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Author: John ONeill

Experience an Alternate History Space Program with Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut Series

Experience an Alternate History Space Program with Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut Series

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The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky

Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2014 (after some shenanigans that caused it to be weirdly disqualified in 2013). All that — not to mention her other accolades, including multiple Nebula nominations for her popular Glamourist Histories fantasy series — helped make it one of the most talked-about SF stories of the last decade. Read the complete text at Tor.com.

“The Lady Astronaut of Mars” is the tale of Elma York, who led the expedition that paved the way to life on Mars, and the impossible decision she faces when she’s given the opportunity to return to space years later. Mary returns to the world of “Lady Astronaut” with her debut science fiction novel The Calculating Stars, available tomorrow from Tor Books. Fast on its heels is the sequel The Fated Sky, shipping in August. Tor.com offered us the following teaser back in September.

The novels will be prequels, greatly expanding upon the world that was first revealed in “Lady Astronaut.” The first novel, The Calculating Stars will present one perspective of the prequel story, followed closely by the second novel The Fated Sky, which will present an opposite perspective — one tightly woven into the first novel. Kowal elaborates: “The first novel begins on March 3, 1952 about five minutes before a meteorite slams into the Chesapeake Bay and wipes out D.C. I’ve been doing historical fantasy and I keep saying that this is historical science fiction, even though I know full well that ‘alternate history’ is already a genre. It’s so much fun to play in.”

Omnivoracious selected The Calculating Stars as one of 15 Highly Anticipated SFF Reads for Summer 2018, and just today the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog picked it as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of July

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Shadows, Robots, and Warrior Monks: Amazon Selects the Five Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of June

Shadows, Robots, and Warrior Monks: Amazon Selects the Five Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of June

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Amazon Top Five SF & Fantasy in June

Amazon closes out a month of great books with their 5 Top Picks for Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of June. The list includes some pretty familiar titles, including Peng Shepherd’s The Book of M, Yoon Ha Lee’s Revenant Gun, Stephanie Garber’s Legendary, and the debut novel by Black Gate‘s own Todd McAulty. Here’s their take.

The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

Robots have taken over most of the world, but not quite in the way you’d expect. Some have fought their way to dominion. Others have been voted into power by human citizens who think AIs will make better decisions. Readers who enjoyed the complex robot-human relationships within Robopocalypse and the investigations in World War Z about how institutions function (or don’t) in the face of species-changing event will happily sink their teeth into The Robots of Gotham.

See the complete list here.

Can a Trilogy Have Six Books? The Legends of the First Empire by Michael J. Sullivan

Can a Trilogy Have Six Books? The Legends of the First Empire by Michael J. Sullivan

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Age of Myth-small Age of Swords-small Age of War-small

Every time an author wraps up a trilogy, we bake a cake at the Black Gate rooftop headquarters.

Of course, this sometimes leads to anxiety. Is the series really wrapped up? Are there going to be more books? It’s not like the publisher slaps a sticker on the book saying Finito!, exactly. What if we bake a cake, and it turns out there’s four more books? Won’t we look stupid.

Ah, the hell with it. It’s cake! We’ll be forgiven. Probably. In that spirit, we were all dressed up to celebrate the arrival of Age of War, the third and (final? maybe?) book in Michael J. Sullivan’s The Legends of the First Empire series, when one of Goth Chick’s interns did some actual research (i.e. spent five minutes on Sullivan’s website). Turns out there’s a whopping six books planned for the series. Who knew?

Fortunately for those of us on staff who love cake (meaning, like, everybody), the first three books in the series will be the only ones published by Del Rey, so Age of War is an ending, of sorts. Good enough for us. Cake for everyone!

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The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of June 2018

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of June 2018

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Brief Cases-small Revenant Gun-small The Robots of Gotham McAulty-small

June has been a fantastic month for new books. My TBR (to-be-read) pile is reaching structurally unsound heights already, and Jeff Somers at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog isn’t helping matters any by showcasing nearly two dozen of the best new releases. Here’s a few of his more interesting selections.

Brief Cases, by Jim Butcher (Ace Books, 448 pages, $28 hardcover/$14.99 digital, June 5, 2018)

Butcher offers up 12 stories set in the world of Harry Dresden, wizard and private investigator working an alternate, magic-filled Chicago. Several stories follow Harry’s adventures with River Shoulders, a smart sasquatch with a half-human son. Others involve Harry’s apprentice Molly Carpenter, crime boss John Marcone, and even Wyatt Earp. The novella “Zoo Day” follows Harry as he takes his young daughter Maggie to the zoo — and since this is Harry Dresden, you know there’s more in store than daddy/daughter bonding. Dresden fans may have encountered some of these stories before, but rereading them in this collection, alongside one all-new tale, should help ease the pain for waiting for Harry’s next novel-length adventure.

