“The level of idiocy of some people in this world surpasses imagination.” *** Okuda is a long time temp worker at a computer software company in 2008, and after suddenly realizing that he was never going to get a long term, stable position, he eventually got fired for being “fucking useless,” or bringing up the ... Read more
By: Edi,
on 3/9/2013
What better day for book trailers than a Saturday?
Prophecy by Ellen Oh was released in January, 2013.
Kira’s the only female in the king’s army, and the prince’s bodyguard. She’s a demon slayer and an outcast, hated by nearly everyone in her home city of Hansong. And, she’s their only hope…
Murdered kings and discovered traitors point to a demon invasion, sending Kira on the run with the young prince. He may be the savior predicted in the Dragon King Prophecy, but the missing treasure of myth may be the true key. With only the guidance of the cryptic prophecy, Kira must battle demon soldiers, evil shaman, and the Demon Lord himself to find what was once lost and raise a prince into a king.
Intrigue and mystery, ancient lore and action-packed fantasy come together in this heart-stopping first book in a trilogy.
Prophecy – Book 1 of the Prophecy Series
Warrior – Book 2 arrives 2014
King – Book 3 arrives 2015
By: Alice,
on 3/15/2012
“Beware the Ides of March,” warns the soothsayer in Act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and by the end of the play, the Roman dictator, having ignored the soothsayer’s prophecy, is dead at the hands of a conspiracy of foes. The 15th of March was made famous by this single historical event, described in Plutarch’s history of Caesar’s life and made part of our contemporary Western vocabulary by Shakespeare’s tragedy and, more recently, by last summer’s political drama starring Ryan Gosling and George Clooney.
The messages seem clear. No matter how powerful you are, destiny will have her due, and you ignore the soothsayer at your peril. But our contemporary era is remarkably bereft of reliable soothsayers. A true gift of prophecy would be a wonderful gift indeed. Equivalent to the superhero powers of invisibility and flight. A modern day seer could pick winning stocks and lottery numbers, anticipate successful and unsuccessful romantic pairings, and dress appropriately for the weather every single day.
There is no shortage of people vying for the job of prophet. American preacher and radio personality Harold Camping gained wide publicity last year by predicting the arrival of judgment day on May 21, 2011. When this appointment did not pan out Camping came up with a revised end of the world date of October 21, 2011. I was invited to a “Rapture party” in honor of the event, and, thanks in part to Camping’s second miscalculation of 2011 (he also predicted the end of the world in 1988 and 1994), I managed to get home safely. This year, we will endure the 2012 Mayan calendar apocalyptic legend, which has been aggressively promoted by movie and television producers hoping to cash in on a manufactured hysteria that will only intensify as the the latest dooms day date of December 21, 2012 approaches.
The motivation for our interest in predicting the future — particularly with respect to dire events — is quite clear. Many of life’s most important episodes — the moment and manner of our death, for example — are utterly unpredictable. Even when we cannot do anything about these calamitous happenings, we would often like to know if and when they will occur. Laboratory rats will learn to press a lever to be warned about when an electric shock is coming, even when the shock cannot be avoided.
If, on the other hand, armed with a glimpse of the future, we were in a position to avoid the disasters that have been assigned to us, the gift of prophetic knowledge would be invaluable. We would have the power to change our destinies and make life immeasurably happier than it was originally designed to be.
Unfortunately, the future hides its secrets jealously. Some years ago, Alan M. Tuerkheimer and I conducted a study of predictions made by psychics and by experts in various fields. We found that neither experts nor psychics were very good at predicting the future and that psychics were significantly worse at their chosen profession than the experts.
Not only should despotic dictators beware, but ordinary consumers of the services of self-proclaimed soothsayers — be they psychics, financial analysts, or political prognosticators — should also take heed. The future’s not ours to see. 0 Comments on The Ides of March and the enduring romance of prophecy as of 1/1/1900
By: Rebecca Ryals Russell,
on 8/7/2011
I don't have anything big to write about this week. I've been super busy designing and making my Steampunk costumes for Dragoncon. It's coming up over Labor Day weekend so I have to hurry. Plus I've been writing, of course, and marketing my new book, Zarena, my old book (lol) Odessa and thinking about my September release of Prophecy. I've also been thinking a lot about the book Majikals, the next big Seraphym Wars book I'll be writing. I couldn't believe a recent email I received stating that the cover art for Odessa won first place for the June/July contest at Books in Sync. Then again, why wouldn't it? It's a magnificent cover and Delilah did an awesome job. Continue reading
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By: Rebecca Ryals Russell,
on 7/31/2011
Yay! It's finally out! The first book of the MG series Stardust Warriors has been released as an eBook available in many places for $3.50. You can download it to any eReader in seconds and be off on an adventure with Zarena as she learns about her fate as leader of the Vigorios in the war between the Seraphym and demons of Dracwald. In other news, Odessa is now available in PRINT as well as eBook. My latest cover, for Prophecy of the Seraphym Wars YA series is finished. It's as awesome as Odessa! Check it out! The book comes out in September. Continue reading
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By: Rebecca Ryals Russell,
on 7/10/2011
Now, onto another topic. Time to reveal the winners of last week’s Freedom Blog Hop Giveaway. For the Signed Print Edition of Odessa, illustrated calendar, keychain and bookmark, the WINNER is: (drumroll, please) Laura Dunks of England! Congratulations Laura. As soon as I receive the boxes of Odessa in print, I will send your signed copy straight away. For the eBook edition of Odessa, personally-designed graphic totebag, sticky note pad, pen, signed coverart postcard and bookmark, the WINNER is: Amanda Romano Congratulations Amanda. I hope you enjoy the story and find the bag useful. Continue reading
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By: Rebecca,
on 9/15/2009
Mark Philip Bradley is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. His most recent book, Vietnam at War, looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced the conflicts,
showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain to this day. In the excerpt below, from the introduction, Bradley begins to paint the Vietnamese perspective of the conflict.
