Black Gate

While I was at the Friday night mass autographing session at the Nebula Awards weekend, I discovered Neil Clarke had a small number of copies of his upcoming anthology The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 1 at his table — a book I’ve been looking forward to for months — and I was delighted to be able to buy one. Since we were at an autographing session, after all, I asked if he’d sign it. I also asked, as I usually do when requesting autographs, if he’d add, “To my one true love, John.” Neil, who knew of my ongoing plan to save my marriage (it’s a long story), wrote the following:

To John,

Since everyone does it… to my one true love. See Alice, we really do this all the time.

It’s good to have friends who care if I stay married.

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I’m very much looking forward to Paula Guran’s annual Best of the Year collections — The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2016, coming in June, and especially The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016, shipping in August.

While we wait we have her latest anthology to tide us over, and it looks like a lot of fun. The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu is a thick collection of all-new Mythos fiction by Michael Shea, Laird Barron, John Langan, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Silvia Moreno, John Shirley, Simon Strantzas, and many others (plus reprints from Caitlín R. Kiernan, Veronica Schanoes, and Damien Angelica Walters).

An outstanding anthology of original stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft from authors who do not merely imitate, but reimagine, re-energize, and renew his concepts in ways relevant to today’s readers. Fresh new fiction that explores our modern fears and nightmares. From the depths of R’lyeh to the heights of the Mountains of Madness, some of today’s best weird fiction writers—both established award-winning authors and exciting new voices — The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu collects tales of cosmic horror that traverse terrain created by Lovecraft and create new eldritch geographies to explore…

With stories by: Laird Barron, Nadia Bulkin, Amanda Downum, Ruthanna Emrys, Richard Gavin, Lois H. Gresh, Lisa L. Hannett, Brian Hodge, Caitlín R. Kiernan, John Langan, Yoon Ha Lee, Usman T. Malik, Helen Marshall, Silvia Moreno, Norman Partridge, W. H. Pugmire, Veronica Schanoes, Michael Shea, John Shirley, Simon Strantzas, Sandra McDonald, Damien Angelica Walters, Don Webb, Michael Wehunt, and A.C. Wise.

The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu will be published by Robinson/Running Press on May 24, 2016. It is 476 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback. The cover is by Tim McDonagh. No word yet on the digital edition.

Holy cats… Jonathan Strahan’s up to Volume Ten already? My oh my, how times flies.

Well, you know what the imminent arrival of the newest volume of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year means. That’s right — the Best of the Year season is upon us. Strahan kicks it off, as usual, but in the next 3-4 months we’ll see a dozen more from Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Paula Guran (two volumes!), Ellen Datlow, Neil Clarke, John Joseph Adams, and many others. (Have a look at the 17 volumes we covered last year here and here.)

You don’t need that many Best of the Year anthologies. But you definitely need Jonathan’s — his taste is impeccable, and this volume is one of the very best of the lot. Here’s a peek at the table of contents… 27 short stories from Kai Ashante Wilson, Vonda McIntyre, Robert Reed, Alastair Reynolds, Kim Stanley Robinson, Genevieve Valentine, Kelly Link, Anne Leckie, Jeffrey Ford, and many others. Here’s the complete TOC.

1. “City of Ash,” Paolo Bacigalupi
2. “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” Elizabeth Bear
3. “The Machine Starts,” Greg Bear
4. “The Winter Wraith,” Jeffrey Ford
5. “Black Dog,” Neil Gaiman
6. “Jamaica Ginger,” Nalo Hopkinson & Nisi Shawl
7. “Drones,” Simon Ings
8. “Emergence,” Gwyneth Jones

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Madeline Ashby is the author Vn and its sequel iD, the first two novels in the The Machine Dynasty trilogy from Angry Robot. She lives in Toronto and writes articles for my hometown paper, the Ottawa Citizen, which automatically makes her cool in my eyes.

Her third novel Company Town, a near-future mystery, is getting a lot of early attention. Locus calls it “Worthy of the best Heinlein…. a terrific ride,” and Chuck Wendig says “This is brave, bold, crazy storytelling.” Charlie Stross says “Madeline Ashby bludgeons cyberpunk to death with this post-climate change thriller about life aboard a gas platform, confronting an uncomfortable new future.” I’m sold.

New Arcadia is a city-sized oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd.

Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bio-engineered enhancements. As such, she’s the last truly organic person left on the rig — making her doubly an outsider, as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire. Still, her expertise in the arts of self-defense and her record as a fighter mean that her services are yet in high demand. When the youngest Lynch needs training and protection, the family turns to Hwa. But can even she protect against increasingly intense death threats seemingly coming from another timeline?

Meanwhile, a series of interconnected murders threatens the city’s stability and heightens the unease of a rig turning over. All signs point to a nearly invisible serial killer, but all of the murders seem to lead right back to Hwa’s front door. Company Town has never been the safest place to be — but now, the danger is personal.

