Browsed by
Month: March 2020

Future Treasures: Eden by Tim Lebbon

Future Treasures: Eden by Tim Lebbon

Comments 1 comment

Tim Lebbon Eden-small

The ivy-cover copy of Tim Lebbon’s Eden,
mailed to me by a creative publicist at Titan Books

Getting review copies never gets old. I get far too many to write about these days, and they pile up on my library floor. When it comes time to crank out a Future Treasures post about an upcoming title, I take the time to select what looks most interesting, or the one I think you lot would most like to hear about.

Unless I’m in a hurry, in which case I grab whatever catches my eye. Then you’re at the mercy of whatever publicist or cover designer is most clever this week, and able to cut through all the clutter and grab my attention.

Today there are more than three dozen review copies and advance proofs piled up in front of my big green chair, but I’m not writing about any of them. Today you’re hearing about Tim Lebbon’s new eco-thriller Eden. Not because Kirkus Reviews calls it “Jurassic Park meets catastrophic climate change in this creepy, cinema-ready story,” or because Publishers Weekly says it’s “wondrous and deeply unsettling.” No, I’m telling you about Eden because a very clever publicist took the time to wrap a copy in plastic ivy before mailing it to me, and it’s that little bit of extra effort that gets attention. (Plus, what the hell are you going to do with an ivy-wrapped book? You can’t just stick it in the pile; the ivy will get crushed.)

It reminds me of the time the Tor publicity team sent me K Arsenault Rivera’s The Tiger’s Daughter with a seed packet that doubled as a bookmark (complete with planting instructions). You better believe I wrote about that one.

…

Read More Read More

Rogue Blades author: Robert E. Howard, Conan and Me

Rogue Blades author: Robert E. Howard, Conan and Me

Comments 1 comment

Howard changed my lifeBelow is an excerpt from author John C. Hocking’s essay for the upcoming book, Robert E. Howard Changed My Life, from publisher Rogue Blades Foundation.

I was a precocious reader.  By the time I was seven years old, guided by the taste of my father, I was reading Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, E.R. Burroughs, E.E. Smith, and Lester Dent’s Doc Savage stories.  Around this time my father, an art and history teacher, a martial artist and collector of swords, became a little frustrated that my mother was less than keen to accompany him to see a new, supposedly pretty hardboiled, Western movie called A Fistful of Dollars, so he took me.

In addition to thrusting upon my youthful eyes an unimagined example of cinematic style, the film presented a powerful vision of a highly qualified good and a frighteningly believable evil in stark conflict beyond anything I’d encountered before.  Every aspect of the movie resonated with me, but the depiction of fearsome, believably dangerous villains being faced down by a hero who was actually dangerous enough to confront and destroy them instantly made most of the reading, TV and movies I’d known seem somehow inadequate, even false.

Then, in the summer of 1967, my Dad brought me a copy of Lancer’s Conan the Adventurer.  The Frazetta cover promised much, but I read the first story in that collection, Robert E. Howard’s “The People of the Black Circle,” on a quiet sunny morning and it blew my little mind.

…

Read More Read More

A Masterclass in Dystopian Science Fiction: The Worlds Trilogy by Joe Haldeman

A Masterclass in Dystopian Science Fiction: The Worlds Trilogy by Joe Haldeman

Comments 3 comments
Worlds Joe Haldeman-small Worlds Apart Joe Haldeman-small Worlds Enough and Time-small

Joe Haldeman’s Worlds trilogy, paperback editions from Avon/ AvoNova. Covers by Vincent Di Fate

Are you working from home? Quarantined? Hanging out with a doomsday cult and wondering if the end times have actually arrived? You’re not alone. (Especially if you’re in a doomsday cult — those guys are surprisingly chummy.) But here at Black Gate, our work continues. Classic SF and fantasy isn’t going to promote itself to an increasingly chaotic world. That’s our job.

Today I’m looking at a forgotten trilogy from an author who is very definitely not forgotten. Joe Haldeman became an SFWA Grand Master in 2010, the highest honor one can attain in our field. In 2012 he was inducted as a member of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and he’s won virtually every major science fiction award. His most famous novels include The Forever War (1974), The Hemingway Hoax (1991) and Forever Peace (1997).

In 1981 he wrote the opening novel in a trilogy about life in an orbital habitat, Worlds. It was followed by Worlds Apart (1983) and Worlds Enough and Time nearly a decade later (1992). All three were shortlisted for the Locus Award. The Portalist calls the trilogy “an epic sci-fi saga… a masterclass in dystopian science fiction,” and last July they published an excerpt from the first novel to help promote the release of digital versions of all three books from Open Road Media. Here’s an excerpt from Xavier Piedra’s helpful recap of the whole series.

