schwab

A stunning collector's edition of the acclaimed novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author V.E. Schwab. With an exclusive metallic ink cover and reading ribbon, this edition will feature: end papers of London, fan art, a glossary of Arnesian and Antari terms, an interview between author and editor, and original (never before seen!) tales from within the Shades of Magic world.

SYNOPSIS: Kell is one of the last Antari―magicians with a rare, coveted ability to travel between parallel Londons; Red, Grey, White, and, once upon a time, Black.

Kell was raised in Arnes―Red London―and officially serves the Maresh Empire as an ambassador, traveling between the frequent bloody regime changes in White London and the court of George III in the dullest of Londons, the one without any magic left to see.

Unofficially, Kell is a smuggler, servicing people willing to pay for even the smallest glimpses of a world they'll never see. It's a defiant hobby with dangerous consequences, which Kell is now seeing firsthand.

After an exchange goes awry, Kell escapes to Grey London and runs into Delilah Bard, a cut-purse with lofty aspirations. She first robs him, then saves him from a deadly enemy, and finally forces Kell to spirit her to another world for a proper adventure.

Now perilous magic is afoot, and treachery lurks at every turn. To save all of the worlds, they'll first need to stay alive.

The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic

Leigh Bardugo

Inspired by myth, fairy tale, and folklore, #1 New York Times-bestselling author Leigh Bardugo has crafted a deliciously atmospheric collection of lavishly illustrated short stories filled with betrayals, revenge, sacrifice, and love.

SYNOPSIS: Enter the Grishaverse...

Love speaks in flowers. Truth requires thorns.

Travel to a world of dark bargains struck by moonlight, of haunted towns and hungry woods, of talking beasts and gingerbread golems, where a young mermaid's voice can summon deadly storms and where a river might do a lovestruck boy's bidding but only for a terrible price.

Perfect for new readers and dedicated fans, the tales in The Language of Thorns will transport you to lands both familiar and strange―to a fully realized world of dangerous magic that millions have visited through the novels of the Grishaverse.

This collection of six stories includes three brand-new tales, each of them lavishly illustrated and culminating in stunning full-spread illustrations as rich in detail as the stories themselves.

Red Queen Collector's Edition

Victoria Aveyard

A beautifully designed collector’s edition of the #1 New York Times bestselling Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard, featuring exclusive content, fan art, a redesigned cover, printed case, stained edges, a never-seen-before look behind the scenes of the Scarlet Guard, and more!

SYNOPSIS: Mare Barrow's world is divided by blood--those with common, Red blood serve the Silver- blooded elite, who are gifted with superhuman abilities. Mare is a Red, scraping by as a thief in a poor, rural village, until a twist of fate throws her in front of the Silver court. Before the king, princes, and all the nobles, she discovers she has an ability of her own.

To cover up this impossibility, the king forces her to play the role of a lost Silver princess and betroths her to one of his own sons. As Mare is drawn further into the Silver world, she risks everything and uses her new position to help the Scarlet Guard--a growing Red rebellion--even as her heart tugs her in an impossible direction. One wrong move can lead to her death, but in the dangerous game she plays, the only certainty is betrayal.

The perfect gift for anyone looking to add this beautiful edition to their collection, and for new readers eager to discover the lush, vivid fantasy series where loyalty and desire can tear you apart and the only certainty is betrayal.

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years

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Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead

The Handmaids Tales joyful reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic generators spooky prescience

Once or twice in a generation, a tale is suggested that vaults out of the literary corral studying to be a phenomenon, well known to beings the world over who have never read the book: George Orwells 1984 is one and Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale is another.

So its perhaps not remarkable that a new 10 -part TV series based on the romance has struck a chord. Starring Elisabeth Moss as handmaid Offred, the succession launched in the US last-place month and comes to the UK later this month trailing superlatives.

At 77, Atwood blends the loftiness of a high priestess who does not stand moron gladly with an unstinting generosity to those she deems not to be foolhardy. She is a heartfelt environmentalist, with a special interest in chicks, which she shares with her husband, Graeme Gibson.

If her determination to live by her principles occasionally seems incidentally comic as when she embarked by barge on an international tour of a stage show publicising the second tale of her MaddAddam trilogy, The Year of the Flood she also brings to her politics a healthy dose of intentional humour.

