Black Gate

Last year I wrote a brief New Treasures piece on Nick Setchfield’s debut novel The War in the Dark, and made a note to keep an eye out for the sequel. The Spider Dance finally arrived in September, and in October Nick gave this enticing summary in an interview with Starburst Magazine.

It’s the next adventure for supernaturally-inclined British Intelligence agent Christopher Winter. This time he’s mixed up with the stolen hearts of the undead, unholy criminal empires and a contract for a kill that demands a very strange bullet indeed. It’s a quest that spans the stranger corners of London, Budapest, Venice, Normandy, and Naples and the map certainly gets spattered with blood along the way.

[It’s] The Day of the Jackal – with vampires…. I wanted to refresh the vampire myth. Keep the essential glamour and horror of the creature but create a breed of vampire that would slot into a ‘60s-set spy thriller.

That certainly sound like something I need. But is it any good? Last week Ginger Nuts of Horror gave it a rave review, saying in part:

The Spider Dance is the direct sequel to his excellent 2017 novel The War in the Dark , a perfect genre blend of spies, monsters, magic and derring-do… In Nick Setchfield’s previous novel, he laid out the groundwork for a well constructed and believable alternative history where magic and the occult coexist in an otherwise reasonably realistic representation of our world…

It’s going to become cliched and, but you can’t review this book without mentioning James Bond, after all the simplest way to describe this book is James Bond meets the occult…

The mashing up of genres is pitch perfect… However it [is] his portrayal of a classic horror monster that shines in this book… Setchfield has created an exciting and extraordinary version of the creature that has sadly over the years been unfairly represented in fiction.

The Spider Dance was published by Titan Books on September 3, 2019. It is 352 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. See all our recent New Treasures here.

Covers by Lauren Panepinto and Stephan Martiniere

Down Among the Dead, the second novel in K. B. Wagers’ Farian War series, arrives from Orbit tomorrow, and it’s one of the most anticipated SF books of the month. It’s the sequel to the The Indranan War trilogy featuring gunrunner empress Hail Bristol, which put Wagers on the map for serious space opera fans. The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog said the opening novel, There Before the Chaos, was “”A perfect blend of political intrigue and realistically-conveyed action…. [with] Kick-butt women, space battles, complex relationships, and fiendish plots.” Publishers Weekly was even more enthusiastic:

Hailimi “Hail” Bristol, an Indranan princess turned selectively ruthless gunrunner, was forced to take her empire’s throne after conspirators murdered her family. She saved the empire, but now a war between Indrana’s centuries-long allies, the Farians, who can heal or kill with a touch, and the Farians’ ancient enemy, the Shen, threatens to spill over to all of humankind, with disastrous consequences… Wagers achieves a rare balance of action… tension, and quiet moments, keeping pages turning while deepening the portraits of Hail and the friends and foes around her. Fans of the original trilogy will welcome Hail’s return, and any space opera reader can easily jump in here.

We covered There Before the Chaos last November. Down Among the Dead will be published tomorrow by Orbit; it is 448 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Stephan Martiniere.

Surprisingly (well surprising to me, anyway), The Farian War is not the only space opera series Wagers has on the go at the moment. Early next year Wagers is launching a brand new military science fiction series that looks extremely interesting. Check it out below.

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Covers by Charlie Bowater

Brandon Sanderson is one of the most ambitious fantasy authors at work today. (To give you some idea what I mean, he’s already 3,424 pages into his projected 10-volume Stormlight Archive series — and that just the first three books.) He has multiple series on the go at the moment, including Skyward, projected to reach four books.

Skyward is being marketed as Young Adult (unless you’re in the UK, where it’s being marketing as adult fiction — go figure.) Deana Whitney and Darci Cole at Tor.com call it a “girl and her starship” story, and that seems to be right on the money.  Here’s an excerpt from the Kirkus review of the first novel, Skyward.

Eager to prove herself, the daughter of a flier disgraced for cowardice hurls herself into fighter pilot training to join a losing war against aliens.

Plainly modeled as a cross between Katniss Everdeen and Conan the Barbarian (“I bathed in fires of destruction and reveled in the screams of the defeated. I didn’t get afraid”), Spensa “Spin” Nightshade leaves her previous occupation — spearing rats in the caverns of the colony planet Detritus for her widowed mother’s food stand — to wangle a coveted spot in the Defiant Defense Force’s flight school. Opportunities to exercise wild recklessness and growing skill begin at once, as the class is soon in the air, battling the mysterious Krell raiders who have driven people underground… Meanwhile, hints that all is not as it seems, either with the official story about her father or the whole Krell war in general, lead to startling revelations and stakes-raising implications by the end… Sanderson plainly had a ball with this nonstop, highflying opener, and readers will too.

