To celebrate the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars today, the ninth Young Wizards novel, A Wizard of Mars, will be available for FREE download until midnight Hawai’ian time. Use the discount code CURIOSITY for a 100% discount. (Info on how to use our discount codes is…
I love this book and I love Mars and I love rovers.
(via anluan)
DUANNNEEEE. I love the YW books. The new one is coming out in a couple of weeks!
Of course, book six is one of the failiest things ever in terms of its treatment of autism, which really distressed me. I usually end up skipping it if I’m rereading the series.
I’ve only read it once, and it was at a time when I was really, really not conscious of issues related to disability in general and autism in particular, so it hadn’t even occurred to me that it was problematic (thanks, privilege! I love finding out what a jerk I used to be!). Looking back on it, yeeeeeahhhh, not so great. I was considering doing a re-read of the series in preparation for the new one (squee!!!!). If I do, I think I’ll skip that one too.
A good chunk of the old-school classic Trek novels not only are written by awesome women, like Diane Duane & Vonda M McIntyre & … lots of other awesome women, but they feature female characters front and center. Whether taking characters like Uhura, Chapel, and Rand and making their awesome the center of a story, or by adding additional female characters and making their awesome the center of the story, the Star Trek novels were just “Look! Look at how awesome women are! Look at them!!!!!”
This is totally off-topic (and, in tumblr time, like four years late), but I’m saying it anyway because seeing someone else name-check Diane Duane just made my little heart explode. I never really got into her Star Trek novels, but she totally rocked my entire world when I was a geeky teenager with no friends who had just moved from a huge city to a small town where, as far as I could tell, every single person’s social life revolved around hunting and a particularly virulent strain of Baptistry. Discovering her Young Wizards series at the truly great used bookstore in town (okay, so maybe not quite everyone was a hick) was what kept me functioning during high school. They were books! About a girl! Who used words to do magic! And morality was complex and the devil, at times, was sympathetic! And and and also whales OMG!!!
I loved those books so much that at one point I tried to convince my little sister and her best friend that I was actually a wizard myself, and that my copy of the first book was in fact my spellbook, magically disguised so that non-wizards couldn’t see it for what it truly was (this idea was, of course, lifted straight from the books). Ostensibly, I was trying to trick them, but I am pretty sure that, deep down, I was hoping against hope that sometime during that afternoon of talking to trees and scratching weird symbols in the dirt, the trees would start talking back.
This all ended, incidentally, with me being forced to call my sister’s friend’s mother and sobbingly explain that I was not, in fact, a Satanist. Fun times.