In the early 1990 a short story by a young author, Tran Huy Quang, entitled ‘The Prophecy’ (’Ling Nghiem’), appeared to great interest in Hanoi. It told the tale of a young man named Hinh, the son of a mandarin, who longed to acquire the magical powers that would one day enable him to lead his countrymen to their destiny. The destiny itself does not particularly concern Hinh, but he is intent upon leading the Vietnamese people to it. In a dream one evening, Hinh meets a messenger from the gods, who tells him to seek out a small flower garden. Once he reaches the garden, Hinh is told, he should walk slowly with his eyes fastened on the ground to ‘look for this’. It will only take a moment, the messenger tells Hinh, and as a result he will ‘possess the world’.
When he awakens, Hinh finds the flower garden and begins to pace, looking downward. Slowly a crowd gathers, first children, then the disadvantaged of Vietnamese society: unemployed workers, farmers who had left their poor rural villages to find work in the city, cyclo drivers, prostitutes, beggars, and orphans. Watching Hinh, they ask in turn, ‘What are you looking for?’ He replies, ‘I am looking for this.’ Hopeful of turning up a bit of good luck, they join him, and soon multitudes of people are crawling around in the garden. Hinh looks around at the crowd searching with him and believes the prophecy has been fulfilled: he possesses the world. With that realization Hinh goes home.
To Vietnamese readers the story was immediately recognized as a parable, with Hinh representing Ho Chi Minh, the pre-eminent leader of the twentieth-century Vietnam. The prophecy was seen as coming from a secular god, Karl Marx. ‘This’ was the promise of a socialist future, which the author of ‘The Prophecy’ and many of his readers in Hanoi increasingly believed to be a hollow one. For them, socialist ideals did enable Vietnamese revolutionaries to develop a mass following and establish an independent state, throwing off a century of French colonial rule. But in the aftermath of some thirty years of war against the French and the Americans, their hopes for a more egalitarian and just society appeared to remain unfulfilled.
…In truth, there were many Vietnam wars, among them an anti-colonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and among southern Vietnamese, and a revolutionary war of ideas over the vision that should guide Vietnamese society into the post-colonial future. The contest of ideas began long before 1945 and persists to the present day in yet another war, this one of memory over the legacies of the Vietnam wars and the stakes of remembering and forgetting them.
For most Vietnamese, the coming of French colonialism in the late nineteenth century raised profound questions about their very survival as a people and pointed to the need to rethink fundamentally the neo-Confucian political and social order upon which Vietnamese society has rested. As one young Vietnamese asked in a 1907 poem:
Why is the roof over the Western universe the broad land and skies;
While we cower and confine ourselves to a cranny in our house?
Why can they run straight, leap far,
While we shrink back and cling to each other?
Why do they rule the world,
While we bow our heads as slaves?
Throughout the twentieth century, in both war and at peace, and into the twenty-first century, the Vietnamese have searched for answers to the predicaments posed by colonialism and the struggle for independence. As they have done so, a variety of Vietnamese actors have appropriate and transformed a fluid repertoire of new modes of thinking about the future - social Darwinism, Marxist-Leninism, social progressivism, Buddhist modernism, constitutional monarchy, democratic republics, illiberal democracies, and market capitalism to name just a few - to articulate and enact visions for the post-colonial transformation of urban and rural Vietnamese society. But the end of the Vietnam wars did not bring a final resolution to these competing visions. When North Vietnamese tanks entered Saigon on 30 April 1975 to take the surrender of the American-backed South Vietnamese government, Vietnam was reunified as a socialist state. The long war for independence was over. Yet even today, as the searchers in ‘The Prophecy’ suggest, the meanings according to ‘running straight and leaping far’ remain deeply contested. In one of many present-day paradoxes, the Vietnamese state seeks to develop a market economy as it maintains its commitment to socialism, while an increasingly heterodox Vietnamese civil society simultaneously embraces the global economy, years for the unfulfilled promises of socialist egalitarianism, and reinvents many of the spiritual and familial practices the socialist state spent the war years trying to stamp out. Indeed, a walk today through a typical city block at the centre of Hanoi or Saigon, a block in which a refurbished Buddhist temple might be flanked by a Seven-Eleven store on one side and the local community party headquarters on the other, quickly reveals these everyday contradictions and tensions…
