In This Issue:

Featured author: Elizabeth Bear
Featured titles: WORLDWIRED by Elizabeth Bear
THE MARK OF RAN by Paul Kearney
THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF RANGERGIRL by Tim Pratt
GLORIOUS TREASON by C. J. Ryan
On the Horizon: Upcoming Releases!
Spectra Debut: The K. J. Bishop and Sarah Micklem double interview!
News & Events
Reader Review contest: FULL MOON RISING by Keri Arthur
THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF RANGERGIRL: Your reviews!
AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS: Reader Reviewers Announced!

FEATURED AUTHOR

WORLDWIRED
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0hvz0Ej
Elizabeth Bear

The winner of the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer returns with this follow-up to HAMMERED and SCARDOWN.

The year is 2063. The Earth has been brutalized - an asteroid flung at Toronto by the PanChinese government has killed tens of millions and left the equivalent of a nuclear explosion in its wake. Humanity must find another option.

Perched above the devastation in the starship Montreal, Jenny Casey is still in the thick of the fray. Plugged into the worldwire, connected to a brilliant AI, her mind can be everywhere and anywhere at once. But it's focused on the mysterious alien beings right outside her ship. Are they there to help - or destroy? With Earth a breeding ground for treason and betrayal as governments struggle to assign blame, Jenny holds the fate of humankind in her artificially reconstructed hand.

Read an excerpt from WORLDWIRED: http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQH0EK

Visit the author's website here: http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQI0EL

Read more about Bear in this month's News and Events section.

You Will Want to Read Elizabeth Bear's WORLDWIRED-

If you like...
Greg Bear
David Brin
Lois McMaster Bujold
Chris Moriarty
Karen Traviss

FEATURED TITLES

WORLDWIRED
Elizabeth Bear
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0hvz0Ej

THE MARK OF RAN
Paul Kearney
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0hv10EW

THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF RANGERGIRL
Tim Pratt
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0hv20EX

GLORIOUS TREASON
C. J. Ryan
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0hv30EY

ON THE HORIZON

FELAHEEN
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
January 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0iXT0Ec

AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS
Linnea Sinclair
January 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0iXU0Ed

THE MYSTERIES
Lisa Tuttle
January 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0iXV0Ee

THE PILLOW FRIEND
Lisa Tuttle
January 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0iXW0Ef

FULL MOON RISING
Keri Arthur
February 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQJ0EM

THE MYTH HUNTERS (VEIL, BOOK ONE)
Christopher Golden
February 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQK0EN

DUSK
Tim Lebbon
February 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQL0EO

A SECRET ATLAS
Michael Stackpole
February 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQM0EP

BOUDICA: DREAMING THE HOUND
Manda Scott
February 2006
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQN0EQ

SPECTRA DEBUT

Response was so positive to last month's conversation between Spectra authors Marc Giller and Tamara Siler Jones that this month we asked K. J. Bishop (THE ETCHED CITY, 11/04) and Sarah Micklem (FIRETHORN, 6/05) to interview each other, in their own words.

>Sarah Micklem: You have many wonderful characters in THE ETCHED CITY, but the one who bothered me the most, the one I loved and hated, was Gwynn, the gunslinger and slaver's henchman. You made us so intimate with him that we are in collusion as he goes about his horrible business. He doesn't want God to exist, but he does desire magic; he wants the intrusion of the impossible. Is he the character who fascinated you the most? Did your ideas about him change as you wrote your way into his head?

