Future Treasures – Page 12

Epic Fantasy on a Reliable Schedule: A Chorus of Dragons by Jenn Lyons

Tuesday, June 9, 2020 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Covers by Lars Grant-West

Bestselling fantasy dominates modern bookshelves in a way I could only dream about as a young reader. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle are the two biggest examples in recent memory. Of course, both are also unfinished, and the latest installments are both long overdue. Makes you wonder what they could have accomplished if the publishing magic that fueled them had also included a reliable schedule.

Tor is trying something impressive with their latest big-budget epic fantasy. If things unfold as scheduled, Jenn Lyons’ ambitious 5-volume series A Chorus of Dragons will be released in rapidfire sequence. Here’s what Lyons said on her website last year.

The series is on a nine month release schedule. That means that, should everything go to plan, Tor will be releasing a book in the series every nine months or so. Two this year, one next year, two the year after that (again, if all goes to plan.) Is this stunningly ambitious? Yes. Is this going to kill me? Quite possibly…

So far, Jenn (and Tor) have hit the deadlines. The Ruin of Kings was published in February 2019, The Name of All Things in October, and Book 3, The Memory of Souls, is now scheduled to arrive on August 25, 2020.

The series has been a critical hit as well as a commercial one; the first novel scored a rare publishing quadruple crown, with starred reviews from Library Journal (“Stunning”), Booklist (“Dazzling”), Publishers Weekly (“intricate epic fantasy”) and Kirkus Reviews (“Un-put-down-able”). Tor has been leaking news about the third book since October. I’ll be very curious to see if the buzz built up after the release of the first two volumes continues once the third arrives.

Read the complete first chapter of The Ruin of Kings at Tor.com, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

Future Treasures: The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison

Saturday, June 6, 2020 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

There are pseudonyms, and there are pseudonyms. “Katherine Addison” is one of the latter.

“Addison” is a pen name for Sarah Monette, who’s achieved some notoriety in the field with the Melusine novels and her Kyle Murchison Booth stories, which have appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny, and other fine places. In 2014 she adopted the name Katherine Addison to publish The Goblin Emperor, which became one of the most successful books of the year, nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award, and winning the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Award. It was included in Unbound Worlds‘ list of The 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time.

What do you do when your pseudonym is more famous than you are? Write more books under the pseudonym, of course. And that’s exactly what Monette has done. Her next Addison novel, The Angel of the Crows, arrives from Tor in two weeks, and it looks like a doozy.

It’s a Sherlock Holmes pastishe in which Holmes is an outcast angel called Crow, Watson is suffers from a supernatural injury picked up in the war, and the city of London is crawling with vampires, werewolves and darker things. Kirkus calls it “A Sherlock Holmes–esque novel that truly breaks the mold,” and The Nerd Daily pronounces it “good for Holmes fans of any stripe.”

Addison… makes note of the inspiration she drew from Cumberbatch’s Sherlock in particular, so it’s no surprise that since Sherlock opened with “A Study in Pink,” The Angel of the Crows opens with what we might call a Study in Gold… Yes, this version of Victorian London is densely populated by angels, monsters, creatures, fey, and various and sundry supernatural alongside the usual assortment of villains, murderers, and thieves. But that’s no real impediment to the world’s greatest detective or his newly stalwart companion. Dr. Doyle, who is essentially-but-not-quite Dr. Watson, joins the enigmatic Crow, who is Sherlock but for one distinct difference: Crow is an angel.

The Angel of the Crows takes us through the most famous of Holmes’s cases, including “A Study in Scarlet,” “The Sign of the Four,” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” as well as taking on Jack the Ripper.

The Angel of the Crows will be published by Tor Books on June 23, 2020. It is 448 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. Read the first two chapters here.

See all our coverage of the best upcoming SF and fantasy here.

Future Treasures: The Ghosts of Sherwood and The Heirs of Locksley by Carrie Vaughn

Tuesday, May 26, 2020 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

The Ghosts of Sherwood and back cover, and The Heirs of Locksley. Tor.com, June and August 2020

Carrie Vaughn is the author of the bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series, the superhero saga After the Golden Age, The Bannerless Saga from John Joseph Adams Books, and Martians Abroad. Her latest, The Ghosts of Sherwood, arrives in two weeks and kicks off a new series of adventure novellas from Tor.com. The second installment, The Heirs of Locksley, follows in just two months.