Our previous coverage of Harry Dresden includes Barbara Barrett 2014 article “A Wizard is a Wizard is a Wizard — Except When He’s Harry Dresden.”

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Experience the Terrors of the Mythos in the Old West in Down Darker Trails

Experience the Terrors of the Mythos in the Old West in Down Darker Trails

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One of the many things I love about the Call of Cthulhu RPG — besides the prospect of gathering with close friends to cheerfully go insane together — is the rich array of settings. The core game is set in 1930s America, where Lovecraft (who died in 1937) set virtually all of his fiction, and that serves the pulp horror aesthetic nicely. But over the years Chaosium, and other publishers, have produced several top-notch supplements giving players the option to adventure in a wide range of times and places.

These include Cthulhu Now (1987), Terror Australis (1987), King of Chicago (1992), The Cairo Guidebook (1995), Atomic-Age Cthulhu (2013), and many, many more. The Dreamlands, Victorian London, Scotland, even the Orient Express… no other game invites you to go stark, raving mad in such finely detailed surroundings.

However, CoC has been sorely lacking a weird western sourcebook, so I was very pleased to see Kevin Ross and his friends at Chaosium release Down Darker Trails, a massive full-color 256-page hardcover which lovingly brings Mythos horror to the old west. The book is an excellent addition to Chaosium’s catalog, and contains a splendid historical re-telling of the American Territories, plenty of famous individuals, two complete towns, four western-themed Lost Worlds (including the weird subterranean world of K’n-yan, and the eerie Shadow Desert), and two complete introductory adventures.

Down Darker Trails invites you to play American Indian heroes and famous gunslingers, visit famous sites, and discover just how deeply the terror and mystery of the Great Old Ones has seeped into the West.

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Future Treasures: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

Future Treasures: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio

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Empire of Silence-smallI’m definitely in the mood for an immersive, baroque space opera, with aliens, mystery, epic space battles, and even space gladiators. Wait, space gladiators?

Well, I’m not inclined to be picky right now so, sure, bring on the space gladiators. They’re a major part of Christopher Ruocchio’s debut novel Empire of Silence, the opening volume of The Sun Eater, which Eric Flint calls “epic-scale space opera in the tradition of Dune.” It arrives in hardcover from DAW next month.

Hadrian Marlowe, a man revered as a hero and despised as a murderer, chronicles his tale in th galaxy-spanning debut of the Sun Eater series, merging the best of space opera and epic fantasy.

It was not his war.

The galaxy remembers him as a hero: the man who burned every last alien Cielcin from the sky. They remember him as a monster: the devil who destroyed a sun, casually annihilating four billion human lives — even the Emperor himself — against Imperial orders.

But Hadrian was not a hero. He was not a monster. He was not even a soldier.

On the wrong planet, at the right time, for the best reasons, Hadrian Marlowe starts down a path that can only end in fire. He flees his father and a future as a torturer only to be left stranded on a strange, backwater world.

Forced to fight as a gladiator and navigate the intrigues of a foreign planetary court, Hadrian must fight a war he did not start, for an Empire he does not love, against an enemy he will never understand.

Christopher Ruocchio is the co-editor (with Tony Daniel) of the new Baen anthology Star Destroyers, and (with Hank Davis) the upcoming Space Pioneers.

Empire of Silence will be published by DAW Books on July 3, 2018. It is 624 pages, priced at $26 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Sam Weber, who also painted the cover to Medusa Uploaded and Ken Liu’s The Wall of Storms.

Vintage Treasures: Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois’ 40-Volume Reprint Library

Vintage Treasures: Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois’ 40-Volume Reprint Library

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Bestiary Dann Dozois-small Aliens Among Us-small

The impending release of Gardner Dozois’ 35th and final Year’s Best anthology next month brings us to the end of an era. Hard as it is to believe, after his final books are released in the next few months, there will be no more magazines, stories or anthologies from one of the most gifted editors the field has ever seen.

Many readers are unaware that, as prolific as Gardner was as a magazine and Year’s Best editor — 17 years at the helm of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and 35 years as the editor of the annual Year’s Best Science Fiction — his greatest contribution to the field, at least in terms of raw numbers, was as an editor of standalone anthologies. He produced many dozens, including 21 volumes collecting stories from Asimov’s, such as Isaac Asimov’s Detectives (1998) and Isaac Asimov’s Halloween (2001), most co-edited with Sheila Williams.

But his most fruitful partnership was with Jack Dann, which whom he co-edited some 40 themed science fiction and fantasy anthologies between 1976 and 2009, almost all paperback originals with Ace Books. These included 22 volumes in the Exclamatory Series, called that because the anthologies had one-word titles with an exclamation point, like Magicats! (1984), Bestiary! (1985), and Invaders! (1993), and an additional 18 themed reprint volumes, such as Armageddons (1999), Aliens Among Us (2000), and A.I.s (2004).