>K. J. Bishop: Gwynn has been in my mind for a long time, and I'd have to say that yes, he was the character who fascinated me the most. I've always been attracted to antiheroes and glamorous "dark gentleman" figures, and Gwynn was always a glamorous character in my mind, but as I wrote him I gradually saw him as less of an aristocrat and more of a vulgar middle-class cad - which somehow further endeared him to me. I discovered his ordinariness. Originally I thought that in the process of writing the book I'd find out the reason for his being the way he is, but nothing came to light. I realized that he doesn't have any excuses, and doesn't want them. Going back to the modern and the primitive, I initially thought of him as a very modern antihero but came to understand that despite having a modern intellect, he's a primitive creature, and he knows it, and he isn't ashamed. He actually is the savage of the colonial imagination, ironically working for the colonial side. His psyche isn't divided against itself in the way that makes us moral beings - and neurotic beings, too. In modern parlance I guess you could say he suffers from arrested development, but described in another way, he lives in a state of grace with himself, if not with the world. I always felt that Gwynn existed on two levels, the human and the archetypal, or godlike - not just metaphorically, but literally, within the metaphysical environment of the world in the book. And gods are like animals, they simply "am what they am."

>SM: In THE ETCHED CITY, the city of Ashamoil encompasses a whole colonial history: the barbarism of civilization, wealth built on slaving and gun-running and children laboring in factories until their bones turn hollow. It's an old tropical city on the edge of a jungle, full of organic burgeoning and rotting and at the same time sooty with industry. I felt as though you had mapped it thoroughly, and could, if you wished, walk us from the quays on the Skamander up the Crane Stair to mansions in the hills. I wondered if you'd spent a lot of time wandering around the postcolonial cities of our world. What draws you to explore this edge where 'modern' and 'primitive' - which you reference explicitly - meet and transform each other?

>KJB: The colonial past is a recent layer of Australian history, so my imagination is saturated with a sort of dye from that age, when the "modern" was completing its invention of the "primitive" and developing a love-hate relationship with it. I'm also interested in the nineteenth-century construction of femininity, which is tied to ideas about the primitive. Aside from that intellectual interest, at a gut level I think the fascination, for me, is what it was for the Victorians: it's all about fear and desire. On the one hand, there's the fear that the modern mind, the most precious possession of the modern being, rational, free (it likes to think) from superstition, packed with useful facts, having the qualities we identify with adulthood, can be lost, like any other possession; and the fear that, in fact, the modern mind is a sham covering a Conradian "heart of darkness." On the other hand, there's the temptation to let the feared event occur, to drop the bundle of one's modern subjecthood, to "go native" - an idea which is possible only because of our own fanciful notions of the primitive (it's why modern man needs tiki bars!) And presumably the natives have their own ideas of the primitive, the wild, the Other.

>K. J. Bishop: FIRETHORN is full of remarkable realistic detail, not only in the descriptions of the world but also in action scenes. There's one battle in particular that made me feel I was watching a movie. From my own admittedly limited experience, physical fights of all kinds are hard to write; the choreography's a challenge if you've made the stylistic decision to describe the goings-on in detail. How did you go about writing the action scenes in FIRETHORN?

>Sarah Micklem: First of all, I wrote myself into a corner. My narrator is a spectator, not a participant. She's up on a hill watching the action. It's chaos down there and she can't tell what's going on. Besides that, her lover, Galan, has to fight on foot when everyone else is on horseback, for reasons I won't go into here. I had no idea how he could survive the fight, but I knew he must. Then there was my ignorance: I've never studied martial arts or been in combat or a fight.

So I bought a lot of books on medieval and renaissance fighting, and sword-fighting in general, and worked my way through them. I read first-person accounts of battle in oral histories and novels, trying to get at the experience of being in combat. After I figured out the choreography, I found it hard to describe all those nearly simultaneous actions without pages of blow-by-blow description that I wrote and then cut. Movies have it all over fiction in that regard. On the other hand, in a book you can depict different states of consciousness more easily than on film. In the end I resorted to magic (no more about that, it's a spoiler). I wrote my way out of the corner, but it took months, a whole summer in fact.

>KJB: The divining compass in FIRETHORN with the twelve gods and their avatars, is fascinating and quite unusual. Some of the names of the gods and avatars sound like personal entities - Queen of the Dead, Hunter, Sailor - while others seem elemental or abstract, such as Plenty, Foresight, and Iron. Can you say something about how you developed this system?