I don’t know about you lot, but I’m always open to a quality retelling/reinterpretation of the Robin Hood myth. Publishers Weekly raved about the first one; always a good sign. Here’s an excerpt.

Vaughn (the Kitty Norville Series) turns her formidable talents to the legend of Robin Hood in this impeccable novella and series launch. When Robin of Loxley learned of the death of heroic King Richard, he reluctantly swore loyalty to Richard’s wicked brother, King John. Though the decision caused tension among Robin’s former merry band, it enabled Robin and his beloved wife, Marian, to settle down and raise their children in peace. But when a band of rogues kidnap the three Locksley children, the aging Robin and Marian brave Sherwood Forest once again, reuniting with old friends as they confront a new threat… Vaughn’s masterful worldbuilding and lovable cast promise more good things to come in future adventures.

Here’s all the deets.

The Ghosts of Sherwood (104 pages, $12.99 trade paperback/$3.99 digital, June 9, 2020)
The Heirs of Locksley (128 pages, $13.99 trade paperback/$3.99 digital, August 4, 2020)

See all our coverage of the best upcoming fantasy books here.

Future Treasures: Fantastic Paintings of Frazetta by J. David Spurlock

Monday, May 18, 2020 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

There’s not many novels in the publishing pipeline this month, to be honest with you. The regular flood of advance proofs and review copies that wash up in the mailroom at Black Gate‘s rooftop headquarters here in Chicago has slowed to a trickle, and the only thing flooding in these days is book cancellations and postponements.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have exciting publishing news for you. Would we ever let you down? (Hint: no.) The upcoming month of June is looking lighter than usual from a publishing perspective, but that just means the books remaining in the schedule will be all the more cherished. And that goes double for J. David Spurlock’s oversized tribute to one of the great fantasy artists of the 20th Century, Fantastic Paintings of Frazetta.

J. David Spurlock is the author of Art of Neal Adams, Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage: Queen of Pulp Pin-Up Art, and Paintings of J Allen St John: Grand Master of Fantasy, all from Vanguard, as well as multiple volumes dedicated to Frank Frazetta, including the Frazetta Sketchbook (two volumes) and The Sensuous Frazetta. His latest is Fantastic Paintings of Frazetta, which repackages and expands the long out-of-print The Fantastic Art of Frank Frazetta from 1977 into a 120-page coffee table book. It arrives in hardcover next month from Vanguard.

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Future Treasures: Ballistic, Book 2 of The Palladium Wars by Marko Kloos

Tuesday, May 12, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Aftershocks and Ballistic, the first books in The Palladium Wars (47North). Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant.

Marko Kloos is the author of six books in the Frontlines military SF series, starting with Terms of Enlistment (2013) and Lines of Departure (2014). His newest series is The Palladium Wars, a space opera trilogy which kicked off with Aftershocks last summer. In a far-ranging interview at The Verge, Kloos laid out the intriguing backdrop.

Aftershocks is set in the aftermath of that massive, system-wide conflict over resources — namely palladium — that saw its instigator, the planet Gretia, endure a major defeat and occupation by its enemies. One of the story’s central characters, Aden Robertson, was on the losing side, and he’s just been released from a POW camp where he’s had to contend with the atrocities that he witnessed during the war. Kloos explains that he wanted to deal with a character who had to come to terms with the collapse of a system he supported for two decades, and “how you find your identity after that.”

Kloos’s own German roots figure into the larger geopolitics of the series. “I totally cribbed from history,” he says. “The aggressors here are basically space Germany. It’s kind of like this cross between the end of World War I and the end of World War II. I kind of mashed it up a bit so that there’s a set of circumstances where it was a war of aggression, and they definitely are the bad guys, but also make the war logically understandable and consistent — a war for resources.”

Booklist called Aftershocks a “fast-moving combination of corporate machinations, police procedural, and interstellar naval combat.” The second volume Ballistic arrives from 47North on May 26, 2020, priced at $24.95 in hardcover, $14.95 in trade paperback, and $4.99 in digital formats. It is 318 pages. The cover was designed by Shasti O’Leary Soudant.

See all our recent Future Treasures here.

Future Treasures: Unreconciled, Book 4 of Donovan by W. Michael Gear

Tuesday, May 5, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

The Donovan series: Outpost, Abandoned, Pariah, and the forthcoming Unreconciled. Covers by Steve Stone.

