Black Gate

36 Streets (Titan Books, February 8, 2022). Cover by Shutterstock

Here’s one that came out a while ago, but I just caught up with recently: 36 Streets, the debut novel by Australian T.R. Napper.

It’s got a Blade Runner/Cyberpunk vibe, and an armload of great notices: Grimdark Magazine calls it “brilliantly realized SF noir,” Publishers Weekly proclaims it “A gripping near-future cyberthriller with plenty of action and intrigue,” and SciNow sums it up as “a deeply textured vision of the future brimming with new and inventive ideas… a gripping sci-fi thriller.”

Sounds like my kind of debut. I snapped up a copy on my last trip to Barnes & Noble. Here’s a snippet from that Grimdark review by Adrian Collins.

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Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms (Grim Oak Press, March 8, 2022)

I owe my professional writing career to John Joseph Adams.

I published four stories in Black Gate magazine, all under the name Todd McAulty. I wrote one novel, The Robots of Gotham, and before I could really start to shop it around John purchased and published it under his John Joseph Adams imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. That was the first time I’d ever been paid for my fiction, and with that one sale, John made me a professional writer. He subsequently bought several of my short stories for Lightspeed magazine, including one I really wanted to call “Sixty Ton Killer Robot,” but John wisely retitled “The Ambient Intelligence.”

It’s no surprise that John and I are pretty aligned. We both love fast paced adventure SF and fantasy in colorful settings. Also robots! (Yeah I know. Everybody loves robots.) John is a prolific anthologist, with nearly 50 anthologies under his belt in the last 15 years or so, including the popular Wastelands and The Apocalypse Triptych volumes, and I’m always on the lookout for his latest. So I was excited to see Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, a fat volume of original stories from the top fantasists working today, including Kate Elliott, Carrie Vaughn, Tobias S. Buckell, James L. Cambias, Jonathan Maberry, Seanan McGuire, Jeffrey Ford, Becky Chambers, Theodora Goss, and many others.

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Ymir (Orbit, July 12, 2022). Cover by Arcangel

Rich Larson has enjoyed a vanishingly rare career phenomenon. He’s vaulted into the top rank of modern science fiction almost solely on the strength of his short fiction.

This used to be more common. In fact, it used to be the way to do it — you published a few dozen short stories in genre magazines, maybe got a series going, attracted a few sly looks from publishers, and next thing you know you had a book deal and a real writing career. That doesn’t happen any more. At least, not the way it used to.

Except for Rich Larson, apparently. He burst onto the scene in 2012, and sold over 100 stories in the next six years — more than one per month. In 2016 Gardner Dozois called him “one of the best new writers to enter science fiction in more than a decade.” Since then he’s been focusing on longer work, and in July of this year he published his third novel Ymir. Publishers Weekly says “The nonstop action and violence keep the pages flying. Fans of finely crafted, high-intensity sci-fi stories will enjoy.”

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The World Gives Way (Orbit, May 3, 2022). Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

Here at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters there are few things as exciting as a good science fiction debut. (Maybe our Friday zeppelin races? Let’s call it a tossup.)

Marissa Levien’s The World Gives Way is one of the year’s strongest debuts. It made The New York Times list of Best Science Fiction Books of the Year, and Lacy Baugher at Culturess calls it “bleak, beautiful science fiction done right.” A.S. Moser at Strange Horizon says it’s “brave storytelling that uses the distorted mirror of science fiction to best effect.”

But my favorite review came from Martin Cahill at Tor.com, who calls it “incredible… The World Gives Way socks [readers] in the gut.” Here’s an excerpt.

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Andrew Paul Weston has described himself as a “Former Royal Marine, Police Officer & Crime & Intelligence analyst, cursed with an overactive imagination.” His muse and expertise drive him to write action-adventure that spans genres. Black Gate’s Fletcher Vredenburgh reviewed his internationally bestselling IX Series, military sci-fi that transports the lost Roman IX Legion across time & space to fight energy-eating monsters (book #1 The IX, book #2 Prelude to Sorrow, book #3 Exordium of Tears). And Joe Bonadonna covered Weston’s trilogy following the Devil’s hitman, Daemon Grim, set in Janet Morris’ Heroes in Hell ™ universe (book #1 Hell Bound, book #2 Hell Hounds, book #3 Hell Gate).

With The Siren’s Song (just released), Weston continues The Cambion Journal series which promises to be a six-novella series. It tracks Augustus Thorne, a “Cambion” (a half-demon, half-human hybrid). He’s cursed with a terrible hunger he can barely control, hunting and exterminating any Incubi and Succubae he can find.

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