Black Gate

Tim Powers is certainly best known as a novelist. His novels include two World Fantasy Award Winners, Last Call (1992) and Declare (2001), as well as the Philip K. Dick Award winners The Anubis Gates (1983) and Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985). He’s also the author of six collections, most published in limited edition hardcovers through William Schafer’s Subterranean Press.

His newest collection, Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, is his first major short fiction retrospective and, at 488 pages, is more than twice the size of any of his previous collections. It contains twenty tales of science fiction and fantasy, including half a dozen previously uncollected novellas and stories originally published as limited edition hardcovers or chapbooks from places like Subterranean Press, Charnel House, Axolotl Press, and others. Most are now priced out of reach of any but the most determined collector, so finally having them in a mass market hardcover is a godsend to Powers fans.

Here’s the description.

Twenty pulse-pounding, mind-bending tales of science fiction, twisted metaphysics, and supernatural wonder from the two-time World Fantasy and Philip K. Dick Award winning author of The Anubis Gates and On Stranger Tides.

A complete palette of story-telling colors from Powers, including acclaimed tale “The Bible Repairman,” where a psychic handyman who supernaturally eliminates troublesome passages of the Bible for paying clients finds the remains of his own broken soul on the line when tasked with rescuing the kidnapped ghost of a rich man’s daughter. Time travel takes a savage twist in “Salvage and Demolition,” where the chance discovery of a long-lost manuscript throws a down-and-out book collector back in time to 1950s San Francisco where he must prevent an ancient Sumeric inscription from dooming millions in the future. Humor and horror mix in “Sufficient unto the Day,” when a raucous Thanksgiving feast takes a dark turn as the invited ghosts of relatives past accidentally draw soul-stealing demons into the family television set. And obsession and vengeance survive on the other side of death in “Down and Out in Purgatory,” where the soul of a man lusting for revenge attempts to eternally eliminate the killer who murdered the love of his life. Wide-ranging, wonder-inducing, mind-bending — these and other tales make up the complete shorter works of a modern-day master of science fiction and fantasy.

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Here’s one that slipped under my radar when it was originally published by Tor in September. It’s the second novel from Sage Walker. Her first, Whiteout (1996) won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Gary Wolfe reviews her sophomore effort at Locus:

The Man in the Tree is a generation starship tale… but Walker makes a couple of interesting choices that set The Man in the Tree apart. In the first place, Kybele is still in the decades-long preparatory phase before leaving orbit, with contract workers arriving and departing, and the culling of the population – to determine who will be allowed to remain among the 30,000 on the actual voyage – is an ongoing source of tension. In the second place, Walker’s plot is that of a police procedural murder mystery. One of those contract workers, Cash Ryan, is found impaled on a tree, having either jumped or been thrown from a nearby high-rise tower.

Here’s the description.

Humanity’s last hope of survival lies in space…but will we even get there?

Helt Borresen is an Incident Analyst. What that means is that aboard the seed ship Kybele, he is the closest thing that the organization has to a security officer. But he doesn’t think that it’ll be a big part of his job, as all the candidates have been carefully screened.

Why the need for a seed ship? Because our planet is toast and the colonists that leave our world are the best shot that we have for our species to continue.

Everything is set… and then someone is found hanging dead just weeks before the launch. Fear and paranoia spread as the death begins to look more and more like a murder. The authorities want the case settled quickly and quietly so as not to cause panic.

And Helt is the one to prevent a murderer from sabotaging the entire mission.

The Man in the Tree was published by Tor Books on September 12, 2017. It is 384 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by John Harris. Read Chapter One at Tor.com.

C. Courtney Joyner has more than 25 movies to his credit, including the Viggo Mortensen film Prison. His new novel Nemo Rising began as a screenplay, as Joyner reveals in the appendix, “Nemo Rising: From Script to Novel and Back Again.” Here’s a snippet.

A kiddie matinee, with popcorn boxes and cups of soda flying overhead, was my introduction to Jules Verne. The movie was Mysterious Island, that grand and very loose adaptation of Verne’s semi-sequel to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which featured that wonderful giant crab, created by Ray Harryhausen, and a mesmerizing Captain Nemo in the form of actor Herbert Lom. I was about eight years old, and hadn’t read any Verne yet, but I knew who he was, thanks to monster magazines, comic books, [and] paperbacks… I wish I could pretend my interest in Verne, and all that he created, had more sophisticated roots, but the movies and comic books touched the nerve that made me want to discover the real thing and sit down and read.

Joyner sounds like a man after our own heart. I get the feeling he and our Saturday morning blogger Ryan Harvey would hit it off especially well. His script version of Nemo Rising (a sample of which he includes in the appendix) was a sequel to Verne’s adventures of Captain Nemo; he turned it into a novel and attracted the attention of Tor Books, no mean feat. Here’s the description.

Sea monsters are sinking ships up and down the Atlantic Coast. Enraged that his navy is helpless against this onslaught and facing a possible World War as a result, President Ulysses S. Grant is forced to ask for assistance from the notorious Captain Nemo, in Federal prison for war crimes and scheduled for execution.

Grant returns Nemo’s submarine, the infamous Victorian Steampunk marvel Nautilus, and promises a full Presidential pardon if Nemo hunts down and destroys the source of the attacks. Accompanied by the beautiful niece of Grant’s chief advisor, Nemo sets off under the sea in search of answers. Unfortunately, the enemy may be closer than they realize…

Nemo Rising was published by Tor Books on December 26, 2017. It is 368 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Raymond Swanland. Read the first chapter here.