The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best SF and Fantasy Books in May

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best SF and Fantasy Books in May

D’Arc Robert Repino-small Extinction Horizon-small The Caledonian Gambit-small

I’m never going to get through my May reading list. Heck, I’m not even going to finish compiling my May reading list.

But that’s okay, because the good folks at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog made one, and it’s better than mine anyway. In fact, it’s got a whole bunch of great titles — by Timothy Zahn, Robin Hobb, M.R. Carey, Gregory Benford, Robert Jackson Bennett, Jack Campbell, Gini Koch, Faith Hunter, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Isabelle Steiger, Robyn Bennis, and many others — including a bunch of stuff I didn’t even know about.

For those who missed it when we discussed it here earlier, there’s also some long-anticpiated books by several notable Black Gate contributors, including Martha Wells, Ellen Klages, and Foz Meadows.

The B&N article was authored by Jeff Somers. Here’s some of the highlights.

D’Arc, by Robert Repino (May 9, Soho Press — Hardcover) is the third installment in one of the most original fantasy series on the market.

Repino’s third novel in the War with No Name series continues to deepen and expand the strange universe he’s created, one that still hasn’t settled after the upheaval of a war between ants, animals, and humans. The cat Mort(e) found his love, the dog Sheba, after the animals of the world gained sentience and attempted to eradicate humanity at the direction of the Colony, intelligent ants seeking to scrub man from the globe. Mort(e) and Sheba (now re-named D’Arc) are together, the Queen of the Colony is dead, and a fragile peace exists between the animals and the humans. But a series of strange, brutal events threatens that peace, as a race of creatures form deep below the ocean’s surface seek to fulfill the Colony’s goal of destroying humanity — and soon enough, war hero Mort(e) must once again head into battle.

We covered the first two books in Robert Repino’s War with No Name here:

Mort(e)
Culdesac

Extinction Horizon, by Nicholas Sansbury Smith (May 30, Orbit — Paperback) looks like an intriguing entry in the zombie apocalypse genre.

The first in Sansbury’s planned six-book Extinction Cycle introduces Master Sergeant Reed Beckham, the leader of the elite Delta Force Team codenamed Ghost. Beckham and Ghost are sent to deal with the worst problems in the world, so when a top-secret medical facility drops off the grid, they get the call. What they find at the site is terrifying: a mutant strain of Ebola that transforms people into monsters. Ghost and Beckham barely survive, and as the virus spreads, the world descends into chaos. Beckham is charged with keeping alive Dr. Kate Lovato — an elite virologist with the CDC — until she can develop a cure. What Lovato and Beckham uncover instead is bone-chilling, because the cure might actually be worse than saving humanity from complete extinction.

And finally, here’s a debut novel from podcast star Dan Moren: The Caledonian Gambit (May 23, Talos — Paperback)

Combining space opera with espionage thriller, Moren sets his story in a universe divided between superpowers: the Illyrican Empire and the Commonwealth. Simon Kovalic is the Commonwealth’s greatest spy, the sort of man who engineers planet-wide events in order to shift the balance of power. He identifies an opportunity on the planet of Caledonia — but even a spy of his skill can’t gain access to the people and places he needs in order to leverage the situation. For that he needs Eli Brody, a broken man working a lowly job on a remote planet to which he fled from Caledonia years ago. Forced to return home by Kovalic, the two form an uneasy alliance as events spin outside of their control in ways that could change the balance of power in the universe forever. We’ve loved listening to Moren natter away on various fandom podcasts over the years; his debut may be the SF spy thriller we’ve been searching for.

Read the complete list at the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog here.

If you’re trying to keep up on the best new books arriving every month, the B&N Sci-Fi Blog is a great resource. (Heck, it’s a lot of fun to browse, even if you don’t buy a single book this year). Some of their previous lists include:

B&N Blog on 96 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in 2017
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Horror Books of 2016
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Collections and Anthologies of 2016
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Selects the Best Novels of 2016
Barnes & Noble on 7 Essential New Sci-Fi & Fantasy Short Story Collections
The B&N Sci-Fi Blog on The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of November
Barnes and Noble Picks the Best SF and Fantasy of 2015

See all our recent New Treasures here.

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Stuart G

*Sigh* And almost all of them are parts of a series. Even those that aren’t specifically identified as such, sound as if they could easily become the start of one.


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