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Author: John ONeill

Solving Crimes in a War-Torn Tokyo: Ninth Step Station, created by Malka Older

Solving Crimes in a War-Torn Tokyo: Ninth Step Station, created by Malka Older

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Serial Box is one of the most exciting new genre publishers to arrive on the scene in the past few years. They’ve brought a very old concept — serialized fiction — into the 21st Century, and attracted an incredible line-up of top-notch writers to give it new life. So how does it work? Serial Box offers multiple stories in a rich variety of genres, and they release new episodes every week. Each serial typically runs for a “season” of 10-16 weeks, and each is written by a team of talented writers. Just check out this list of contributors: Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Ian Tregillis, Michael Swanwick, Mary Robinette Kowal, Brenda Clough, Michael R. Underwood, Marie Brennan, Alyssa Wong, Paul Cornell, Paul Tremblay, Christopher Golden, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, and many, many more. The stories are easy to jump into, individual episodes are standalone (but contribute to a larger story arc), and each episode is available in ebook and audio formats, and takes about 40 minutes to enjoy.

Their newest serial Ninth Step Station launches this week. Created by Malka Older and written by Older, Fran Wilde, Jacqueline Koyanagi, and Curtis C. Chen, Ninth Step Station is the tale of two unlikely partners in a future Tokyo who solve a series of murders. Here’s the description.

A local cop. A US Peacekeeper. A divided Tokyo.
In the future, two mismatched cops must work together to solve crimes in a divided Tokyo.

Years of disaster and conflict have left Tokyo split between great powers. In the city of drone-enforced borders, bodymod black markets, and desperate resistance movements, US peacekeeper Emma Higashi is assigned to partner with Tokyo Metropolitan Police Detective Miyako Koreda. Together, they must race to solve a series of murders that test their relationship and threaten to overturn the balance of global power. And amid the chaos, they each need to decide what they are willing to do for peace.

Ninth Step Station is only one of the many offerings from Serial Box. Here’s a few of the others.

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New Treasures: Figures Unseen by Steve Rasnic Tem

New Treasures: Figures Unseen by Steve Rasnic Tem

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I’m still sorting through all the books I brought back from the World Fantasy Convention this year (which is kinda par for the course — it usually takes me 4-8 months to unpack from that con). Based on reading time and enjoyment over the past few months, my most productive period of the entire convention was the 10 minutes I spent in the Valancourt Booth.

I’ve already talked about several of the books I purchased there, including Michael McDowell’s The Complete Blackwater Saga and Harry Adam Knight’s The Fungus. But I haven’t yet mentioned Steve Rasnic Tem’s new book Figures Unseen, a fabulous collection of 35 of his best tales, as selected by the author.

In his long career Tem has received the World Fantasy, British Fantasy and Bram Stoker Awards. His novels include Excavation (1987), The Man on the Ceiling (2008, with Melanie Tem) and Blood Kin (2014), and his many collections include City Fishing (1999), The Far Side of the Lake (2001), Celestial Inventories (2013), and Out of the Dark (2016). Dan Simmons calls Tem “One of the finest and most productive writers of imaginative literature in North America,” and this collection is the perfect place to start if you want to sample some of his finest work. It includes many of my favorites — including the brilliant “City Fishing,” the tale of a father who takes his son on a very unusual fishing trip in the heart of an ancient city.

Figures Unseen also includes a fine introduction by Simon Strantzas, which I think explicates the effectiveness of Tem’s work better than anything else I’ve read. Here’s a small excerpt.

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The Future of Politics, a Desert Fantasy, and Murder in the City of the Dead: Spring Titles from Parvus Press

The Future of Politics, a Desert Fantasy, and Murder in the City of the Dead: Spring Titles from Parvus Press

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Early last year I wrote about a trio of books I discovered from a promising new publisher, Parvus Press. They were plenty interesting: Flotsam, by RJ Theodore, a steampunk space opera, and Vick’s Vultures & To Fall Among Vultures, the first two titles in Scott Warren’s Union Earth Privateers space opera. Parvus Press’s catalog was filled with an enticing assortment of new and forthcoming titles, especially for such a small company. They certainly made a fine first impression, and I made a note to keep close tabs on them.

