The holiday season is upon us. It’s time for giving and receiving, and what better way to get into the spirit than with gifting some good books. And this year, there’s plenty of selections to choose from for fans of properties like Star Wars, Star Trek, Labyrinth, and the movies of Guillermo del Toro, as well as titles by authors like Stephen King, Anne Rice, J.K. Rowling, Roger Zelazny, and Greg Cox.

Check out here below our Holiday Geek Gift Guide 2016 for Books, eBooks, and Audiobooks for our favorite holiday gift picks for this year for the reader in your life.

Jack of Shadows
Rediscovered Classics Series
Paperback | Kindle
By Roger Zelazny
Foreword by Joe Haldeman
Chicago Review Press
Release date: May 1, 2016

Originally published in 1971, Roger Zelazny‘s long out-of-print sci-fi/fantasy novel Jack of Shadows is a hidden gem amongst the author’s works. Chicago Review Press has exhumed the novel from its publishing grave for its Rediscovered Classics Series, adding to it a Foreword by Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) and a redesigned cover that more accurately depicts the world described within.

Zelazny, who passed away in 1995, is best known for his 10-book The Chronicles of Amber saga, and thanks to the movie Argo, his novel Lord Of Light has gotten more attention in recent years. But Jack of Shadows stands out not only for its intriguing tale, but for the fact that the author wrote the story in only one draft, and it’s a good one.

Walking Dead comic book creator Robert Kirkman will be developing Roger Zelazny‘s epic scifi-fantasy saga Chronicles Of Amber for television.

Kirkman will be adapting Zelazny’s 10-book series with his Skybound Entertainment banner partner Dave Alpert, as well as Vincent Newman Entertainment (We’re the Millers), in what THR reports could be TV’s next Game of Thrones. GoT author George R.R. Martin has often credited Zelazny as one of his biggest inspirations.

Ben Affleck‘s dramatic thriller Argo, based on true events, is up for seven major Academy Awards tonight. (If you haven’t seen the film, there’s still time to watch it online through Instant Video before tonight’s broadcast.) Affleck directed the film (no Best Director nod for this unbelievably), in which he also stars as Tony Mendez, a CIA operative tasked with rescuing six Americans who worked at the U.S. Embassy in Iran who went into hiding at the home of the Canadian Ambassador during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis. Mendez came up with a cover story for getting into Iran: He posed as a Canadian filmmaker scouting for locations in Iran; the six Americans were to act as members of his film crew. But in order to make his cover story believable, he had to act as though the film was really being made and it had to be a project that would warrant needing locales in Iran. As luck would have it, the perfect script was found for the mission: Lord Of Light, based on the science fiction novel of the same name by Roger Zelazny.

Before the Lord Of Light script became the basis for the Argo movie that Mendez would use as his cover, the rights had been optioned by producer Barry Geller, who wanted to turn it into a movie and then use the sets to create a theme park to be called “Science Fiction Land.” Things didn’t work out the way Geller planned, obviously, but when the project was still in the planning stages, Geller had hired famed artist Jack Kirby, who co-created major comic book characters like the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Captain America, and the Hulk, to do concept art. Now, some of that art has made its way online, check some out here below.