A brilliant, twisted mystery, as one woman must evaluate saving the people of a town that can’t be saved, or saving herself.

Company Town will be published by Tor Books on May 17, 2016. It is 341 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital version. The cover is by ChiZine’s genius designer Erik Mohr.

I enjoy a good fairy-tale retelling, especially those written with a modern sensibility — and a dark edge. Kat Howard’s debut novel, selected by Publishers Weekly as a Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror Novel of Summer 2016, looks like it fits my criteria nicely.

The marketing for Roses & Rot includes an enviable blurb from Neil Gaiman (“Kat Howard is a remarkable young writer”), and the promise that its main characters, Imogen and her sister Marin, find themselves living in a fairy tale as the story unfolds. But which fairy tale? Ah, that’s part of the mystery.

A prestigious artists’ retreat holds dark secrets as desire for art and love are within grasp for Imogen and her sister, Marin, but at a terrible price.

What would you sacrifice for everything you ever dreamed of?

Imogen has grown up reading fairy tales about mothers who die and make way for cruel stepmothers. As a child, she used to lie in bed wishing that her life would become one of these tragic fairy tales because she couldn’t imagine how a stepmother could be worse than her mother now. As adults, Imogen and her sister Marin are accepted to an elite post-grad arts program — Imogen as a writer and Marin as a dancer. Soon enough, though, they realize that there’s more to the school than meets the eye. Imogen might be living in the fairy tale she’s dreamed about as a child, but it’s one that will pit her against Marin if she decides to escape her past to find her heart’s desire.

Roses and Rot will be published by Saga Press on May 17, 2016. It is 307 pages, priced at $24.99 in hardcover, and $7.99 for the digital version.

The 2015 Nebula Awards were a pretty big deal for me. They were presented here in Chicago, and I was able to attend for the first time. I was also asked to present the award for Best Novelette of the Year, an honor I won’t soon forget.

In addition I got to catch up with old friends, and meet plenty of new faces — folks like Rachel Swirsky, Liz Gorinsky, Aliette de Bodard, Lawrence M. Schoen, Cixin Liu, and many more. The Nebula Awards Weekend is relaxed, fun, and attended by the best and brightest writers and editors in the industry. It’s a great place to meet and chat with your favorite writers — not to mention get lots of free books.

They also give out some Nebula Awards, of course. And the Nebula Awards Showcase collects the winners and finalists in a handsome anthology, as it has every year since 1966. The Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 is the 50th volume in the series, and it looks like one of the strongest in recent memory.

This year editor Mercedes Lackey elected to take a rather eclectic approach — to include every short story and novelette nominee and winner, and limit herself to excerpts in the novella category (with the exception of the winner). Here’s the complete TOC.

Short Story

“Jackalope Wives,” Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/7/14) — Winner

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This looks like fun: a standalone supernatural thriller from The New York Times bestselling team of Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. In Arlington, Virginia, a cop about to lose his career comforts a dying woman in the wreckage of her car. The next night, her ghost asks him for his help… a Russian general has infiltrated the US on a madman’s quest. His weapons are wraiths who cannot be killed. Ghosts have been weaponized.

In 1995, the CIA made a breakthrough that they hid from the world because it would change everything in modern science ― but some secrets can’t stay hidden. A rogue force has learned how to make disembodied minds capable of lethal action. Ghosts have been weaponized, and now a Russian general has infiltrated the U.S. with a squad of “berzerkers”―an army that can’t be killed because they’re already dead. Only one person knew the general’s plans, but she died in a car crash. The only person who can communicate with her is the cop who was at her side when she died ― and now he must race to stop a force that could end life as we know it.

Wraith will be published by Thomas Dunne Books on April 26, 2016. It is 320 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Micharl Komarck.

I’ve covered a handful of truly massive anthologies at Black Gate over the years — Otto Penzler’s The Vampire Archives and The Big Book of Adventure Stories spring to mind, as well as Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s 1152-page The Weird — but I’m not sure I’ve ever come something as hugely ambitious as The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by the Vandermeers, and scheduled to be released by Vintage this July.

Weighing in at 1,216 pages in oversized trade paperback, this could be one of the largest anthologies the genre has seen. Here’s the description.

Quite possibly the greatest science fiction collection of all time — past, present, and future!

What if life was neverending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the pope were a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia E. Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut, alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, you’ll find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the New Wave, and more. Learn about the secret history of science fiction, from titans of literature who also wrote SF to less well-known authors from more than twenty-five countries, some never before translated into English. In The Big Book of Science Fiction, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Immerse yourself in the genre that predicted electric cars, space tourism, and smartphones. Sit back, buckle up, and dial in the coordinates, as this stellar anthology has got worlds within worlds.

And here’s the complete Table of Contents — including a rich assortment of world SF.

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