Apocalypse Triptych #1: Anthology
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Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore 2864 Chicago Avenue, Minneapolis, MN 55407 Newsletter #110 June 2015 - August 2015 Hours: M-F 10 am to 8 pm Sat. 10 am to 6 pm Sun. Noon to 5 pm Uncle Hugo's 612-824-6347 Uncle Edgar's 612-824-9984 Fax 612-827-6394 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.UncleHugo.com Parking Metered parking (25 cents for 20 minutes) is available in front of the store. Meters are enforced 8am-6pm Monday through Saturday (except for federal holidays). Note the number on the pole you park by, and pay at the box located between the dental office driveway and Popeyes driveway. The box accepts quarters, dollar coins, and credit cards, and prints a receipt that shows the expiration time. Meter parking for vehicles with Disability License Plates or a Disability Certificate is free. (Rates and hours shown are subject to change without notice - the meters are run by the city, not by us.) Free parking is also available in the dental office lot from 5pm-8pm Monday through Thursday, and all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Autographing Events (at Uncle Hugo's) Sunday, July 19, 3-4pm: Wesley Chu - Time Salvager Saturday, August 8, 1-2pm: Kelly McCullough - School for Sidekicks Sharon Lee and Steve Miller have a new Liaden Universe collection, A Liaden Universe Constellation Volume 3 ($14.00), expected the beginning of August. We’ve arranged to have Sharon and Steve to sign a hundred copies and ship them to us. If you order from our website by July 1, you can also get your copy personalized if you like. If you wait until after July 1, you’ll have to settle for just a signed copy–until we run out of signed copies. Used Book Sale Every year our supply (oversupply) of used books gets larger. We’re having a used book sale to try to reduce our supply.All used books will be 20% off, whether you have a discount card or not. The sale includes used paperbacks, used hardcovers, used magazines, used gaming books, and bagged books. Because we have so many used audiobooks, we will be selling all used audiobooks at $5.00 each, whether cassette or CD. The sale runs from Friday, May 29 through Sunday, June 7. That gives you two weekends to take advantage of the sale. This sale will be for customers shopping in the store–it does not apply to mail orders. If you’re thinking about bringing in lots of used books to sell to us during the sale, expect a longer than normal wait. Holiday Schedule Monday, May 25: Closed Saturday, July 4: Closed Award News The finalists for the Nebula Award for Best Novel are The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison aka Sarah Monette ($8.99), Trial by Fire by Charles E. Gannon ($15.00), Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie ($16.00), The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu ($25.99), Coming Home by Jack McDevitt ($25.95), and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer ($13.00). The nominees for the Hugo Award for Best Novel are The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison aka Sarah Monette ($8.99), The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson ($8.99), Skin Game by Jim Butcher ($9.99), Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie ($16.00), and The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu ($25.99). Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne ($15.00) and My Real Children by Jo Walton ($25.99 hc, $15.99 tr pb due mid-May) tied for the 2014 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, given for works that explore and expand gender roles. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie ($16.00) won the British Science Fiction Association Award for best novel. The Edgar Allan Poe Award winners included Best Novel to Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King ($16.00), Best First Novel by an American Author to Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman ($14.95), Best Paperback Original to The Secret History of Las Vegas by Chris Abani ($16.00), and Best Critical/Biographical to Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe by J. W. Ocher ($18.95). The Agatha Award Winners included Best Contemporary Novel to Truth Be Told by Hank Phillipi Ryan ($24.99), Best Historical Novel to Queen of Hearts by Rhys Bowen ($25.95, $7.99 paperback due early August), and Best First Novel to Well Read, Then Dead by Terrie Farley ($7.99). The nominees for the 2015 Thriller Awards for Best Novel are The Fever by Megan Abbott ($15.00), Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes ($26.00, $16.00 trade pb due mid-June), Suspicion by Joseph Finder ($9.99), Natchez Burning by Greg Iles ($27.99 signed hc or $9.99 pb), and That Night by Chevy Stevens ($15.99). The nominees for Best First Novel are The Axeman’s Jazz by Ray Celestin (no U.S. edition yet), Invisible City by Julia Dahl ($15.99), The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens ($15.95), The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh ($16.00), and The Martian by Andy Weir ($15.00). How’s Business by Don Blyly Business continues to be up compared to last year, but still down compared to a few years ago. National Independent Bookstore Day on May 2 was reasonably successful at Uncle Hugo’s (sales up about 50% from the first Saturday in May of last year), and I’ve heard that most other bookstores also experienced a large increase for the day. But most of our business on the day was regular customers coming in to make large purchases to get a free bookbag, rather than new customers discovering us for the first time. The local mass media seems to have pretty much ignored it. I know that MPR did a nice little article about it on their website, but I’m not aware of them discussing it on the radio. I didn’t encounter any other local media coverage of the day, so most of the population had no idea it was happening. I mentioned in the last newsletter that Borderlands Books of San Francisco had announced that they were going out of business because of the $15 per hour minimum wage approved by San Francisco voters. They came up with a plan to stay in business. They offered sponsorships for $100 each, and announced that if they sold 300 sponsorships by the end of March, they would stay open for the rest of 2015. Next year, they will also offer sponsorships, and if they sell enough by the end of March, 2016, they will stay open for the rest of 2016, and they will continue to sell annual sponsorships until either they don’t sell enough sponsorships to cover the extra expenses or they have to close for some other reason. They sold enough sponsorships within 48 hours to be able to stay open for 2015. Last newsletter I discussed some medical problems I had been experiencing. Since then, I had two more medical “adventures”, totally unrelated to the ones I mentioned last time, but I now seem to be in good shape. Short Recommendations by Don Blyly The Rebirths of Tao ($7.99) by Wesley Chu is the third in the series that began with The Lives of Tao ($7.99) and was followed by The Deaths of Tao ($7.99). The premise is that hundreds of millions of years ago a starship full of Quasings was damaged while passing through our solar system, and the only planet that could possibly support them was Earth. The Quasings could not survive on their own in Earth’s atmosphere, but they could enter into a symbiotic relationship with the critters that had evolved on Earth. The Quasings have been guiding evolution on Earth ever since, trying to produce a race capable of building them a new starship so that they could continue their journey. A few centuries ago, the Quasings split into two groups. One group pushed for more wars to advance technology even faster, regardless of the cost to the humans; the other group had become fond of the humans and felt that after hundreds of millions of years working on the project, it wouldn’t hurt to allow the humans an extra couple of centuries to get the to point where they could build the starship. The two groups of Quasings have been at war ever since, using the individual humans that they have symbiotic relationships with. Much of the story is told from the point of view of Tao and the various humans he has lived with and guided through the centuries. Tao is a member of the Prophus (friendly to humans) faction and has been fighting the schemes of the Genjix (stick it to the humans) faction. The Genjix have now come up with a new scheme. They think they have found a way to change the atmosphere of Earth so that the Quasings can survive on their own without the Earth critters, which is just as well, since the atmospheric changes will kill off all life that evolved on Earth. Tao and the rest of the Prophus faction are fighting this new plan, and even some of the Genjix faction think that their leadership is pushing forward with the new plan too quickly without enough testing to make sure that the Quasings will survive long term under the changed conditions. I’m looking forward to the next book in the series.