Black Gate

Aside from the usual crop of Best of the Year books, I’ve been disappointed with this year’s reprint anthologies. So I’m intrigued and hopeful about The New Voices of Fantasy, a very promising reprint anthology with a Table of Contents that reads like a Who’s Who of the best new voices in the genre — including Amal El-Mohtar, Sofia Samatar, Sarah Pinsker, Max Gladstone, Hannu Rajaniemi, Maria Dahvana Headley, Ursula Vernon, and many others. Kirkus Reviews calls it “Stellar… proves not only that fantasy is alive and well, but that it will be for years to come.”

The contents include Alyssa Wong’s Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” Ursula Vernon’s Nebula Award winner “Jackalope Wives,” and Usman T. Malik’s British Fantasy Award Award winner “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn.” It also contains an original story by Eugene Fischer. Here’s the description.

What would you do if a tornado wanted you to be its Valentine? Or if a haunted spacesuit banged on your door? When is the ideal time to turn into a tiger? Would you post a supernatural portal on Craigslist?

In these nineteen stories, the enfants terribles of fantasy have arrived. The New Voices of Fantasy captures some of the fastest-rising talents of the last five years, including Sofia Samatar, Maria Dahvana Headley, Max Gladstone, Alyssa Wong, Usman T. Malik, Brooke Bolander, E. Lily Yu, Ben Loory, Ursula Vernon, and more. Their tales were hand-picked by the legendary Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn) and genre expert Jacob Weisman (The Treasury of the Fantastic).

So go ahead and join the Communist revolution of the honeybees. The new kids got your back.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

Jeff Noon is something of a legend among SF fans, chiefly for the breakout success of his audacious Vurt trilogy (Vurt, Pollen, Nymphomation). His latest is completely different, a science fiction noir thriller about a PI who takes on the case of a missing girl in an inverted city. I doubt any description I can come up with would do it justice… instead, here’s Noon’s comments on the Q*bert-inspired cover by Will Staehle.

I was truly excited when I first saw the cover design for A Man Of Shadows. Will Staehle has caught the essence of the novel: the noir atmosphere, the loneliness of the characters, the nature of the invented city with its mirrored images of light and dark, and the Escher-like labyrinth that my private eye hero is trapped within. The story is set in an alternative 1959, and the cover captures both the period feel as well as the more fantastical elements of the book. I couldn’t ask for a better design. It’s perfect!

See the complete cover reveal at Tor.com. Here’s the book description.

Below the neon skies of Dayzone – where the lights never go out, and night has been banished – lowly private eye John Nyquist takes on a teenage runaway case. His quest takes him from Dayzone into the permanent dark of Nocturna.

As the vicious, seemingly invisible serial killer known only as Quicksilver haunts the streets, Nyquist starts to suspect that the runaway girl holds within her the key to the city’s fate. In the end, there’s only one place left to search: the shadow-choked zone known as Dusk.

A Man of Shadows will be published by Angry Robot on August 1, 2017. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Will Staehle (and you know I’m right about Q*bert). It is the first book in the John Nyquist series.

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

Jon Courtenay Grimwood has had a very impressive career. His Arabesk Trilogy, a trio of alternate history cyberpunk hard-boiled detective novels set in Alexandria, had the unusual distinction of being nominated for both the British Science Fiction and British Fantasy Awards. And we talked about his Assassini Trilogy, a tale of politics and the supernatural in 15th Century Venice, right here just last week.

His latest is a bit of a departure, but still very interesting — a thriller with political overtones set in 1980s Moscow. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne next week.

Red Square, 1985. The naked body of a young man is left outside the walls of the Kremlin, frozen solid ― like marble to the touch ― missing the little finger from his right hand.

A week later, Alex Marston, the headstrong fifteen-year-old daughter of the British Ambassador, disappears. Army Intelligence Officer Tom Fox, posted to Moscow to keep him from telling the truth to a government committee, is asked to help find her. It’s a shot at redemption.

But Russia is reluctant to give up the worst of her secrets. As Fox’s investigation sees him dragged deeper towards the dark heart of a Soviet establishment determined to protect its own, his fears for Alex’s safety grow with those of the girl’s father.

And if Fox can’t find her soon, she looks likely to become the next victim of a sadistic killer whose story is bound tight to that of his country’s terrible past…

Moskva will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on July 11, 2017. It is 358 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover was designed by Blacksheep UK. See all of our recent Future Treasures here.

I look forward to Gardner’s Year’s Best volume every year. It was the first science fiction Year’s Best I read regularly — starting way back in 1989, with the Sixth Annual volume, while I was in grad school. And while I didn’t always make time to read every volume cover to cover, year after year, I always read Gardner’s summation, the indispensable annual report card that captures all the relevant news, industry trends, hot books, overlooked gems, and of course Gardner’s cranky observations and ruminations on the future of the field.

A few years ago I noticed that Gardner lists my name in the “Acknowledgements” section every year, and that he has every year since 2004. I’m not sure why. But I’m always surprised and delighted to see it.

Gadrner’s Year’s Best Science Fiction is by far the largest and most comprehensive of the annual Year’s Best volumes. The Thirty-Fourth — thirty-fourth! — arrives in hardcover and trade paperback from St. Martin’s Press in ten days. Here’s a taste of Gardner’s Summation, in which he comments on an unwelcome trend I’ve noticed myself: the gradual disappearance of the mass-market paperback.

Like last year, 2016 was another relatively quiet year in the SF publishing world, although there were some changes down deep… One such effect that may eventually become noticeable to the average reader is the dwindling of mass-market paperback titles, once the most common way (at one point, almost the only way) for SF books to be published, from bookstores shelves. The publishing industry has been trying to find the right balance between traditional print publishing and the publishing of titles as e-books for a number of years now, and one area where publishers seem to be switching away from print publication to e-book only publication is in the mass-market paperback market niche. At least in the science fiction/fantasy publishing world, the number of mass-market paperbacks published was down for the eighth year in a row, hitting a new record low, down 11 percent since 2015. I think this may be a mistake, myself.

The Thirty-fourth volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction contains 39 stories — more than 300,000 words of fiction — from Alastair Reynolds, David Gerrold, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Paul McAuley, Aliette de Bodard, Rich Larson, Geoff Ryman, Sam J. Miller, Shariann Lewit, Gregory Benford, Nina Allan, James Patrick Kelly, Ken Liu, Eleanor Arnsason, Paolo Bacigalupi, Charlie Jane Anders, and many others. I was especially pleased to see contributions from Black Gate authors Derek Kȕsken and Bill Johnson.

Here’s the complete TOC.

…

Read More Read More