To celebrate the ebook publication of BookViewCafe member Vonda N. McIntyre‘s The Moon and the Sun, BVC is running a “Beaded Sea Creature caption contest.”
When she’s not writing, one of McIntyre’s hobbies is “creating beaded sea creatures. The designs are based on hyperbolic and fractal surfaces, and have been exhibited in conjunction with The Institute for Figuring‘s Hyperbolic Coral Reef,” at installations across the country and around the world. “The next installation will be at the Smithsonian, in Washington, DC, this autumn.”
The photos of three beaded sea creatures are on this page (one of the three is reproduced at right, but this smaller version of the photo doesn’t really do it justice). To enter the contest, choose one of the pictures, offer a caption for it on one the blog pages set up for the contest (links from that page linked earlier in this paragraph). The contest closes 19 June 2010 at 1AM CDT, and will be judged by McIntyre and Deborah J. Ross.
The winner will receive an autographed copy of The Moon and the Sun and a McIntyre Beaded Sea Creature. The second place finisher will receive an autographed copy of the book (but no sea creature). The third prize winner will receive a copy of the ebook version of The Moon and the Sun.
And why a beaded sea creature caption contest, you may ask? Because “Sherzad, the sea monster, one of the main characters in The Moon and the Sun, would be familiar with creatures very like these: Coral reefs, sea anemones, nudibranchs, marine flatworms,” according to McIntyre. First published by Pocket in 1997, The Moon and the Sun won the Nebula Award in 1998 (it was the author’s second, after Dreamsnake‘s win in 1979).