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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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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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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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Future Treasures: Gate Crashers by Patrick S Tomlinson

Future Treasures: Gate Crashers by Patrick S Tomlinson

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Gate Crashers Patrick S Tomlinson-smallPatrick S. Tomlinson’s debut novel was The Ark, a murder mystery set on a generation ship just before it arrived at its destination. Publishers Weekly called it “Impressive,” saying “Tomlinson’s pacing is beyond reproach, as he deftly crafts an ever more elaborate web of intrigue within the self-contained setting.” The Ark was published by Angry Robot, and it became the opening book in the Children of a Dead Earth trilogy, which wrapped up last year.

Tomlinson’s newest book arrives next week, and it looks like a standalone novel — an easier bite to chew if your reading time is as precious as mine this month. Joel Cunningham at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog says “Gate Crashers is a story of space exploration and humanity’s first contact with aliens, plus a healthy dose of irreverent humor.”

The only thing as infinite and expansive as the universe is humanity’s unquestionable ability to make bad decisions.

Humankind ventures further into the galaxy than ever before… and immediately causes an intergalactic incident. In their infinite wisdom, the crew of the exploration vessel Magellan, or as she prefers “Maggie,” decides to bring the alien structure they just found back to Earth. The only problem? The aliens are awfully fond of that structure.

A planet full of bumbling, highly evolved primates has just put itself on a collision course with a far wider, and more hostile, galaxy that is stranger than anyone can possibly imagine.

Gate Crashers will be published by Tor Books on June 26, 2018. It is 416 pages, priced at $18.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover art is uncredited. Read Chapter One here.

See all our recent coverage of the best upcoming SF & fantasy here.

Steampunk Critical Mass: The Signal Airship Novels by Robyn Bennis

Steampunk Critical Mass: The Signal Airship Novels by Robyn Bennis

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Last year Tor published The Guns Above, the first installment in Robyn Bennis’ Signal Airship military fantasy series, and Ann Aguirre called it “Marvelous, witty and action-packed steampunk… she honest to God made me believe you could build an airship from spare parts.” I’ve gotten pretty jaded towards author blurbs over the years, but I gotta admit that one piqued my interest.

It was hardly the only good press the book received. Liz Bourke at Tor.com labeled it “immensely entertaining, fast-paced adventure,” and Patricia Briggs said it was “full of sass and terrific characters.” That all sounded pretty compelling, but I’m a guy who likes to have a couple of installments at hand before I dive into a new adventure series. So I was pleased to see By Fire Above arrive right on time last month. Here’s the description.

“All’s fair in love and war,” according to airship captain Josette Dupre, until her hometown of Durum becomes occupied by the enemy and her mother a prisoner of war. Then it becomes, “Nothing’s fair except bombing those Vins to high hell.”

Before she can rescue her town, however, Josette must maneuver her way through the nest of overstuffed vipers that make up Garnia’s military and royal leaders in order to drum up support. The foppish and mostly tolerated Mistral crew member Lord Bernat steps in to advise her, along with his very attractive older brother.

Between noble scheming, under-trained recruits, and supply shortages, Josette and the crew of the Mistral figure out a way to return to Durum ― only to discover that when the homefront turns into the frontlines, things are more dangerous than they seem.

Now that the series has reached critical mass (well, two books), it has a lot more appeal, and I’ll clear away some time this summer to give it a try. By Fire Above was published by Tor Books on May 15, 2018. It is 368 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital version. We covered The Guns Above here.

Gods and Robots: Booklist‘s Best New Books Include Starless and The Robots of Gotham

Gods and Robots: Booklist‘s Best New Books Include Starless and The Robots of Gotham

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The good folks at Booklist, the flagship publication of the American Library Association, regularly select the Best New Books, and this week two genre releases made the cut: Jacqueline Carey’s Starless, which “may well be the epic fantasy of the year,” and Todd McAulty’s debut The Robots of Gotham, which they proclaim is “thrilling, epic SF.”

John Keogh’s starred review of The Robots of Gotham appeared online this week:

Machine intelligences rule most of the world, human governments are rapidly losing their power, a war-ravaged U.S. is on the brink of descending into chaos, and a mysterious new plague is on the loose. In Chicago, one man finds himself at the nexus of a complex web of secrets that threatens to upend the world as we know it. This debut novel beautifully combines a postapocalyptic man-versus-machine conflict and a medical thriller. The world is immersive and detailed, the characters have depth, the writing is assured, the plotting intelligent, and the pacing about perfect. McAulty’s take on how AI might evolve gives the premise a unique twist. The story is action-packed, starting with a boom (literally) and driving you along from one crisis to the next. The action rarely lets up, yet it never becomes tiresome… This is thrilling, epic sf.

And here’s a snippet from Diana Tixier Herald’s review of Starless.

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