…

Read More Read More

Goth Chick News: Universal Takes Up Its Dark Universe Again (insert facepalm here)

Goth Chick News: Universal Takes Up Its Dark Universe Again (insert facepalm here)

Comments 0 Comment

Dracua Tom Cruise Goth Chick-small

A few weeks ago I shared the news that Universal Studios was adding to its theme park property with a new attraction called Epic Universe. That park would be made up of four ‘lands’, one of which will be dedicated to Universal’s classic monster characters. In my euphoria, I completely overlooked the inevitable truth that there was no way Universal was going hope the classic monster fans would make this new investment successful. No, they would have to try to attract a new generation of monster movie fans. They would have to modernize. Forget they blew it a couple of times already. The time is now to breathe life back into…

The Dark Universe.

Crud.

If you haven’t been keeping score, this marketing idea was pretty much left for dead after the real-life horror that was the 2017 ‘modernization’ of The Mummy, starring (and I use that word in the absolute broadest sense) Tom Cruise.

This, of course, was the second death of Dark Universe, which quietly imploded the first time with the 2014 retelling of Dracula in Dracula Untold. Never heard of it? Of course not. But as Douglas Adams famously reminded us, it will be the marketing people who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. Until then, they’re just banging away.

…

Read More Read More

Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

Stories the Dogs Tell: Clifford D. Simak’s City

Comments 0 Comment

SimakCityGnome

City by Clifford D. Simak. First Edition: Gnome Books, 1952.
Cover by Frank Kelly Freas (click to enlarge)

City
by Clifford D. Simak
Gnome Press (224 pages, $2.75 in hardcover, May 1952)

Clifford D. Simak was a Midwestern US newspaperman who wrote science fiction on the side, and published stories beginning in the 1930s in magazines like Wonder Stories until finding a home in John W. Campbell’s Astounding in the 1940s (and later Galaxy in the 1950s). City was his earliest significant work, published in 1952 but composed of stories published mostly in Astounding from 1944 onward. An enduring work, it won one of the very earliest awards for SF or fantasy, the International Fantasy Award, in 1953 (two years after Stewart’s Earth Abides, which I reviewed here in January, won the same award). It’s Simak’s most popular book along with his Way Station, published a decade later.

Gist

The book tells the future of humanity as it abandons cities for country estates and then moves off Earth to settle other planets, and in parallel the rise of an artificially created Dog civilization. By the end, humans have largely propagated outward to other planets, and Earth is left to the intelligent dog civilization, to whom these stories are myths.

…

Read More Read More

Sad and Weird and Funny: HBO’s The Plot Against America

Sad and Weird and Funny: HBO’s The Plot Against America

Comments 1 comment

The Plot Against America HBO-small

I watched the first episode of this show on the day that my Republican governor suppressed a free election, which I’m sure is one of those funny coincidences that we’ll laugh about when we’re trying to explain to the rising generation what an election was.

My feelings about the show are mixed so far. The novel is brilliant, if problematic. People who read a lot of sf/f mocked Roth for claiming to invent a new genre in this book, as if Murray Leinster and Philip K. Dick had never walked the Earth. But Roth’s novel is really different from any other alternate history that I’ve read. It’s a personal memoir of a time which did not exist, yet somehow did. It’s all very particular, filtered through the eyes and ears of a pre-teen boy — the things he hears his father shout at the radio, the appalling particularities of having to share a bedroom with his cousin who lost a leg in the war, trying to run away from home under a goyische surname so that he won’t be deported to Kentucky, etc. It’s sad and weird and funny as the narrative persona reflects on and reacts to the things he “remembers” as a child, some of which the author may actually remember from his actual childhood. This is categorically different from Professor Minott riding off to find death or glory on the shifting sands of parallel histories.

This great virtue of the book doesn’t really transfer to the screen. They have a capable young actor playing young Philip, but it’s much more difficult for movies and TV to pull off that restricted 3rd-person POV that Roth creates so skillfully in prose. The story is bigger on screen, with more voices, but also shallower.

…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: Made To Order: Robots and Revolution edited by Jonathan Strahan

New Treasures: Made To Order: Robots and Revolution edited by Jonathan Strahan

Comments 2 comments
Made To Order Robots and Revolution-small Made To Order Robots and Revolution-back-small

Cover by Blacksheep UK

A new anthology by Jonathan Strahan is always an event. He’s been editing Year’s Best volumes since 2003, for ibooks, the Science Fiction Book Club, Night Shade, and Solaris, and just announced the contents of the first volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction from Saga Press (if that Facebook link doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it; I’ll cover it in an upcoming Future Treasures post). He also edited the groundbreaking Infinity series for Solaris, seven volumes starting with Engineering Infinity (2010) and ending with Infinity’s End (2018), perhaps the most acclaimed original anthology series of the last decade.

