Wastelands has arrived! Isn’t it beautiful? Here it is in the box it arrived in.
And here’s a shot of the back cover, which until now I hadn’t seen. It is just me, or does the back cover image look like the cover image turned upside down? Think that’s supposed to suggest the "world being turned upside down" sort of effect of an apocalypse?
If any contributors are reading this, that means you’ll have yours soon too. Yay!
The new Locus showed up today, and inside I discovered not a review of Wastelands, as I’d been hoping for, but a nice full-page ad for the anthology on page 16, right in the middle of Gary K. Wolfe’s glowing review of Paolo Bacigalupi’s collection, Pump Six and Other Stories. That’s a great spot for attracting the right sort of reader for Wastelands, as most of Paolo’s stories are rather apocalyptic (when choosing the stories for Wastelands, I had several of his to pick from).
Actually, I say full-page ad, but while the ad itself is a full-page, Wastelands shares the ad space with three of Night Shade’s other titles: Snake Agent, The Demon and the City, and Precious Dragon by Liz Williams–the first three installments in her Detective Inspector Chen series, which are all now coming out in mass market paperback, with the fourth volume, The Shadow Pavilion, due out in hardcover in May.
More obsessive Amazon tracking reveals that at as of 4:30 PM today, Wastelands is the #1 best-selling SF anthology. Though as you’ll note from the screen capture below, Amazon’s categories aren’t very exact–the book ranked #2 is not an anthology at all, it’s a novel. Technically speaking, the #3 book isn’t an anthology either, but it’s a collection, and the category incorporates other collections, so I’ll let that slide.
LiveJournal user Morgan Dhu (bibliogramma) posted some thoughts about Wastelands here. It’s not a review per se, but she seems to have enjoyed it:
I’m not going to single out any stories, because all of them had something important to say about how and why the world–or a world–might end, and what we might do to nudge it in that direction or away from it, and what we could learn from thinking about the issues now, before it really might be too late. Unless of course, it already is and we don’t know it yet.
And since she said she needed to thank me for putting together the anthology: You’re welcome! Thanks for reading it.
Thanks, perhaps, to this brief mention of Wastelands on Instapundit.com, Wastelands shot up to #53 on Amazon.com’s SF bestseller list (and #1124 overall), as of 5PM today. See screenshots below:
Thanks to Tobias S. Buckell for pointing this all out to me. Incidentally, Toby just posted a sweet trailer for his forthcoming novel, Sly Mongoose. A hothouse planet with poisonous atmosphere and people wearing armored pressure suits. What’s not to like about that?
Wastelands received a rave review from Beam Me Up, a radio show/podcast that focuses, as you might imagine from the name, on SF and fantasy. Here’s a snippet:
I know if you’re like me you view "theme" books with a bit of skepticism. Assembling a collection of any size with only one "type" of story can be daunting. I have often found many of these types of books containing one or a few really top notch stories and the rest relegated to filler. Collections like Ellison’s Dangerous Visions is a shining example of how to do it right. Is Wastelands in that league? Not quite, but DAMN close. […] The tales in Wastelands are the crème de la crème of this genre and for that matter science fiction as a whole.
Damn near as good as the most critically-acclaimed genre anthology, like, ever? I’ll take it!
I’m told the review will also be a part of this weekend’s podcast, which you can listen to (and subscribe to) here.
Looks like Wastelands *is* officially on sale. Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and Powell’s Books are all indicating they have it in stock, and Night Shade confirmed to me that the distributor shipped out all their pre-orders.
Go forth and purchase! And hey, if anyone sees it out in the wild, could you snap a photo for me? If you do, please post it to Flickr and tag it with "Wastelands" [make that "wastelandsjja"–there’s LOTS of other stuff tagged "wastelands"]. I’ve got an image of the cover here to start off the tag group. Add to it when you spy a copy!
Update: Tania offers proof that the book is not only out, but her pre-ordered copy already arrived in Alaska.
Amazon.com is indicating that they have stock of Wastelands already, though I haven’t seen copies of it yet. But if they really do have it in stock already, let me tell you, it’ll make a wonderful holiday gift.
Yesterday, Grasping for the Wind posted a review of The Pirate Issue, and now they’ve posted an interview with me:
GFTW: You were recently invited to be a guest editor for the Pirate Issue of Shimmer Magazine. What was your approach to choosing stories for this issue?
JJA: One of the things I wanted to do with the Pirate Issue is have a broad range of pirate stories, which took some liberties interpreting the term "pirate." Of course, there are some stories in the issue that are your typical iconic Caribbean-style pirate, but it was important to me to have a certain diversity represented. So that was one factor.
Other than that, I was really just judging the stories on their own merits as I would judge any story. In fact, that was the only way I could judge them, really, because Shimmer employs a "blind" reading system, in which the names of the contributors are stripped off of their manuscripts before the editor sees them. So when I read each story, all I had was the title and the text. It was kind of a liberating feeling to read each story with absolutely no preconceptions, not even subconsciously, about what I might think about the story I was about to read. (And this was only enhanced by the fact that I read all the submissions electronically, so every submission looked exactly the same to me–there were no variations in manuscript formatting or other things like that to get in the way of me engaging with the story.)
The only other time I’ve ever read a story anonymously, as far as I know, is when I read Neil Gaiman’s "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" for F&SF. The manuscript didn’t have Gaiman’s name on it, just the title. I kind of felt like I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t put my finger on who it was. After I got to the end, I saw Neil Gaiman’s name, and so I learned who wrote it. But I was glad to have read it that way, and I enjoyed reading a whole slush pile’s worth for Shimmer that way.
Click to read the whole interview.
Also, SF Signal asked me to participate in their new Mind Meld feature, in which they get a bunch of knowledgeable folks and ask them to chime in on a certain issue. So click through to read my thoughts about online book reviewing, along with thoughts from folks like David Hartwell, Niall Harrison, James Patrick Kelly, and others.
Sean Melican has a nice review of Wastelands up at Ideomancer. Click through to read the whole review. Here’s a snippet:
John Joseph Adams deserves a great deal of credit for the extensivity and reach of his research […] and for picking recent post-apocalyptic stories that have not been heavily anthologized. […] Mr. Adams demonstrates the sub-genre is not a static, but is a dynamic, continuously evolving fractured mirror, in dialogue with, and sometimes refuting, its basic assumptions […] [A]n excellent cross-section of post-apocalyptic stories well worth reading.