W. Michael Gear knows his way around a science fiction series. He wrote the Way of Spider trilogy in the late 80s, the Forbidden Borders trilogy in the early 90s, and some, what, 20 novels in the First North Americans series, co-written with his wife Kathleen O’Neal Gear? This is a man who knows how to plot for the long haul.

His latest is the Donovan trilogy, which next week turns into the Donovan quartet with the arrival of the fourth novel, Unreconciled. The Dononvan trilogy (er, quartet) is a favorite here in the Black Gate offices. It opened with Outpost in 2018, which Brandon Crilly raved about right here.

I had a blast reading Outpost, the start of W. Michael Gear’s Donovan trilogy… The setting is very Deadwood meets Avatar, set on a frontier colony that hasn’t been resupplied in almost a decade, on a planet filled with bizarre creatures and plants ready to kill the careless or unfortunate. Add in a bunch of new arrivals when the next resupply ship finally shows up, and what you get is an immediate clash of cultures between the freedom-loving colonists and the representatives of the Corporation, which basically runs Earth back home (maybe there’s some Firefly in here, too). Overall, the running idea with a lot of the main characters is the possibility of either losing yourself or remaking yourself in the frontier, with arcs that are diverse and often surprising…

The world-building is amazing, there are echoes of contemporary political and economic conflicts, and an air of mystery that doesn’t take away from a story that feels complete. I really want to find out what’s going to happen on Donovan in Gear’s next book, which is slated for November 2018.

Mystery! Monsters! Freedom-lovin’ colonists! Killer plants! Evil corporations! An alien frontier! This series checks so many boxes it’s ridiculous. I may have to buy it twice.

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Future Treasures: Lake of Darkness by Scott Kenemore

Wednesday, April 29, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

It’s always nice to read a book set in my hometown. Scott Kenemore’s Lake of Darkness, arriving next week in hardcover, has the added appeal of being set in lawless WWI-era Chicago, an era already rich with racial tension, drama, and larger-than-life characters. Layer in a creepy serial killer and a detective with a fascinating crew of magicians and mystics, and you’ve got all the elements of great tale.

Scott Kenemore’s previous books include the Zombie trilogy (Zombie, Ohio, Zombie, Illinois, and Zombie, Indiana) and The Grand Hotel, but his latest book is getting a lot more attention. Simon Strantzas says Lake of Darkness is a “Chicago tale as strange and bizarre as the twin murders at its heart… an exceptional read,” and Dean Jobb (Empire of Deception) calls it “a fast-paced tale of madness, murder, and a streetwise detective on the trail of a depraved serial killer… a stylish, clever whodunit.”

Publishers Weekly gave the book a starred review, saying:

This superb blend of noir and horror from Kenemore (Zombie, Ohio) centers on the search for a serial killer who targets twins in WWI-era Chicago, starting with two 10-year-old African-Americans, a brother and sister, whose heads are cut off and switched. Other murders follow in which black children’s heads are severed and then attached to their siblings’ torsos. Mayor Big Bill Thompson, who has eyes on the White House, is concerned that the killings could harm Chicago’s reputation and stem the migration of African-Americans from the South. Thompson gives Joe “Flip” Flippity, one of Chicago’s few black cops, carte blanche to solve the case. Flip is aided by such unusual allies as the Amazing Drextel Tark, a magician whose illusions employ his own twin brother, and elderly Ursula Green, who uses a crystal ball animated by a supernatural force “larger and stronger than herself.” Kenemore keeps the tension high throughout…

Lake of Darkness will be published by Talos on May 5, 2020. It is 264 pages, priced at $15.99 in paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. Get more details at the publisher’s website here.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy and horror here.

Future Treasures: Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer

Wednesday, April 22, 2020 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Cover art by Kekai Kotaki

Suzanne Palmer won a Hugo Award for her 2018 Clarkesworld novelette “The Secret Life of Bots,” and her 2019 debut novel Finder was widely praised. Kirkus Reviews called it “A nonstop SF thrill ride until the very last page,” and Maria Haskins at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog sums it up as “a Ridiculously Fun Science Fiction Adventure… a rollicking ride from a hardscrabble space colony at the outer edge of the galaxy to the conflict-ridden settlements of colonized Mars and back again.”

