Black Gate

Kameron Hurley’s debut novel God’s War, which eventually became part of her Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy, was nominated for a Nebula Award; she won a Hugo in 2014 for Best Related Work. Her big space opera from last year, The Stars Are Legion, showed a very difference side to her, and was one of the most acclaimed books she’s ever published, with an Honorable Mention for the James Tiptree Award, a nomination for the Campbell Award, and a fifth-place finish for the Locus Award for Best SF Novel.

Her latest is something new again — a science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars. It’s based on a short story with the same title originally published in John Joseph Adams’ Lightspeed Magazine (read it here); the novel version arrives in hardcover from Saga Press in two weeks.

They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back… different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief — no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero — or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.

The Light Brigade will be published by Saga Press on March 19. It is 354 pages in hardcover, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Eve Ventrue.

See all our recent Future Treasures here.

Elizabeth Bear is an author with ambition and big ideas, and that puts her in some rarefied company. Her new novel Ancestral Night, arriving in hardcover next month, is getting a lot of pre-release buzz — more than enough to pique my attention, anyway. Here’s a sample from the starred review at Publishers Weekly.

Anyone who enjoys space opera, exploration of characters, and political speculation will love this outstanding novel, Bear’s welcome return to hard SF after several years of writing well-received steampunk (Karen Memory) and epic fantasy (the Eternal Sky trilogy). As an engineer on a scrappy space salvage tug, narrator Haimey Dz has a comfortable, relatively low-stress existence, chumming with pilot Connla Kuruscz and AI shipmind Singer. Then, while aboard a booby-trapped derelict ship, she is infected with a not-quite-parasitic alien device that gives her insights into the universe’s structure. This makes her valuable not only to the apparently benevolent interstellar government, the Synarche, but also to the vicious association of space pirates… Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.

Kirkus Reviews says the book “Offers plenty of big, bold, fascinating ideas…Impressive at the core.” Here’s the description.

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law… usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence — with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big — just once — to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.

Ancestral Night will be published by Saga Press on March 5, 2019. It is 512 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 in digital formats. It is the opening volume in the White Space series. We previously covered Bear’s novels Shattered Pillars (2013) and The Stone in the Skull (2017).

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

John Wade is the author of more than thirty books published in the US and the UK, including London Curiosities and The Ingenious Victorians. His newest is The Golden Age of Science Fiction: A Journey into Space with 1950s Radio, TV, Films, Comics and Books, a gorgeous hardcover that celebrates classic science fiction in all its forms. Well, the early forms that made vintage SF what it is, anyway.

John Wade grew up in the 1950s, a decade that has since been dubbed the ‘golden age of science fiction.’ It was a wonderful decade for science fiction, but not so great for young fans. With early television broadcasts being advertised for the first time as ‘unsuitable for children’ and the inescapable barrier of the ‘X’ certificate in the cinema barring anyone under the age of sixteen, the author had only the radio to fall back on – and that turned out to be more fertile for the budding SF fan than might otherwise have been thought. Which is probably why, as he grew older, rediscovering those old TV broadcasts and films that had been out of bounds when he was a kid took on a lure that soon became an obsession.

For him, the super-accuracy and amazing technical quality of today’s science fiction films pale into insignificance beside the radio, early TV and B-picture films about people who built rockets in their back gardens and flew them to lost planets, or tales of aliens who wanted to take over, if not our entire world, then at least our bodies. This book is a personal account of John Wade’s fascination with the genre across all the entertainment media in which it appeared – the sort of stuff he revelled in as a young boy – and still enjoys today.

Science Fiction has long been a genre of obsession, though modern fans have a healthy range of sub-genres to obsess over, like video games, anime, role playing games, comics, television, Marvel movies, Star Wars, toys, Star Trek, George R.R. Martin, and many others. In the 1950s there was just magazines, movies…. and radio.

The Golden Age of Science Fiction has a lot of appeal for me, since I hope it will be a look at the genre from a fresh perspective…. well, fresh to me, anyway. I don’t know much about classic SF radio and 1950s monster movies, I’m looking forward to it. It will be published by Pen and Sword Books on February 28, 2019. It is 240 pages, priced at £25.00/$42.95 US. Get more details at the Pen and Sword website here.

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

Ann Leckie knows how to make an entrance. Her debut novel Ancillary Justice (2013) won the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and British Science Fiction Award, and she followed it in short order with three sequels: Ancillary Sword (2014), Ancillary Mercy (2015), and Provenance (2017).

Her fifth novel, and her debut fantasy, is one of the most anticipated books of the year. It arrives in hardcover from Orbit next week. Lev Grossman calls The Raven Tower “A powerhouse epic of humans and gods at war, deeply imagined and profoundly thrilling,” and Kirkus Reviews says:

It is a common fantasy trope to suggest gods gain strength through faith and worshipers and that they can employ that strength to bend reality. But few authors have really explored all the implications of what happens when multiple beings with that power come into conflict. There is so much story and careful thought packed into this short volume that it should correct anyone who believes a fully realized fantasy novel requires a minimum of 500 pages.

Here’s the description.