While prowling the World Fantasy Convention in Baltimore I spotted Colin Coyle, one of the co-founders of Parvus, and after badgering him for three solid hours he cracked like a nut and started spilling secret intel on their 2019 titles. In a dark corner of the bar he grudgingly gave up details, glancing nervously over his shoulder the entire time, while I hastily scribbled notes.

Okay, it wasn’t exactly like that, but it can’t hurt if you picture it that way, so humor me a little. Besides, I did get some good quotes and lots of juicy book details out of Colin, and I’m willing to share them with you, so stop being so negative. Here’s all the secret pre-release info I gathered on the spring 2019 titles titles from Parvus Press. Many bothans died to bring us this information, so listen up.

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The Tome of the Living Dead: Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! edited by Otto Penzler

The Tome of the Living Dead: Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! edited by Otto Penzler

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For Christmas this year I got Alice a copy of The Big Book of Female Detectives, a 1136-page anthology edited by Otto Penzler. It’s the 13th (I think?) of Penzler’s massive pulp-style anthologies from Vintage, which he’s published one per year (roughly) since 2007. I’ve been cataloging them here as I stealthily acquire them all. They are:

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps — 2007
The Vampire Archives — 2009
The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories — 2010
Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! — 2011
The Big Book of Adventure Stories — 2011
The Big Book of Ghost Stories — 2012
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries — 2013
The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries — 2014
The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories — 2015
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper — 2016
The Big Book of Rogues and Villains –- 2017
The Big Book of Female Detectives — 2018

An oversight in my survey so far has been Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!, Penzler’s 2011 tribute to everyone’s favorite undead (“It’s so good, it’s a no-brainer.”) This one is packed with stories by Stephen King, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, HP Lovecraft, Hugh B. Cave, Robert Bloch, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert McCammon, Theodore Sturgeon, Seabury Quinn, Gahan Wilson, Ramsey Campbell, Micheal Swanwick, Joe R. Lansdale, Steve Rasnic Tem, Dale Bailey, Edgar Allen Poe, and many, many more — including a complete novel by Theodore Roscoe, Z is for Zombie (1989). I ordered a copy last year, and it turns out to be just as much fun as the previous volumes. Packed with fascinating intros and delicious pulp spot art, it makes an irresistible addition to your horror collection.

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Closing Out 2018 with Interzone Magazine

Closing Out 2018 with Interzone Magazine

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I don’t get to pick up British SF magazine Interzone as often as I like, though I buy it whenever I see it. I was lucky enough to find three issues recently on the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble, and they’ve help remind me what a terrific magazine it is. If you’re at all interested in what’s going on in modern SF, I urge you to check it out.

Interzone is published and edited by Andy Cox, who has assembled a top-notched team of writers, artists, and columnists. It is one of the sharpest-looking magazines on the market, with full color interiors and gorgeous art. The most recent three issues of the bi-monthly magazine (#276, 277, and 278, cover dated July-December 2018) include fiction from Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, Aliya Whiteley, Natalia Theodoridou, Fiona Moore, Rachael Cupp, James Warner, and many others. They also include some of the best columns and non-fiction in the business, including the long-running Ansible Link by David Langford (news and obits); my favorite film review column, Mutant Popcorn by Nick Lowe; the excellent Book Zone (book reviews); Andy Hedgecock’s Future Interrupted (column); Nina Allan’s Time Pieces (column); interviews, and guest editorials.

Here’s a few samples of that gorgeous interior art I was talking about.