>SM: I wanted to set the book within a moral universe that wasn't based on a dualism. As in Greek mythology, the gods do not line up on an axis of good and evil. They form a wheel, the circle of the divining compass, and between them all, they divide and rule the cosmos. But the divisions aren't neat and simple. There are overlaps, conflicts, and shifting alliances.

The people of Firethorn's society certainly have ideas about proper and improper, good and bad behavior. Bad behavior is dangerous, not because it is sinful and you'll go to hell, but because you might offend and anger a god, not to mention other people, living and dead. Sometimes you can't please one god without offending another - tough luck.

It intrigued me that in some religions a god has different manifestations or avatars, thereby offering different paths for human understanding; in Christianity there is father, son, and holy ghost. I decided each god would be a trinity of male, female, and disembodied (or elemental) avatars. Twelve seemed a good number of gods. So I had twelve gods times three avatars - thirty-six avatars in all - way too many to be convenient for fiction. This is a cautionary tale for those of you inventing your own cosmos.

I finished the divining compass after I finished FIRETHORN. Some of the avatars were nameless until then. They weren't involved in the story so I hadn't given them much thought. I'm working on the sequel now, and I am still finding out about the gods. Firethorn is a believer, and I try to think like her. Everything she looks at is in the domain of one god or another; anything can be a sign.

To read more of this SPECTRA PULSE Q&A between K. J. Bishop and Sarah Micklem, visit Sarah Micklem's website at http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQO0ER

NEWS AND EVENTS

>George R. R. Martin's A FEAST FOR CROWS debuts as #1 on the New York Times bestseller list!
Time magazine raves, 'Of those who work in the grand epic-fantasy tradition, Martin is by far the best-[He] is a tense, surging, insomnia-inflicting plotter and a deft and inexhaustible sketcher of personalities-this is as good a time as any to proclaim him the American Tolkien.'

>Elizabeth Bear Talks to SciFi.com
The WORLDWIRED author recently talked to SciFi.com about why she chooses not to write about present-day events. "Books are for telling stories," Bear said. "Good stories are about something, of course, but first and foremost they're about the characters and their problems and should be readable for themselves, ages after the meta-references have fallen by the wayside."

To read more, click here. (Once page loads, scroll down to read interview): http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQP0ES

>St. Louis Dispatch praises Kim Stanley Robinson's latest In a review of the timely FIFTY DEGREES BELOW, Dorman T. Shindler proclaimed, "Could give Michael Crichton a run for his money...should be required reading for government officials and voters." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

>Publishers Weekly on THE MARK OF RAN- '[A] gritty fantasy swashbuckler-Kearney's crisp, often lyrical writing shines brightest when his characters take to the sea.'

Upcoming Spectra Author Appearances:

>George R. R. Martin, author of A FEAST FOR CROWS 11/29/05 at 7PM | Page One Books | Albuquerque, NM

READER REVIEWER

FULL MOON RISING
Keri Arthur
http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQJ0EM

We're looking for twenty people who would like to receive advance reader's editions of FULL MOON RISING and send us a brief review.

In this exciting debut, author Keri Arthur explodes onto the supernatural scene with a sexy, sensuous tale of intrigue and suspense. A rare hybrid of vampire and werewolf, Riley Jenson and her twin brother, Rhoan, work for Melbourne's Directorate of Other Races, an organization created to police the supernatural races - and protect humans from their depredations. While Rhoan is an exalted guardian, a.k.a. assassin, Riley is merely an office worker - until her brother goes missing on one of his missions. The timing couldn't be worse. More werewolf than vampire, Riley is vulnerable to the moon heat, the weeklong period before the full moon, when her need to mate becomes all-consuming.

Luckily Riley has two willing partners to satisfy her every need. But she will have to control her urges if she's going to find her brother-easier said than done as Riley is confronted with a very powerful - and delectably naked - vamp who raises her temperature like never before.

If you want to be a reader reviewer, please fill out the SPECTRA PULSE Reader Reviewer form: http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQQ0ET by December 6, 2005, and include your full mailing address. Your information will be used only to send your book and will never be used for anything else.

