Black Gate

I find it fascinating how buzz can grow for certain books, weeks and even months before they’re published. I’m talking about real buzz, grass-roots stuff, reader reviews on public sites, not just high-profile blurbs on the back of the book.

I was flat-out astonished to see the early buzz for Jonathan French’s orc epic The Grey Bastards, coming in hardcover June 19 from Crown. Nearly three weeks from publication it already has 54 reviews at Amazon, and a whopping 473 ratings at Goodreads. That’s off the charts, especially for an unknown author with only two previous small press releases to his credit. It wasn’t until I dug a bit deeper (and had already selected it to feature today) that I realized the Crown edition is a reprint of a 2015 small press original from Ballymalis Press. Still, that’s plenty unusual all on its own, so I decided to go ahead and feature it today anyway. Here’s the description.

Call them outcasts, call them savages — they’ve been called worse, by their own mothers — but Jackal is proud to be a Grey Bastard.

He and his fellow half-orcs patrol the barren wastes of the Lot Lands, spilling their own damned blood to keep civilized folk safe. A rabble of hard-talking, hog-riding, whore-mongering brawlers they may be, but the Bastards are Jackal’s sworn brothers, fighting at his side in a land where there’s no room for softness. And once Jackal’s in charge — as soon as he can unseat the Bastards’ tyrannical, seemingly unkillable founder — there’s a few things they’ll do different. Better.

Or at least, that’s the plan. Until the fallout from a deadly showdown makes Jackal start investigating the Lot Lands for himself. Soon, he’s wondering if his feelings have blinded him to ugly truths about this world, and the Bastards’ place in it.

In a quest for answers that takes him from decaying dungeons to the frontlines of an ancient feud, Jackal finds himself battling invading orcs, rampaging centaurs, and grubby human conspiracies alike — along with a host of dark magics so terrifying they’d give even the heartiest Bastard pause. Finally, Jackal must ride to confront a threat that’s lain in wait for generations, even as he wonders whether the Bastards can — or should — survive.

Delivered with a generous wink to Sons of Anarchy, featuring sneaky-smart worldbuilding and gobs of fearsomely foul-mouthed charm, The Grey Bastards is a grimy, pulpy, masterpiece — and a raunchy, swaggering, cunningly clever adventure that’s like nothing you’ve read before.

The Grey Bastards will be published by Crown on June 19, 2018. It is 432 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. Anyone out there read this in the earlier edition?

One of the things I’ve appreciated about David Afsharirad’s Best Military and Adventure SF, now in its fourth year, is that he seeks out the kind of fiction that routinely gets overlooked by the editors of the other Year’s Best SF books. The newest volume, coming in trade paperback next week from Baen, is no exception. Check out the table of contents.

Contest
Preface by David Afsharirad
“The Secret Life Of Bots,” by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, September 2017)
“The Snatchers,” by Edward Mcdermott (Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March/April 2017)
“Imperium Imposter,” by Jody Lynn Nye (Infinite Stars, 2017)
“A Thousand Deaths Through Flesh And Stone,” by Brian Trent (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2017)
“Hope Springs,” by Lindsay Buroker (Beyond the Stars: New Worlds, New Suns, 2017)
“Orphans Of Aries,” by Brad R. Torgersen (Rocket’s Red Glare, 2017)
“By The Red Giant’s Light,” by Larry Niven (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2017)
“Family Over Blood,” by Kacey Ezell (Forged in Blood, 2017)
“A Man They Didn’t Know,” by David Hardy (Rocket’s Red Glare, 2017)
“Swarm By Sean,” by Patrick Hazlett (Terraform, December 2017)
“A Hamal In Hollywood,” by Martin L. Shoemaker (Rocket’s Red Glare, 2017)
“Lovers,” by Tony Daniel (Forged in Blood, 2017)
“The Ghost Ship Anastasia,” by Rich Larson (Clarkesworld, January 2017)
“You Can Always Change The Past,” by George Nikolopoulos (Galaxy’s Edge, March 2017)
“Our Sacred Honor,” by David Weber (Infinite Stars, 2017)
Contributors

To see what I mean, you can compare Afsharirad’s selections versus other Year’s Best volumes coming out this year. Here’s a list with Tables of Contents for the other major 2018 volumes from Rich Horton, Gardner Dozois, Jonathan Strahan, Neil Clarke, John Joseph Adams, Paula Guran, Jane Yolen, and Michael Kelly.

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Read More Read More

Peter Watts is the author of the Rifters Trilogy, which Matthew David Surridge reviewed for us here, the Hugo and Locus Award-nominated Blindsight (2006), which Rich Horton called “Brilliant,” and the collection Beyond the Rift (2013).