The second volume Starlight was released today by Tor. It is 461 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover and $10.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Charlie Bowater. Read a huge excerpt from Skyward (the first 15 chapters) at Underlined and another one at i09.

Covers by Victor Mosquera

Ian McDonald has had a heck of a career, and I’ve managed to miss all of it. He won the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Desolation Road (1989), the Philip K. Dick Award for King of Morning, Queen of Day (1991), and has been nominated for a Hugo so many time I’ve lost count, including for his novels River of Gods (2005), Brasyl (2008), and The Dervish House (2011). I haven’t read any of those. I suck.

But redemption beckons. We’re heading into the holiday season, with its vacation days and reading time, and I’m casting around for a good, crunchy, science fiction epic. And McDonald just happens to have completed his widely acclaimed Luna series with Luna: Moon Rising in March of this year. The Guardian calls it “Splendid, space-age Game of Thrones-style entertainment. A Game of Moons, if you will. Play it to win, or die.” Boy, I like the sound of that. I just ordered the entire series, and I’m looking forward to long hours in my big green chair.

While I wait for the books to arrive, I’ve been heightening my anticipation by re-reading the reviews. Here’s a snippet from the full review by Adam Roberts.

McDonald’s world of lunar colonists is dog-eat-dog, or indeed dog-push-dog-out-of-airlock. Rival families compete to exploit lunar resources: the rich prosper and the majority poor go to the wall. Helium-3 is plentiful, and mining it provides cheap energy for Moon and Earth both. Five family-owned corporations, or “dragons”, dominate, and although they operate within the law, they are all mafia-style organisations… The story largely concerns the powerful Corta family, originally from Brazil, ruled by the fierce but dying matriarch Adriana Corta. Her first-born son and heir, Rafa Corta, is a hothead, the Sonny Corleone of the novel; his younger brother Lucas, calmer and a better tactician, is more Michael Corleone. The Cortas are effectively at war with the “Mackenzie Metals” family, originally from New Zealand. After somebody tries to assassinate Rafa with a cyberengineered fly, and when the Cortas snatch a lucrative new mining property from under the noses of the Mackenzies, matters heat up fast…

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Cover art by Tony Mauro

I found Mirah Bolender’s debut novel City of Broken Magic waiting for me when I got home from the World Fantasy Convention last year. I liked the premise quite a bit — a city in which a understaffed bomb squad must deal with leathly deadly weapons left over from a long-forgotten war. Liz Bourke at Tor.com summarized it nicely:

City of Broken Magic sets itself in a secondary fantasy world where humans live huddled into well-defended cities. Hundreds of years before the novel’s beginning, a colonised people tried to fight back against their colonisers by creating a weapon that ate magic. They succeeded a little too well, creating something that can hatch from broken or empty magical amulets and that can consume everything in its path. These infestations, as they’re known, are extremely dangerous and require specialised knowledge and equipment to combat. The people who do this job are known as “Sweepers,” and their mortality rate can be high…

The novel’s worldbuilding, in the form of infestations and the social response to it, is its big idea. City of Broken Magic is the story of an emergency response unit, and in narrative and stylistic terms, it feels one part thriller, one part procedural, and one part professional coming-of-age for its viewpoint character. Bolender writes action very well, building tension into every escalating encounter with infestations… City of Broken Magic is a fast-paced, exciting ride. And an entertaining one.

The book earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Monsters are threatening to take over the city of Amicae. The government has convinced residents that the monsters can’t get in, but Clae and Laura know that isn’t true. They are Sweepers, the only people in the city qualified to fight the monsters… they take on mobsters, corrupt businessmen, and a deliberately skewed cultural narrative, culminating in a fight to protect their city from its own refusal to accept reality. Amicae’s strict caste system is expertly woven into the fast-paced plot that will keep readers turning pages until the very end.

The sequel, The Monstrous Citadel, the second novel in the Chronicles of Amicae, sees the Sweepers face new threats, including gangs, ungrateful bureaucrats, and the grasping ambition of Rex, the City of Kings, which breeds its own monsters. The Monstrous Citadel was published by Tor on November 5, 2019. It is 415 pages, priced at $18.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital versions. The cover art is by Tony Mauro. Read Chapter One of from City of Broken Magic here, and a lengthy excerpt at the Tor-Forge Blog. See all our recent New Treasures here.