On a recent trip to her Toronto home, her longtime UK publisher Lennie Goodings was amazed to converge her carrying a paper bag bellying with four large-scale rubber turkeys. She established them to me with that joke, manager on a tilt, wicked smile of hers. They yelped when she pressed them. It turned out that she and Gibson were about to present the trophies at an annual RSPB competition. The winners each receive a rubber goose from Margaret, at which point she deports them in a squeezing squawking choir.

Atwood traces her refer with the environment back to a childhood spent criss-crossing the groves of Canada with her entomologist leader. She was the second of three children, and the familys itinerant life meant that she did not going to see full-time academy until she was eight years old. She embarked producing her poetry while a student at the University of Toronto, acquired her firstly major literary award for a poetry collection are presented in 1964, and three accumulations later diversified into fiction in 1969 with The Edible Woman, about the status of women driven mad by consumerism.

She is a exceedingly hands-on person, says Goodings, a fellow Canadian, who has been her publisher at at the feminist imprint Virago since 1979. Her self-sufficiency comes from her childhood but also from her participation in the early days of CanLit[ Canadian Literature ]. She designed her own cover for her first journal of poetry, The Circle Game, with the red-faced specks you buy at stationery stores. In the early days of Virago she enjoyed and learned alongside us bookshop point-of-sale information such as shelf airstrips and dumpbins.

Once she and I passed in a taxi to an happen with a large cardboard lady a replication of the figure on the handle of[ her 1988 novel] Cats Eye. She loved it.

Her hands-on approach has carried her forcefully into the digital period. As an internationally successful author who has been awarded 24 honorary magnitudes in six two countries, been shortlisted five times for the Booker prize( acquiring it in 2000 for The Blind Assassin ), and who was more recently invited to Norway to implant a manuscript for 100 years as the first participant in The Future Library project, she faced the tricky issue of a monumental carbon footprint. She undertook it by inventing the LongPen, which enabled her at least to do volume signals without leaving her home.

Her penultimate novel, The Heart Goes Last, began its life on the fanfiction scaffold Wattpad, and she has 1.6 million Twitter partisans, to whom she tweets a dozen times a day on subjects arraying from the urgent need to protect the monarch butterfly to the vilification of Hilary Clinton.

She has also made cameo appearances in The Handmaids Tale, and as an cataclysm survivor on Zombies, Run !, a fitness app blending an audio drama with an immersive jogging competition, which was devised by her protege, the English novelist and gaming wizard Naomi Alderman.

The two were brought together through a mentoring strategy run by Rolex. Four of us got flown out to Canada to meet her and I belief she picked me because I was funny, says Alderman, who ascribes Atwood with the convent settle of her recent novel, The Power, which is in the running for the Baileys prize. Shes really implied me in their own families in a way I hadnt expected. Ive been bird watching in Cuba with her brother and his wife, and to the Arctic.

Atwood has said she was reluctant to get involved with the strategy, and some of her more institutional mentoring rapports ought to have little encouraging. As a teacher she was pretty hectoring, says one former student on a imaginative print MA. She read all our first assemblies and we each had one grilling with her about our journals. Almost all the questions she requested was, And then what happens? And then what happens? so I predict plot is pretty important.

Her abrasive line-up has also been evident in run-ins with the science fiction parish as to which category her fictions are all part of, insisting that they are speculative myth on the basis that: Discipline story has demons and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen.

The veteran SF columnist Ursula K Le Guin countered in a Guardian inspect: To my memory, The Handmaids Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future thats half prediction, half wit.

Published in the mid-1 980 s, with a Canadians mounting chagrin at the religion revitalization she was detecting over their own borders in the United States, The Handmaids Tale, a legend of a theocratic territory in which young woman are treated as clutch mares by a merciless revolutionary upper-clas, has become a staple of the curriculum in the English-speaking world.

In the late 20 th century, when a progress in feminism appeared irreparable, it seemed a cautionary tale of what might well. At the Hay festival in 2003, Atwood herself argues that it had little general relevance than the first fiction in what was to become her MaddAddam trilogy about a world-wide facing the consequences of environmental meltdown. Oryx and Crake, she said, addressed world-wide issues whereas The Handmaids Tale was specifically about America.