His latest is Made To Order: Robots and Revolution, released yesterday by Solaris. Published on the 100th anniversary of the word “Robot” entering our modern lexicon, Made To Order contains brand new stories by Sofia Samatar, Peter Watts, Ken Liu, Sarah Pinsker, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Annalee Newitz, Suzanne Palmer, Ian R. MacLeod, Rich Larson, and others. (To get a sense of the spirit of this anthology, read the first story “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, complete and completely free, at Tor.com. It’s a hilarious tale of two robot pals who couldn’t be more different, and it’s well worth your time.)

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Tabletop Looting in Riot Quest

Tabletop Looting in Riot Quest

Comments 0 Comment

RiotQuestBox-1

The current storyline in Privateer Press’ Iron Kingdoms setting is leading toward the apocalypse, as otherworldly Infernals swarm across the nations of Immoren. Characters familiar from the Warmachine/Hordes game setting will (and already have) died, but others may escape Immoren to become the progenitors of the upcoming Warcaster science fantasy wargame (with 3 days left on its Kickstarter).

But what of those who survive, left behind on the Immoren after the Infernals have harvested souls, and broken the nations that make up the Iron Kingdoms? When the swan of Cygnar has fallen, and even the undead cannot remain safe within the land of Cryx? Well, at that point … might as well start some looting.

That is the theme of Riot Quest, released at GenCon 2019. It is a miniature arena game, where players field teams of models to go up against each other to collect treasure and cool equipment. As your team appears on the field, randomly located near one of 6 spawn gates, players try to make it to treasure chests located at randomly-determined treasure points. Once a treasure is obtained, another treasure spawns, and the race is on again. As you gain treasure, and defeat opponents, you gain loot tokens that can be used to buy special Riot Gear cards to boost your characters’ abilities.

…

Read More Read More

John DeNardo on the 7 Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of March

John DeNardo on the 7 Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Books of March

Comments 1 comment
A Pale Light in the Black-small The House in the Cerulean Sea-small The Gobblin’ Society by James P. Blaylock-small

Covers by Vadim Sadovski, Chris Sickels/Red Nose Studio, and Jon Foster

Good friends recommend good books. And that makes John DeNardo just about the best friend we have in this business. I’ve come to rely on his regular columns for Kirkus Reviews to point me towards the best new releases each month, in articles like “Sex Robots, the Future of Racism, and Cthulhu Vacations” [Jan 21] and “The Definitive List of the Top Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2019” [Dec 2019].

He also does regular monthly round-ups of the best novels — while not neglecting short fiction, which is one of the things I like about him. For March he looks at new novels by Katie M. Flynn, K. B. Wagers, Myke Cole (Sixteenth Watch), TJ Klune, N. K. Jemisin (The City We Became), Zack Jordan, and Menna van Praag, and new short fiction and collections from Tor (including Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights, and Hearts of Oak by Eddie Robson), Titan Books (including Cursed edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane), Undertow Publications, the British Library, and Black Library, not to mention James P. Blaylock, Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and many others.

As always, there’s plenty of great stuff on John’s list. Here’s a few of the highlights.

…

Read More Read More

Future Treasures: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Future Treasures: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

Comments 0 Comment

The City We Became-small

Cover design by Lauren Panepinto

There is no hotter writer in the field right now than N.K. Jemisin. She’s the first writer in history to win back-to-back-to-back Hugo awards, with all three novels in her Broken Earth trilogy (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky). Last year she started working for DC Comics, producing the science fiction comic Far Sector with Jamal Campbell.

She has a new book coming out next week, and it looks like a winner. It’s an expanded version of her short story “The City Born Great,” originally published at Tor.com (and which you can read online right here). Set in an eldritch New York City, the story followed a supernatural talented graffiti artist, NYC’s self-dubbed “midwife,” as he tried to paint the city’s song. What’s the novel about, then? Best to let N.K. explain it. Here’s what she told EW in a recent interview.

This story is my chance to have a little monstrous fun after the weight of the Broken Earth saga, so I’m hoping readers will enjoy it, too… The city of New York comes to life — literally, as in, the city has developed sentience and an ability to act on its own. And because there’s a dangerous otherworldly tourist lurking about, trying to supernaturally gentrify the city to death, New York chooses five human champions to fight for it. Problem: they don’t know they’ve been recruited for a magical, interdimensional battle, although they figure it out pretty quickly when possessed toilet stalls attack, backyard pools turn into portals to monsterville, and traffic on the FDR becomes a literal, tentacled, killer.

Yeah, that sounds adequately funky and pretty darn great. The City We Became will be published by Orbit on March 24, 2020. It is 448 pages, priced at $28 in hardcover and $14.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Lauren Panepinto. It is the first novel in The Great Cities Trilogy. See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.