{"id":1305,"date":"2010-06-10T13:42:44","date_gmt":"2010-06-10T17:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1305"},"modified":"2010-06-10T13:49:33","modified_gmt":"2010-06-10T17:49:33","slug":"cold-hands-and-other-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1305","title":{"rendered":"<i>Cold Hands and Other Stories<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/content\/paperback-book\/cold-hands-and-other-stories\/8222599\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/06\/CHCoverPrototype.png\" style=\"DISPLAY: block; MARGIN-LEFT: auto; WIDTH: 500px; MARGIN-RIGHT: auto; HEIGHT: 750px; TEXT-ALIGN: center\" height=\"750\" alt=\"CHCoverPrototype.png\" width=\"500\"\/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;d be a lot more famous if I weren&#8217;t so slow, but better late than never: I&#8217;m pleased to announce that <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/content\/paperback-book\/cold-hands-and-other-stories\/8222599\">Cold Hands and Other Stories<\/a><\/em> is now available from Lulu.com in print form, with cover art by <a href=\"http:\/\/bartrop.purrsia.com\/\">the estimable Richard Bartrop<\/a>. Trade paperback, 230 pp. $11.99.<\/p>\n<p>The body of my short fiction divides pretty much in halves: Stories focused on AI, and stories focused on everything else. I published all of my AI shorts in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/product\/paperback\/souls-in-silicon\/3408142\">Souls in Silicon<\/a><\/em> back in 2008. <em>Cold Hands and Other Stories<\/em> contains everything else, albeit with a new excerpt from my nanotech AI novel, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Cunning-Blood-Jeff-Duntemann\/dp\/0975915622\/\">The Cunning Blood<\/a><\/em>. And &#8220;everything else&#8221; covers a lot of ground: spaceflight, aliens, religion, calculus, witchcraft, and steam locomotives, or at least steam locomotives hacked together from alien parts that probably weren&#8217;t intended to go into steam locomotives.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the stories have appeared in print before, and one, &#8220;Cold Hands,&#8221; was on the final Hugo ballot in 1981. There are a few new ones, including one as new as late last week. Here&#8217;s the lineup:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Cold Hands&#8221; (from <em>IASFM<\/em>, June 1980)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Our Lady of the Endless Sky&#8221; (from <em>Nova 4<\/em>, 1974)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Inevitability Sphere&#8221; (from <em>IASFM<\/em>, Sept.\/Oct. 1978)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Whale Meat&#8221; (from <em>Starwind Magazine<\/em>, August 1977)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Born Again, With Water&#8221; appears for the first time.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Drumlin Boiler&#8221; (from <em>IASFM<\/em>, April 2002)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Drumlin Wheel&#8221; appears for the first time.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Roddie&#8221; appears for the first time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Rounding it out is another excerpt from <em>The Cunning Blood<\/em>, different from the one I published in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/product\/paperback\/souls-in-silicon\/3408142\">Souls in Silicon<\/a><\/em>, and not available anywhere else but in the novel itself.<\/p>\n<p>A big chunk of the book involves the Drumlins world, which I introduced in 2002 and intend to do a lot more with. Calling it steampunk isn&#8217;t quite fair, as it doesn&#8217;t take place in Victorian times and corsets are mentioned exactly once. Someone described &#8220;Drumlin Boiler&#8221; to me as &#8220;hillbilly steampunk&#8221; (steambilly?) and while that&#8217;s a surreal notion, it may be as close as you&#8217;ll come.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, an ebook edition is planned, though given the sad, fragmented state of the ebook world right now, it&#8217;s going to take some time to kick the file down the tool chain into all the requisite formats. Fortunately, Lulu is a certified aggregator for iBooks, so once I have an EPub that passes the gnarly <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/epubcheck\/\">epubcheck<\/a> test for standards compliance, I&#8217;m going to give it an ISBN and let Lulu list it on iBooks.<\/p>\n<p>As always, blog mentions and reviews are much appreciated!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;d be a lot more famous if I weren&#8217;t so slow, but better late than never: I&#8217;m pleased to announce that Cold Hands and Other Stories is now available from Lulu.com in print form, with cover art by the estimable Richard Bartrop. Trade paperback, 230 pp. $11.99. The body of my short fiction [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[33,16,18],"class_list":["post-1305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daybook","tag-books","tag-publishing","tag-sf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1305"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1308,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1305\/revisions\/1308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}