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The End of an Era: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois

The End of an Era: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois

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The Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection-small The Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection-back-small

We lost Gardner Dozois last month. It was a terrible blow to the field. I’ve seen plenty of somber discussion among fans about whether or not Gardner was the finest editor science fiction has ever seen, and there’s no doubt in my mind he’s in the running.

Gardner devoted his entire career to science fiction, and his accomplishments were extraordinary. He won the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times during his 19-year tenure at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Nineteen years is an amazing run, but it’s barely half the 35 years he spent as editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, the de facto SF yearbook. I read the sixth volume in 1989 and I’ve looked forward to every one ever since.

The last volume will be published in less than two week, and its publication is bittersweet. It’s not the final book we’ll have from Gardner. His huge fantasy anthology The Book of Magic — with brand new stories by George R.R. Martin, John Crowley, Tim Powers, Scott Lynch, Eleanor Arnason, Garth Nix, Ysabeau Wilce, Liz Williams, Kate Elliott, and many others — is coming in October, and The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year’s Best Science Fiction is scheduled to be published in February. But the arrival of the final Dozois Year’s Best is very definitely the end of an era.

There will never be another editor like him. Cherish this book while you can.

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Robots! Spies! The Toronto Star on the Best New Science Fiction Books

Robots! Spies! The Toronto Star on the Best New Science Fiction Books

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The Robots of Gotham McAulty-small Gate-Crashers-Patrick-S-Tomlinson-medium The Book of M-small

Last Friday the Toronto Star selected the Best New Science Fiction Books of the summer, and it’s an auspicious list: four new novels by Todd McAulty, Patrick S. Tomlinson, Peng Shepherd, and Hannu Rajaniemi. At the top of the list is The Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty, released Tuesday by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

SF fans rejoice! Your summer beach reading has arrived. Todd McAulty’s debut novel is a massive, fast-paced, action-packed epic… with robots!

Lots of robots. In the year 2083 the world’s geopolitical order has been shaken up by the rise of sentient machines, with many countries now being ruled by godlike sovereign AIs, and robots of all different shapes, sizes and functionality rubbing shoulders in the streets with humans.

Canadian tech entrepreneur Barry Simcoe is visiting Chicago, which is now part of an occupied zone governed by a Venezuelan-led consortium of powers, when he gets sucked into a complicated web of plots and counterplots that lead all the way to the top of the global machine hierarchy, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.

Even more than the fascinating and fully realized world it presents, what makes The Robots of Gotham such a great ride is its sheer narrative drive. Every page has the fierce readability of early Neal Stephenson, which is as high praise as it gets. Enjoy the summer.

Read the first chapter of The Robots of Gotham at The Portalist, and see the complete list of Best New Science Fiction Books here.

Explore the Vast and Mysterious Universe in The Final Frontier, edited by Neil Clarke

Explore the Vast and Mysterious Universe in The Final Frontier, edited by Neil Clarke

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The Final Frontier Neil Clarke-smallNeil Clarke is the editor of the acclaimed Clarkesworld magazine, as well as the Best Science Fiction of the Year series from Night Shade Books, now in its third year. He also dabbles in themed anthologies, and they have been excellent. They include Galactic Empires and a splendid collection of robot stories, More Human Than Human.

His anthologies pretty rigorously exclude any classic SF, and in fact tend to focus almost exclusively on stories published after 2002 (which I assume is when he began reading the magazines regularly). This laser focus on modern writers makes him almost unique among modern genre anthologists and — for me at least — means that his books have been an invaluable tool for discovering great new writers. If, like me, your exposure to science fiction skews pretty heavily towards the 20th Century, Neil’s fine books may be just the antidote you need to bring you up to date on where SF is headed today.

So I was very excited to see Night Shade announce a brand new reprint anthology from Neil. The Final Frontier arrives in three weeks and includes tales from Nancy Kress, Ken Liu, James Patrick Kelly, Carrie Vaughn, Peter Watts, Greg Egan, Vandana Singh, Michael Swanwick, Tobias S. Buckell, and many others. Here’s the description.

The vast and mysterious universe is explored in this reprint anthology from award-winning editor and anthologist Neil Clarke (Clarkesworld magazine, The Best Science Fiction of the Year).

The urge to explore and discover is a natural and universal one, and the edge of the unknown is expanded with each passing year as scientific advancements inch us closer and closer to the outer reaches of our solar system and the galaxies beyond them.

Generations of writers have explored these new frontiers and the endless possibilities they present in great detail. With galaxy-spanning adventures of discovery and adventure, from generations ships to warp drives, exploring new worlds to first contacts, science fiction writers have given readers increasingly new and alien ways to look out into our broad and sprawling universe.

The Final Frontier delivers stories from across this literary spectrum, a reminder that the universe is far large and brimming with possibilities than we could ever imagine, as hard as we may try.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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