Black Gate

Canadian SF writer James Alan Gardner published seven novels between 1997 and 2002, including Expendable, Commitment Hour, and Radiant. Then he switched almost entirely to short fiction, producing 17 short stories and one collection between 2005 and 2017 (with the exception of one media tie-in novel, Tomb Raider: The Man of Bronze).

There’s nothing wrong with short fiction, of course. But when you stop writing novels for a dozen years, people think you’ve vanished. So I was both pleased and surprised to tear open an envelope from Tor this week and find a review copy of Gardner’s first new novel since 2005. It’s good to have him back — especially with something that looks as fun as All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault. It’s the tale of Kim Lam and her three housemates who are transformed from ordinary college students into superheroes by “a freak scientific accident (what else?),” and find themselves caught up in a war between super-powered humans and sinister darkling creatures (vampires, ghosts, and worse things.) The sequel, They Promised Me the Gun Wasn’t Loaded, arrives next year.

All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault was published by Tor Books on November 7, 2017. It is 382 pages, priced at $17.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is by Getty images. Read an excerpt here.

Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and followed that in quick succession with two Hugo wins: in 2008 a Best Short Story nod for “Tideline,” and in 2009 a Best Novelette award for “Shoggoths in Bloom.”

Her biggest commercial hit so far has been her Eternal Sky trilogy (Range of Ghosts, Shattered Pillars, Steles of the Sky). Last month she returned to the world of Eternal Sky with a brand new trilogy, The Lotus Kingdoms, which kicked off with The Stone in the Skull, now available in hardcover from Tor.

The Stone in the Skull, the first volume in her new trilogy, takes readers over the dangerous mountain passes of the Steles of the Sky and south into the Lotus Kingdoms.

The Gage is a brass automaton created by a wizard of Messaline around the core of a human being. His wizard is long dead, and he works as a mercenary. He is carrying a message from a the most powerful sorcerer of Messaline to the Rajni of the Lotus Kingdom. With him is The Dead Man, a bitter survivor of the body guard of the deposed Uthman Caliphate, protecting the message and the Gage. They are friends, of a peculiar sort.

They are walking into a dynastic war between the rulers of the shattered bits of a once great Empire.

Tor.com usually offers up sample chapters of new Tor releases, and they didn’t disappoint us this time. Check out Chapter One here, and Chapter Two hidden in a completely different place here.

The Stone in the Skull was published by Tor Books on October 10, 2017. It is 368 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Richard Anderson.

Colin Meloy is a talented guy. As the frontman for the rock band The Decemberists he’s sold over a million records around the world. His debut novel, Wildwood, became a New York Times bestseller, and grew into a bestselling trilogy that has been called “full of suspense and danger and frightening things the world has never seen,” (Lemony Snicket), and which Michael Chabon calls “Dark and whimsical, with a true and uncanny sense of otherworldliness… the heir to a great tradition of stories of wild childhood adventure.” Here’s the description for the first volume.

Prue McKeel’s life is ordinary. That is, until her brother is abducted by a murder of crows and taken to the Impassable Wilderness, a dense, tangled forest on the edge of Portland.

So begins an adventure that will take Prue and her friend Curtis deep into the Impassable Wilderness. And what begins as a rescue mission becomes something much greater as the two friends find themselves entwined in a struggle for the very freedom of this wilderness. A wilderness the locals call Wildwood.

All three novels in the series are illustrated by Carson Ellis, the acclaimed illustrator of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Here’s a look at all three back covers.

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Paolo Bacigalupi’s breakout book was The Windup Girl (2009), which won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. He followed that triumph with his first New York Times bestseller, the National Book Award Finalist Ship Breaker (2010), the tale of a teenage boy in a future Gulf Coast devastated by the forces of climate change. Here’s the description.

In America’s flooded Gulf Coast region, oil is scarce, but loyalty is scarcer. Grounded oil tankers are being broken down for parts by crews of young people. Nailer, a teenage boy, works the light crew, scavenging for copper wiring just to make quota–and hopefully live to see another day. But when, by luck or by chance, he discovers an exquisite clipper ship beached during a recent hurricane, Nailer faces the most important decision of his life: Strip the ship for all it’s worth or rescue its lone survivor, a beautiful and wealthy girl who could lead him to a better life….

He followed Ship Breaker with The Drowned Cities, a 2012 Los Angeles Public Library Best Teen Book.

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Brandon Sanderson is one of the most prolific writers in the genre. By any measure, he’s certainly one of the hardest working. Back in 2015 I estimated that he was producing, on average, 1,270 pages per year (not counting short stories and the like). His first novel of 2017, Oathbringer, the third novel in The Stormlight Archive, weighs in at a whopping 1,248 pages — and still manages to bring down his average.

Oathbringer is the sequel to the #1 New York Times bestselling The Way of Kings (2011) and Words of Radiance (2014), both of which were over 1,000 pages in hardcover. The series is projected to be 10 volumes, over 10,000 pages, about ten times the length of The Lord of the Rings. Get a cozy reading nook for this one, you’re going to need it.

In Oathbringer, the third volume of the New York Times bestselling Stormlight Archive, humanity faces a new Desolation with the return of the Voidbringers, a foe with numbers as great as their thirst for vengeance.

Dalinar Kholin’s Alethi armies won a fleeting victory at a terrible cost: The enemy Parshendi summoned the violent Everstorm, which now sweeps the world with destruction, and in its passing awakens the once peaceful and subservient parshmen to the horror of their millennia-long enslavement by humans. While on a desperate flight to warn his family of the threat, Kaladin Stormblessed must come to grips with the fact that the newly kindled anger of the parshmen may be wholly justified.

Nestled in the mountains high above the storms, in the tower city of Urithiru, Shallan Davar investigates the wonders of the ancient stronghold of the Knights Radiant and unearths dark secrets lurking in its depths. And Dalinar realizes that his holy mission to unite his homeland of Alethkar was too narrow in scope. Unless all the nations of Roshar can put aside Dalinar’s blood-soaked past and stand together ― and unless Dalinar himself can confront that past―even the restoration of the Knights Radiant will not prevent the end of civilization.

Nice to see Michael Whelan do the cover art. The wraparound cover is quite striking; here’s a look at the entire piece.

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