But three decades after The Handmaids Tale was produced, there are many all-too-real the locations where the denizens of the fictional republic of Gilead would feel at home, from Donald Trumps increasingly dictatorial and misogynistic US where objectors against two abortion-related greenbacks turned up at the Texas senate in March dressed in the long ruby-red costumes and white bonnets of Atwoods handmaids to a Nigeria in which schoolgirls are seized en masse, and a changing number of theocratic countries across Asia and the Middle East.

The Year of The Flood, are presented in 2009, boasts Gods Gardeners, a religious sect devoted to the melding of science, religion, and sort, whose hymn-singing was promulgated in a strange roadshow.

Atwood herself opened the depict, intoning on a monotone from a wooden throne. As Diana Quick, one of the musicians, echoes: Peggy was rather eerie on that amusing promo make because she had written all their carol of praise and she took to blessing everyone, as it were, ex cathedra. I recall she had had great hopes for it and was quite theatre struck, and then very disappointed in its implementation of the piece.

Perhaps we were too far away to see that wicked smile, though an endnote to the tale proposed to not. In it, Atwood invited readers to listen to the Gardeners hymns on her website and to use them for amateur devotional or environmental purposes. If she sometimes takes herself preferably too seriously, she has surely gave the right to do so over a 60 -book career which shows no sign of ceasing to produce spookily prescient books.

Anyone inclined to be said that The Handmaids Tale is still a parochial parable should consider its relevant to even presumably radical societies in an age of a mass surveillance that would have been inconceivable when the novel was written. Like their fellow citizens of Gilead, we have internalised the distorted reasoning of Atwoods sinister Aunt Lydia, the apparently kindly supervisor who is actually a commonwealth stooge. There is more than one various kinds of democracy. Discretion to and exemption from, she says. In the days of disorder, it was freedom to. Now “you think youre” being given discretion from. Dont underrate it. As Orwell almost said, Big Sister is Watching You.

Potted profile

Born: 18 November 1939

Age: 77

Career: Started out as a poet and has to date written roughly 60 books for adults and children. She has also created opera libretti, television dialogues and a graphic novel.

High spot: Prevailing the Booker prize in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, the fourth of her fictions to be shortlisted.

Low quality: The Handmaids Tale has been censored from schools and libraries all over the US for being anti-Christian and sexually lurid and has appeared on the 100 Most Frequently Objection Books for the last 20 years.

What she says : Optimism necessitates better than world; despair entails worse than actuality. Im a realist.

What they say : The National Book Critics Circle of America gave her a lifetime achievement give this year for her groundbreaking myth, environmental and feminist activism, and work to community as a co-founder of the Scribe Trust of Canada.

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead

The Handmaids Tales joyful reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic generators spooky prescience

Once she and I passed in a taxi to an happen with a large cardboard lady a replication of the figure on the handle of[ her 1988 novel] Cats Eye. She loved it.

The Year of The Flood, are presented in 2009, boasts Gods Gardeners, a religious sect devoted to the melding of science, religion, and sort, whose hymn-singing was promulgated in a strange roadshow.

Potted profile

Born: 18 November 1939

Age: 77

Career: Started out as a poet and has to date written roughly 60 books for adults and children. She has also created opera libretti, television dialogues and a graphic novel.

High spot: Prevailing the Booker prize in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, the fourth of her fictions to be shortlisted.

What she says : Optimism necessitates better than world; despair entails worse than actuality. Im a realist.

The post Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2Ao8cR9 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

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apsbicepstraining · 7 years

Text

Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead

The Handmaids Tales joyful reception on the small screen reminds us of its ever-energetic generators spooky prescience

Once she and I passed in a taxi to an happen with a large cardboard lady a replication of the figure on the handle of[ her 1988 novel] Cats Eye. She loved it.

The Year of The Flood, are presented in 2009, boasts Gods Gardeners, a religious sect devoted to the melding of science, religion, and sort, whose hymn-singing was promulgated in a strange roadshow.

Potted profile

Born: 18 November 1939

Age: 77

Career: Started out as a poet and has to date written roughly 60 books for adults and children. She has also created opera libretti, television dialogues and a graphic novel.

High spot: Prevailing the Booker prize in 2000 with The Blind Assassin, the fourth of her fictions to be shortlisted.

What she says : Optimism necessitates better than world; despair entails worse than actuality. Im a realist.

The post Margaret Atwood: a high priestess of fiction who embraces the digital age | Claire Armitstead appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2Ao8cR9 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

0 notes