We'll send twenty free reading copies immediately thereafter to randomly selected winners. Reviews are due back to us by January 2, 2006. Reviews that are deemed acceptable to Bantam Dell in its sole discretion will be posted in the February issue of the SPECTRA PULSE newsletter and may be used by the publisher and/or author for promotional purposes, including, but not limited to, posting the review, in whole or in part, on the publisher's and/or the author's websites.

Click here for the legal rules: http://info.randomhouse.com/cgi-bin21/DM/y/emSA0ILuVi0WE0jQQ0ET

Your reviews of THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF RANGERGIRL are in!

Here are this month's reader reviews of THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF RANGERGIRL:

'This book is just plain fun. The characters are bizarre enough without entering the realm of the unbelievable. The unbalanced Beej is sympathetic and somewhat loveable. Jane is especially spooky and unsettling. Marzi is an irresistible character with a sharp mind and a unique way of looking at the world. Tim Pratt has a fresh and original voice, and would probably appeal to fans of Charles De Lint and Tim Powers. I enjoyed this book tremendously, and I hope that this is just the first novel in a series of Marzi's adventures as a (more-or-less) real-life Rangergirl.' - Erin M, Los Angeles, CA

'The title says it all in Tim Pratt's debut novel. His writing is fresh and original as he envisions a sort of Sci Fi western, or Westworld meets the land of Narnia. But the door to the Medicine Lands isn't in a cupboard; it's in a closed off room of the coffee house where Marzi works as the nighttime manager. Marzi is an unlikely heroine who resists responsibility to fight the evil that is invading the real world. There are plenty of twists and turns before the final showdown. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and give it a definite 'thumbs up'.' - Marjorie K., Saint Paul, MN

'I really enjoyed reading THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF RANGERGIRL. I read western, fantasy and sci-fi magazines, and used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons to see the old westerns and the Rocketman and other serials. This book has the same feel to it as the old books and movies and I think those who will be reading it will find an appreciation for this style. I'm looking forward to more of Tim Pratt's work.' - Patsy W., Evansville, IN

"The characters were memorable, particularly the mud woman and her relationship with the obsessive-compulsive neat freak. (The ironic humor was another plus.) I enjoyed the vivid scenes retold from the comic book - I would love to see some issues of the comic Rangergirl. A powerful message: With their imagination, artists can actually change the world.' - Natalia M., Toronto, ON, CANADA

'When I received this book I had to start reading it right away. This was a fun read with great characters. From Marzi to Lindsay to Ray, I loved them all. Everyone can enjoy this quick read with all the twists to it.' - Kim V., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada

'Fun and interesting. I was never really sure what was going to happen next. The characters were very vivid. A fascinating read.' - Sandra H., Glendale, AZ

'I really enjoyed reading this book. It's well written. I also enjoyed being able to review a book that isn't in the stores yet.' - Sandra H., Mooresville, NC

'Tim Pratt's novel quickly caught my attention. I liked the plot of today and the old west mixed together. The characters came to life and I found myself fully involved. It is a fun and entertaining novel to read.' - Holly C., Grand Forks, BC

The November 2005 Reader Reviewers Have Been Announced! They will be reading AN ACCIDENTAL GODDESS by Linnea Sinclair. Look for their reviews in the January 2006 SPECTRA PULSE.

Becky H., Omaha, NE
Diane P., Cedar Rapids, IA
Bill C., Kansas City, MI
Craig P., Lonoke, AR
Christy M., Houston, TX
Marijo Y., Hackettstown, NJ
Ken M., Ashland, MA
Kathleen M., Tucson, AZ
Sue C., Eugene, OR
Lorraine C., Murrieta, CA
Judi G., Aberdeen, NJ
Dorie L., Edison, NJ
Sandra H., Glendale, AZ
Paul G., Lake Villa, IL
Kimberly R., Hines, OR
Beth D., Staten Island, NY
Peggy M., Crowley, LA
Kathryn B., Everett, WA
Ron G., Wynne, AK
Mig A., Salem, OR

Copyright © 2005 Bantam Dell. All rights reserved.