The highly anticipated sequel Driving the Deep arrives in hardcover in two weeks, featuring the return of interstellar repo man and professional finder Fergus Ferguson in what sounds like a standalone adventure. Publishers Weekly seems to like it.

Palmer’s spaceborne repo man Fergus Ferguson returns in this lighthearted star-skipping adventure through a futuristic solar system… Fergus is on Earth for the first time in years when he learns that his friends, a team of engineers who man the shipyard on Pluto, have been kidnapped for their scientific expertise. He tracks them to Enceladus, a watery moon of Saturn, where they are being held hostage. Fergus goes undercover to gather intel, taking a job as the pilot of an underwater vessel and making many allies (and a handful of enemies) along the way…

We discussed Finder here. Driving the Deep will be published by DAW Books on May 5, 2020. It is 426 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Kekai Kotaki. Read an excerpt from Chapter One of Finder at the Penguin Random House website.

See all our coverage of the best in upcoming SF and fantasy books here.

Network Effect is the First Full Novel in the Martha Wells’ Epic Murderbot Saga

Saturday, April 18, 2020 John ONeill Comments 2 comments

Covers by Jaime Jones

Martha Wells exploded into the big time with Murderbot. Black Gate readers, of course, know and love Martha from her Ile-Rien tales “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which originally appeared in the pages of our print magazine (and her Nebula-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer, which we serialized online in its entirely here.) But the world at large didn’t truly know her the way we did until the first Murderbot tale All Systems Red appeared in 2017, sweeping all the awards — including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus — and kicking off one of the most successful SF series of the 21st Century. Sequel Artificial Condition (2018) won the Hugo and Locus, and she declined the nominations that came her way for the third and fourth installments (there’s a tradition of Black Gate writers declining Hugo Awards, beginning with Matthew David Surridge, but that’s another story.)

Network Effect, the first full-length Murderbot novel, is one of the most anticipated books of 2020, and it arrives in less than three weeks. I’ve heard plenty of glowing reports from folks who received advance copies, but my favorite came from Martha’s fellow BG writer C.S.E. Cooney, who wrote:

Finished reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot 5 Network Effect aloud to Carlos and Sita.

From time to time, I’d come across a sentence that would make me — and then Carlos too, and then my mama, in solidarity — just yell out: “MAARRTHHAA!!!”

Anyway. That was my second read, and it just keeps getting better.

Network Effect will be published by Tor.com on May 5, 2020. It is 352 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Jaime Jones. Read Chapter One of All Systems Red at Tor.com.

Future Treasures: Shorefall, Book 2 of The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

Friday, April 17, 2020 John ONeill Comments 0 Comment

Cover design by Will Staehle

It’s a damn tough time to be publishing new books, with virtually every bookstore in the country closed and Amazon drastically increasing shipping times for books and other non-essential items. So I very much appreciate those authors and publishers who continue to do it. Lord knows I need good books more than ever these days.

Shorefall, the second volume in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, arrives next week from stalwart fantasy publishers Del Rey, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar called first volume Foundryside “Absolutely riveting… A magnificent, mind-blowing start to a series.” It was selected as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 by The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog; here’s what they said:

The author of the Divine Cities trilogy (a nominee for Best Series at the 2018 Hugo Awards) begins a new trilogy that’s as fun to read as its world is well-imagined. The city state of Tevanne runs on magic and pillage, as the four dominant merchant houses exploit the lands around them (not to mention the poor denizens who crouch outside their walls in a precarious shantytown known as Foundryside), as their scrivers create incredible machines and accomplish feats that look a lot like magic by way of intricate sigils that bend and break the laws of reality. Sancia Grado is a Foundryside thief who comes into possession of Clef, a sentient golden key — and is pursued by police captain Gregor Dandolo, reluctant scion of one of the richest houses. The unwitting Sancia falls into a scheme to destroy the power of the scrivers; putting a stop to it will bring her and Dandolo together as unlikely allies in the greatest theft theft in history, with the lives of everyone in Tevanne on the line. Read our review.

Robert Jackson Bennett is also the author of the BFA and Shirley Jackson Award winner Mr. Shivers, The Troupe, American Elsewhere, and Vigilance (as well as possibly being Chris Pratt in disguise). Here’s the publisher’s description for Shorefall.

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