It's been a couple of years since I've done a Geekmas posting, due to
the temporary blog hiatus, but I've received some subtle (and not-so-subtle) suggestions that a little help in the area of holiday seasonal shopping would be in order, now that we're back in production - so here are some hopefully helpful options for Christmas gifts.
Gaming
A Steam™ gift card of whatever denomination seems appropriate would certainly be appreciated - as far as I know, they're now available on those gift card mega-displays that you can find at London Drugs or Best Buy.* It's certainly something I would use, a reluctance to pay full price is the only thing that's kept me from buying Starfield from Bethesda, or Space Marine II, the popular sequel to Relic Entertainment's Warhammer 40K third-person shooter Space Marine from 2011.
Books
Initially, I wasn't sure what to suggest for books, but once I started looking, I was surprised how easily I found six options. Sadly, it's all hardcovers or trade paperbacks, both of which seem a bit spendy, but that's the way the market has gone,
mass market paperbacks are getting harder to find. (At least on the science fiction and fantasy shelves, I can't speak for the mystery or romance marketplaces). That being said, at the moment they're all under $25 on Amazon.ca, which is fairly standard pricing these days.
The first two options are both posthumous offerings from Terry Pratchett: A Stroke of the Pen is a collection of short fiction by Pratchett written for newspapers in the 1970s and 80s, and A Slip of the Keyboard is a collection of his non-fiction. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to read some more of Pratchetts's writing, but it does feel a bit like a record label releasing long-buried demo tapes, it's never too late to make a buck off an artist.**
Sharps and the first volume of The Two of Swords come to us from the prolific pen of K. J. Parker, aka Tom Holt. Parker's fantasy never fails to entertain, and either of these two books would be a welcome addition to my little library. (Although, if I receive the first volume of The Two of Swords and it's enjoyable, that does open the door for two easy additions to next year's list...)
Finally, Arkady Martine's epic Teixcalaan space opera series: A Memory Called Empire, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2020, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace,which took the Best Novel Hugo in 2022. Oddly enough, in a genre overwhelmed by trilogies, Martine explicitly stated in a 2021 Reddit AMA that there will not be a third book in the series, the two books stand alone as a duology. (Although she also suggested that she has plans for more books set in the Teixcalaan universe, which may well feature some of the same characters, she is adamant that the story told in the two books ends there.)
I have to confess that I've already read both of these books as bootleg digital downloads, and they're brilliant: creative, astonishingly original and beautifully well-written. As such, I feel that Martine deserves the support of actually buying the paper editions of the texts - I feel that anyone who exhibits so much originality in a sometimes repetitive genre should get paid for it.
Although I've linked these books to Amazon Canada™, they may very well be available at your local bookstore should you prefer to do a little browsing, something which I can never manage comfortably on the Amazon web site.
T-shirts
And to wrap things up, two t-shirts options: one for Star Wars, one for Star Trek.
I've mentioned the Millennium Falcon t-shirt in a previous Geekmas posting, but it's still in play: conveniently available on Amazon, dark grey and XL, please.
The options for licensed Star Trek merchandise is a little bit less to my taste, they have a tendency to make jokes rather than just represent. Nonetheless, I was able to find a simple t-shirt for First Contact on Startrekshop.ca - shame that they don't have something similar for Generations. Again, XL for sizing, for anyone who skipped over the previous suggestion.
If anyone decides to go rogue on the t-shirt front, please PLEASE use the above as guidelines for style. There are a million science fiction and fantasy t-shirts for sale on the internet - I've got a pretty good collection, but they're all distinguished by being licensed products. I don't want to appear ungrateful, but if you buy me a t-shirt featuring, say, a kawaii interpretation of the crew of Serenity***, I will certainly thank you for your generosity, but sadly, I will be unlikely to wear it unless I'm painting the living room.
And, if this all seems just like too much work, plain old Amazon™ gift cards are the gift that keeps on giving.
- Sid
Update
We happened to be in the local Indigo on Friday, and I took a quick look in the SF-Fantasy section to see if any of my book suggestions were in fact available. The bad news is that only two of the books were on the shelves: A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace, although it's possible that the Pratchett books could have been elsewhere.
The good news is that I added a couple of things to my shopping list. Anything from Hugh Howey's Silo series would be a good option - I don't have any of them in my collection, so let's start with Wool (I assume that anyone who is actually buying me a Christmas gift can coordinate with the rest of the group to avoid duplication.) I'm also long overdue to read Tamysn Muir's critically acclaimed Gideon the Ninth, which, coincidentally, lost out to A Memory Called Empire in the 2020 Hugo Best Novel vote.
- Sid
* Question: does one company handle all the gift card creation and sales, or did someone see a gap in the marketplace and put together a gift card rack that they sold to LD et al?
** It's fortunate that Pratchett's daughter Rhianna is in charge of her father's
intellectual properties, and has no intention of licensing any of his
material to other writers, as with And Another Thing..., Eoin Colfer's
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel, or the endless imitations of Robert E. Howard's Conan.
*** Not a suggestion - or a challenge - but, as per my nephew Chris, you can find anything on the internet, it's like New York only bigger.