His short fiction Sunflower Cycle kicked off in 2009 with the Hugo Award-winning “The Island.” There have been three tales in the series so far; you can read them all at Watts’ website. The fourth, the long novella The Freeze-Frame Revolution, arrives from Tachyon early next month.

“The Island” (The New Space Opera 2, July 2009) — Hugo Award Winner, Best Novelette
“Giants” (Extreme Planets, December 2013)
“Hotshot” (Reach for Infinity, May 2014)
The Freeze-Frame Revolution (Tachyon Publications, June 2018)

Publisher’s Weekly raved about the book, saying:

In this short, tight novel that contains vast science-fictional speculation, the human crew of the construction ship Eriophora spends 66 million years building interstellar wormhole gates, so they have lots of time to ponder issues of purpose. Sunday Ahzmundin, on a quest to find a missing crewmate, has to deal with another coworker, Lian, who is traumatized after the ship is damaged by one of the “occasional demons” that pop out of newly opened gates. Dropping in and out of suspended animation as scheduled by the Chimp, the AI that runs the ship, Sunday begins to uncover the secrets behind Lian’s subsequent death and the disappearances of other crew members, learning what hides beneath the ship’s closed and rigidly structured society… SF fans will love this tale of bizarre future employment and genuine wonder.

Here’s the description.

She believed in the mission with all her heart. But that was sixty million years ago. How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what’s best for you? Sunday Ahzmundin is about to find out.

The Freeze-Frame Revolution will be published by Tachyon Publications on June 12, 2018. It is 192 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. Order copies directly from the Taychon website.

Rob Boffard is the author of the Outer Earth series, which was recently re-packaged in a brick-sized (1,024 pages!) omnibus volume selected by Unbound Worlds as one of the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of February. His newest novel is Adrift, the tale of a group of tourists caught in a cat-and-mouse game with a deadly alien ship in deep space. It arrives in trade paperback from Orbit next month.

In the far reaches of space, a tour group embarks on what will be the trip of a lifetime – in more ways than one…

At Sigma Station, a remote mining facility and luxury hotel in deep space, a group of tourists boards a small vessel to take in the stunning views of the Horsehead Nebula. But while they’re out there, a mysterious ship with devastating advanced technology attacks the station. Their pilot’s quick thinking means that the tourists escape with their lives – but as the dust settles, they realise they may be the only survivors…

Adrift in outer space on a vastly under-equipped ship, they’ve got no experience, no weapons, no contact with civilization. They are way out of their depth, and if they can’t figure out how to work together, they’re never getting home alive.

Because the ship that destroyed the station is still out there. And it’s looking for them…

Adrift will be published by Orbit on June 5, 2018. It is 416 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. Read the first chapter at the author’s website.

Amber Royer first got my attention with her funny and thoughtful guest post at Unbound Worlds last month, promoting her upcoming space opera Free Chocolate from Angry Robot:

I play a bit with gallows humor in Free Chocolate – after all, half the book takes place on an alien warship where your superior officers can eat you should you disappoint them – and, yeah, it’s a fine balance. You don’t want to make death meaningless, even as the characters acknowledge the precariousness of their situation. Because if death becomes meaningless – or, worse, funny – then the remaining characters’ lives aren’t so important anymore… You know, every writer’s worst nightmare. We want our characters to be like that unnamed actor, finding dignity and a sense of psychological well-being, even in the face of absolute horror and near-certain death.

Speaking of which… I once read that science fiction is a society’s hopes, fantasy its daydreams, and horror its nightmares. (I cannot find the citation for this one – sorry, awesome writer, from the mid-90s.) I think that’s another reason SF writers so seldom venture into pure comedy… with sci-fi, you spend so much time building a world that needs to be convincing, an entire vision of the future, or an alternate past, or an alien landscape, and you put so much of yourself into sharing the things you hope and fear. You want it to be bulletproof in the reader’s mind. It’s hard, then, to acknowledge the absurdity of many of those fears, the impossibility of some of the hopes, to let yourself be laughed at, even in a positive way.

Free Chocolate is a far-future tale in which chocolate is Earth’s only unique commodity… one that everyone else in the galaxy is willing to kill to get their hands, paws and tentacles on. Here’s the description.

Latina culinary arts student, Bo Benitez, becomes a fugitive when she’s caught stealing a cacao pod from one of the heavily-defended plantations that keep chocolate, Earth’s sole valuable export, safe from a hungry galaxy.

Forces array against her including her alien boyfriend and a reptilian cop. But when she escapes onto an unmarked starship things go from bad to worse: it belongs to the race famed throughout the galaxy for eating stowaways! Surrounded by dangerous yet hunky aliens, Bo starts to uncover clues that the threat to Earth may be bigger than she first thought.

Free Chocolate will be published by Angry Robot on June 1. It is 448 pages, priced at $9.99 for both the paperback and digital editions. The cover is by Mingchen Shen.