Black Gate

Samantha Shannon, author of the bestselling Bone Season trilogy, is the latest YA author to attempt the jump to adult fantasy. Her highly anticipated The Priory of the Orange Tree — all 830 pages of it — arrives in hardcover from Bloomsbury in a month.

The transition from YA superstar to mainstream success isn’t easy, however (just ask JK Rowling). But I’m extremely intrigued about this one. Mostly because of Sarah Avery’s review of The Bone Season to be honest, published right here back in 2014. Here’s the snippet that caught my eye.

Read this book. Just read it. Ignore the reviews that call Samantha Shannon the next J.K. Rowling, or call the series that opens with The Bone Season the next Hunger Games… It’s the book you would get if Philip K. Dick decided to write about the wild Victorian occult scene that flourished under Madame Blavatsky, blossomed again in the time of W.B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley, lingering until it faded with its evenstar, Dion Fortune. That is, if Philip K. Dick decided to take all that supernatural grandiosity, and steampunk adaptations of Victoriana, and turn them on their heads by transposing them into a dystopian near-future historical moment that feels intermittently like hard SF with its what-ifs scrambled.

The early reviews of The Priory of the Orange Tree have been very promising. Marie Brennan calls it “An astonishing achievement,” and Laini Taylor labels it a “magnificent epic of queens, dragonriders, and badass secret wyrm-slaying priestesses.” Publishers Weekly says it’s a “massive standalone epic fantasy with court intrigue, travel through dangerous lands, [and] fantastical religions.” Here’s the description.

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I’m familiar with the name Simon Ings, but for the life of me I can’t remember from where. His bio says he’s the author of eight previous novels, including his “widely acclaimed” debut Hot Head and the British Science Fiction Association/Campbell Award nominee Wolves (2014), but I dunno, those don’t ring any bells either. However, his short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Meeting Infinity (2015), and Year’s Best volumes from David Hartwell, Rich Horton and Jonathan Strahan, and it seems likely I’ve encountered him in more than a few TOCs over the years. But his upcoming novel The Smoke already looks like one of major SF novels of 2019, and has been getting plenty of advance notice, including a very enthusiastic review from Gary K. Wolfe at Locus for the original UK hardcover.

Early on, we are given to understand that the “Great War” ended in 1916 with the nuking of Berlin and the irradiation of Europe, that a Yellowstone Eruption in 1874 devastated North America and led to a decade-long global winter, and that – more to the immediate point of how this world diverged from ours – the real-life Russian embryologist Alexander Gurwitsch perfected a “biophotonic ray,” which led to a form of biotech that eventually led to “the speciation of man­kind.”… At the top of the sociobiological heap is an enhanced class of urbanites call the Bund, who have taken over large swaths of London (usually referred to as “the Smoke”), and whose advanced technology has already sent robot miners to the moon… [a] haunting tale.

The Smoke will be published by Titan Books on January 22, 2019. It is 309 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital formats. The striking cover is, sadly, uncredited.

See all of coverage of the best upcoming SF and Fantasy releases here.

Kat Howard has been widely acclaimed for her novels, starting with Roses and Rot (2016), a Locus Award nominee for Best First Novel and a Publishers Weekly Best Fantasy Novel of Summer 2016, and An Unkindness of Magicians (2017), the tale of a secret cabal of wizards in New York City. Both were published by Saga Press.

She began publishing short fiction eight years ago, with “Beauty and Disappearance” in the Summer 2010 issue of Weird Tales. Since then she has become a regular in places like Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Uncanny, Nightmare, and other fine magazines, producing over 40 tales. Two decades ago that would have meant she’d have at least a successful collection or two by now, but the industry has changed at lot since the days when publishers would take a chance on a collection from an emerging author.

But apparently nobody told Saga editor Joe Monti. Howard’s new collection A Cathedral of Myth and Bone arrives next month from Saga. It contains fourteen previously published stories, plus two original to this collection, the short story “Saint’s Tide” and the 116-page Arthurian novella “Once, Future.” I’m glad to see it, and I hope it does well. And if, like me, you enjoy short story collections, then I hope you’ll support this one.

A Cathedral of Myth and Bone will be published by Saga Press on January 8, 2019. It is 358 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Amy Haslehurst. See all of our recent coverage of the best in upcoming fantasy here.