Gods meddle in the fates of men, men play with the fates of gods, and a pretender must be cast down from the throne in this masterful first fantasy novel from Ann Leckie, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

For centuries, the kingdom of Iraden has been protected by the god known as the Raven. He watches over his territory from atop a tower in the powerful port of Vastai. His will is enacted through the Raven’s Lease, a human ruler chosen by the god himself. His magic is sustained via the blood sacrifice that every Lease must offer. And under the Raven’s watch, the city flourishes.

But the power of the Raven is weakening. A usurper has claimed the throne. The kingdom borders are tested by invaders who long for the prosperity that Vastai boasts. And they have made their own alliances with other gods.

It is into this unrest that the warrior Eolo — aide to Mawat, the true Lease — arrives. And in seeking to help Mawat reclaim his city, Eolo discovers that the Raven’s Tower holds a secret. Its foundations conceal a dark history that has been waiting to reveal itself… and to set in motion a chain of events that could destroy Iraden forever.

The Raven Tower will be published by Orbit Books on February 26, 2019. It is 432 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Lauren Panepinto.

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

Science Fiction has a reputation — deserved, I think — for being an inhospitable market for non-English writers. Some of the great science fiction writers of all time, like Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem, Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, Pierre Boulle, Elizabeth Vonarburg, and Karel Čapek, wrote in languages other than English…. but remarkably few found real success with American readers.

But that’s changing rapidly as the world gets smaller, and the American appetite and appreciation for international culture grows, especially among the young. Japanese anime, manga, and videogames have been hugely popular in the US for decades, and that helped open the door for Asian cinema, Bollywood, K-pop, Afrofuturism… and much, much more. Clarkesworld magazine has published a Chinese SF story in translation every issue for the past two years, and writers like Cixin Liu (The Three-Body Problem) have achieved breakout success in the U.S.

Ken Liu (The Grace of Kings, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories) has been at the forefront of the Chinese SF invasion, as both promoter and translator. Invisible Planets, his 2016 anthology of contemporary Chinese SF in translation, came in #2 in the Locus Poll for Best Anthology. This month he builds on that success with Broken Stars, a brand new collection of 16 short stories from Liu Cixin, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and many others. It also includes three essays that explore the history of Chinese SF, survey modern Chinese fandom, and the impact of the growing popularity of SF in China. Broken Stars arrives in hardcover from Tor on February 19.

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Chicago is being crushed by record-breaking cold this week. Trains aren’t running, the post office isn’t delivering mail, and I haven’t gone to work for two days.

But it’s a great time to cuddle under blankets with a good book. What kind of book do you read when it’s bone-chillingly cold outside? A bone-chilling book, of course. Micah Dean Hicks’ horror debut Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones, “set in the creepiest screwed-up town since ’Salem’s Lot” (Sci Fi Magazine), looks like a perfect pick. It arrives in hardcover next Tuesday. Here’s the description.

Swine Hill was full of the dead. Their ghosts were thickest near the abandoned downtown, where so many of the town’s hopes had died generation by generation. They lingered in the places that mattered to them, and people avoided those streets, locked those doors, stopped going into those rooms… They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you.

Jane is haunted. Since she was a child, she has carried a ghost girl that feeds on the secrets and fears of everyone around her, whispering to Jane what they are thinking and feeling, even when she doesn’t want to know. Henry, Jane’s brother, is ridden by a genius ghost that forces him to build strange and dangerous machines. Their mother is possessed by a lonely spirit that burns anyone she touches. In Swine Hill, a place of defeat and depletion, there are more dead than living.

When new arrivals begin scoring precious jobs at the last factory in town, both the living and the dead are furious. This insult on the end of a long economic decline sparks a conflagration. Buffeted by rage on all sides, Jane must find a way to save her haunted family and escape the town before it kills them.

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones will be published by John Joseph Adams Books on February 5, 2019. It is 298 pages, priced at $24 in hardcover and $12.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Chris Thornley. See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming fantasy here.

Best Fantasy Books.com‘s Top 25 Best Indie Fantasy Books is a very handy list if you’re interested in discovering new fantasy talent. It originally appeared in 2016, and has been updated at least once, in November 2017. Buried deep in the article the (anonymous) author notes that

I found Mark Lawrence’s (you know, author of The Broken Empire series) Great Self Published Fantasy Blog Off contest immensely helpful for helping to point me in the direction of some of the stand out picks.

Okay, I didn’t know Mark had a self-publishing contest, but what a cool idea. The SPFBO has apparently been running for several years now, and has showcased several intriguing writers. For example, Rob J. Hayes won in 2017 for Where Loyalties Lie.

What’s so intriguing about Hayes? For one thing, except for one book from Ragnarok Publications, he’s exclusively self published, and his backlist is lengthy and impressive, including the Best Laid Plans series, The Ties that Bind trilogy, It Takes a Thief to Catch a Sunrise (2016) and City of Kings (2018). And next week his newest self-published effort Never Die arrives, the tale of five undead heroes re-animated by an eight-year-old Necromancer to take on an evil emperor. Here’s a snippet from Michael Gruneir’s review at Fantasy Book Review.

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