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Future Treasures: Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds

Future Treasures: Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds

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Alastair Reynolds’ Revenger was one of the most acclaimed SF novels of 2016. It was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and won the Locus Award for Best Young Adult Book. SFX called it “By far the most enjoyable book Reynolds has ever written,” and The Guardian labeled it “”A swashbuckling thriller — Pirates of the Caribbean meets Firefly.” In his enthusiastic review for Black Gate, Brandon Crilly said:

Reynolds’ work is always fast-paced and interesting, weaving the detailed science with just enough of the fantastic to add that sense of wonder and a perfect balance of action and character work. Revenger, for example, has the pacing of Firefly or Star Wars, so that even as he’s explaining the steampunkiness (is that a word?) of the starships and personal technology in the novel, you’re never mired in an info-dump or bored by too much scientific description, just to understand how everything works.

Revenger is particularly good because it’s a very human story: it focuses on two sisters who want to escape their homeworld and sign on with a starship crew not for pure escapism like Luke Skywalker, but specifically to earn money to help their father’s struggling business. What begins as a story of adventure and wild-eyed wonder as these sisters get to know their very first crew becomes a dark and harrowing tale almost immediately, as Reynolds takes his protagonists through multiple twists and unexpected locales.

The long-awaited sequel Shadow Captain will be published by Orbit on January 15, 2019. It is 448 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats. Get more details and read the complete first chapter here.

Vintage Treasures: The Great Science Fiction Series, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander

Vintage Treasures: The Great Science Fiction Series, edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander

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One of the things I like to do with Vintage Treasures posts is to shine a light on fascinating genre books from the 20th Century, and point out how inexpensive they are. Everyone like to share their hobbies; mine is collecting science fiction paperbacks and — unlike stamp or coin collecting, say, or vintage toys — virtually the entire field is available to you. With the exception of unique autographed items and the like, I’m unaware of a single science fiction paperback, no matter how rare, that costs more than a few hundred dollars. I’ve collected tens of thousands, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never paid more than 20 bucks for any one of them.

Hardcovers, of course, are a different story. I’ve dealt with a few extremely collectible books (remind me to tell you the tale of the most valuable book in my collection, the Meisha Merlin edition of A Game of Thrones, some time), but it’s not something I make a habit of. In general I stay away from the limited edition collectible market, which I think is a particular disease that afflicts collectors like me.

But every once in a while I’ll stumble on a rare or collectible title that piques my interest. That’s exactly happened with The Great Science Fiction Series, a 1980 Harper & Row hardcover anthology edited by Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander, which I found on eBay over the summer. I was struck by it for three reasons. One, because I’d never seen it before, and I certainly thought I was familiar with all of Fred Pohl’s anthologies by now. Two, I thought it was a great idea: a collection of twenty stories from the best SF series from 1944-1980, each with an accompanying essay by the author. And three, it was ridiculously expensive, over $140. A quick search on AbeBooks confirmed that copies were available, starting around $80. Used copies on Amazon started at over $100.

I couldn’t find any literature that explained why the book was so pricey, but it didn’t seem any particular mystery. Likely copies were very scare, which would explain why I’d never seen it. There’s never been a reprint, paperback or otherwise. The book simply wasn’t very well known. Of course… if it wasn’t very well known, that meant that sooner or later someone would sell a copy without knowing what they had. I set an automated eBay search, and sure enough I got a hit less than two months later. That’s how I acquired the virtually new copy above for less than $20.

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New Treasures: Clarkesworld Year Nine, Volumes One & Two, edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

New Treasures: Clarkesworld Year Nine, Volumes One & Two, edited by Neil Clarke and Sean Wallace

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It’s hard to believe Clarkesworld magazine launched over a decade ago (in October 2006, believe it or not). I remember when Neil Clarke announced it, as sort of a side project/marketing scheme for his online Clarkesworld bookstore. I was already a regular customer — Clarkesworld was far and away the best source for small press magazines, and they sold a lot of the print edition of Black Gate — and I was curious to see what he could do with it.

