Beginning today, December 1st, Tor.com will be hosting a giveaway every day until this year’s winter solstice!
For 2010 in the northern hemisphere, the winter solstice takes place on December 21st and marks the longest night of the year. (Here’s the quick science behind that.) There are scores of traditional celebrations involving the winter solstice, but what resonated the most with us was the spirit behind those celebrations; an overarching theme of revelry amidst shortening days and a railing against the loss of light and warmth.
The solstice also represents a rare peaceful synthesis between hard science and spiritual health in being a measurable astronomical phenomenon that affects us all on an emotional level. Being a site that mostly features content on how science fiction, fantasy, and other genre media make us feel, that appealed to us.
(The Too Lofty; Didn’t Read version: We just like it.)
These are a little different than our usual giveaways, in that we’ll be posting the giveaway at a random time each day and you’ll only have a limited time (specified in the giveaway post itself) to comment within them before the giveaway has expired. So you’ll have to be watchful.
There are some handy tools you can use to be notified when a giveaway is posted:
- Follow Tor.com on Twitter. A notification will be tweeted at the same time a giveaway post goes up, so that’s a good realtime way to keep tabs.
- Follow Tor.com on Facebook. Same as on Twitter, the giveaway posts will be simultaneously fed to our Facebook page.
- Subscribe to the Tor.com RSS feed. We fixed up our RSS feed lately if you prefer to aggregate our content into one RSS reader. The giveaway posts should appear in the feed a few minutes after going live on the site. We recommend the “front page partial” view for the sake of update speed.
Winners will be chosen randomly and notified shortly afterwards. As usual with our giveaways, we ask that winners please respond within 24 hours of being contacted or a new winner will be chosen.
We’ve got lots of fun prizes in the queue. Some that are a little bit of light fun and some so awesome we can barely stand to give them away. Keep your eyes peeled later today for the very first giveaway!
Photo of phoenix at Burning the Clocks solstice festival © John Varah
Totally looking forward to the first giveaway!
Unfortunately, with the great deal of lag that tends to make my posts take a good five minutes to get through, I missed the first giveaway by about 45 seconds.
You seemed to have left out a most rare event that graces the Winter Soltice sky this year.
A Total Lunar Eclipse occurs early in the am of December 21st and can be seen across the entire continental US.
Be sure to Howl at the Blood Red Moon!
@3. So on the longest night of the year, the moon is going to blink out?
*sigh* I hate these giveaways, they usually seem to work out only for those on US time that can check their feeds every few minutes
Would it really be so hard to allow people to enter these through their preferred method? Limiting some to facebook, twitter, or website only seems stupid and arbitrary to me.
Atrus,
No fear. Because these are the first giveaways we are running with less than 24hrs windows, we have made specific plans to have them spread out through the day and night.
MrBurack, just spreading the love….we wanted to hop around a bit, make it fast and fun. With 21 prizes there will be plenty of opportunities for people to play in their favorite arena.
My family (my 4 children and a few of my sibs) seems to have spontaneously decided to celebrate Solstice in late December rather than the christian feast, as none of us are christians.
It’s now officially a movement, thanks!
Chris
Wooohooo blood red moon can I hoot instead of howl?
yeaa i want to read these and think about thought
I’d like that please :)
Love to win
that be very cool :)
Would love to get those book, thanks
Jim
That would be nice to have
good for christmas reading.
Would fit in with my other books of fantastic art—–yes I would love to give it a home!
Nice collection. It’s dark up here in norway and I could use some of these good books to keep my mind working.
Gotta do it! Are we supposed to choose here?
If so, I choose: Pohl and North. If not, I’ll do more research and choose later. Just pick me!
Thanks Tor!
Bout Time! After waiting a year for WOT13 with another
year until final payoff I need some filler!!!!
I choose Col Buchanan and David Gaiter. Merry Xmas!
salutations to GW, a relentlessly good guy, brilliantly tampering with the very fabric of words–TZ
Gene Wolfe was the writer who done it for me. His book of the new sun changed my life. Utter Genius.
Tell me again. Why do these other people think they have a claim on my winning entry? Thanks again to the you, the Rulers of the Science Fiction World at TOR, for choosing my entry. I wonder if I should wait until the selection is made….Naah, that would be so normal.
All covers are really great
Knife of Dreams
Hey folks, entrants should comment in the specific posts for that giveaway, not the general Solstice Countdown announcement.
fires of heaven please
KNIFE OF DREAMS!!!!
or the Great Hunt…
or ANY OF THEM!
Tri-S Swords,sorcery,& solstice. Shazaaaam. Hard to pick one cover they are all excellent.
please please please pick me, i love to read and this is one of my favorite authors. I am out of work and don’t purchase many books right now. this would be great