The rest, as they say, is history. The bookstore shut down a few years later, but the magazine exploded. Last time I counted it had a World Fantasy Award, three Hugo Awards, a British Fantasy Award, and in 2013 it received more Hugo nominations for short fiction than all the leading print magazines combined. Clarkesworld keeps getting bigger and more ambitious every year… although, in one way at least, things haven’t changed much since 2006: I’m still intensely curious to see where Neil and Sean will take it next.

I don’t have time to read every issue, so I greatly appreciate their tradition of producing an annual print volume every year collecting a complete year of fiction under a single cover. Last year’s Year Eight was a huge 448 pages and, given how much the magazine has grown in the past year, I was looking forward to seeing just how big Year Nine would be. When I finally set eyes on it (at the Clarkesworld booth at the World Fantasy convention) I wasn’t disappointed. For the first time it’s been broken into two books, both over 300 pages.

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The Omnibus Volumes of Sean Russell: Moontide and Magic Rise

The Omnibus Volumes of Sean Russell: Moontide and Magic Rise

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Art by Braldt Bralds and Shutterstock

Canadian fantasy writer Sean Russell produced three popular paperback series with his publisher DAW in the 90s, each exactly two books long:

Initiate Brother (The Initiate Brother, 1991, Gatherer of Clouds, 1992)
Moontide and Magic Rise (World Without End, 1995, Sea Without a Shore, 1996)
The River into Darkness (Beneath the Vaulted Hills, 1997, The Compass of the Soul, 1998)

These were all handsome volumes, and I collected them enthusiastically. By the early 2000s Russell had switched publishers, to Avon Eos (where he produced the Swan’s War trilogy), and after that he exited the fantasy genre entirely. He’s currently writing an ongoing series of novels about the HMS Themis, a Royal Navy frigate at the time of the French Revolution, under the name Sean Thomas Russell.

Over the last few years DAW has been collecting Russell’s 90s fantasy in large-size omnibus editions. The first, The Initiate Brother Duology, appeared in 2013, and The River Into Darkness was released just three months ago (and we covered it here as part of our look at the Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of October 2018). And just a few weeks ago I stumbled on Moontide and Magic Rise at Barnes & Noble, a hefty 820-page tome released in May, collecting World Without End and Sea Without a Shore.

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Guilds, Glasses, and Galaxies: Joshua Palmatier’s 2018 Kickstarter Anthologies

Guilds, Glasses, and Galaxies: Joshua Palmatier’s 2018 Kickstarter Anthologies

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There’s a lot of different ways to have a career in SF and fantasy. Don’t believe me? Just look at the fascinating case of Joshua Palmatier.

Over the last decade Joshua has built a formidable reputation as an author, producing both an acclaimed fantasy trilogy (The Throne of Amenkor) and a popular science fiction trilogy (Erenthrall) with DAW books. Not content with merely being an author, he partnered with Patricia Bray to co-edit a pair of DAW anthologies, After Hours: Tales from the Ur-Bar (2011), and The Modern Fae’s Guide to Surviving Humanity (2012). Shortly after that DAW ended their monthly anthology program. Undaunted, Joshua launched his own small press, Zombies Need Brains, and over the next three years produced half a dozen additional anthologies with editors Bray and S.C. Butler. As author, editor, and now publisher, Joshua has moved steadily from success to success.

2018 was perhaps his most ambitious and successful year yet. He delivered three complete anthologies funded with a simultaneous Kickstarter campaign, and successfully funded three more in October. I’m not much of a Kickstarter nut, but I backed the first project. Not simply due to my admiration for Joshua (which was considerable), but because one of the books, Guilds & Glaives, contained stories from no less than four Black Gate authors: David B. Coe, James Enge, Howard Andrew Jones, and Violette Malan. The others, Second Round: A Return to the Ur-Bar and The Razor’s Edge, were almost as appealing for different reasons, and I consider the set to be one of the best-kept secrets of genre publishing in 2018. Here’s a closer look at all three.

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