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Author: John ONeill

io9 on the Must-Read Science Fiction and Fantasy of July

io9 on the Must-Read Science Fiction and Fantasy of July

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Afterlife Marcus Sakey-small In Evil Times Melinda Snodgrass-small The Best of Subterranean-small

Over at io9, Cheryl Eddy has been doing the hard work of cataloging the best new science fiction and fantasy month after month. Her July list — packed with brand new releases by Greg Egan, Charles Stross, Nancy Kress, Gardner Dozois, Harry Turtledove, Jay Posey, Nina Allan, Sam J. Miller, Rachel Caine, Kay Kenyon, Carrie Vaughn, Naomi Kritzer, Adam Christopher, and many others — is one of the best yet. Here’s a few of the highlights.

Marcus Sakey is the author of the million-copy bestselling Brilliance trilogy. His new novel Afterlife is set right here in Chicago, and has already been optioned by Imagine Entertainment and producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.

In this dystopian romance, a pair of FBI agents investigating a Chicago terrorist attack fall in love — a circumstance complicated by the fact that one is dead and one is still alive.

Afterlife was published by Thomas & Mercer on July 18, 2017. It is 318 pages, priced at $15.95 in trade paperback and $4.99 for the digital edition.

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Future Treasures: Blackthorne, Volume Two of The Malorum Gates by Stina Leicht

Future Treasures: Blackthorne, Volume Two of The Malorum Gates by Stina Leicht

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Cold Iron Stina Leicht-small Black Thorne-small

Stina Leicht’s first two novels were Of Blood and Honey (2011), which Sean Stiennon reviewed for us here, and And Blue Skies From Pain (2012). In 2015 she released the first novel in her new flintlock epic fantasy series, Cold Iron.

Okay, I’m not an expert on flintlock epic fantasy. In fact, I kinda thought the publisher was pulling my leg. Flintlock fantasy? Come on, you just made that up so that you’d have a section to file this under. But I did a Google search and, holy cats, it’s a legit genre and everything. Examples include Brian McClellan’s Powder Mage trilogy, D.B. Jackson’s Thieftaker Chronicles, and Django Wexler’s Shadow Campaigns series. (Check out this list for more. Use it to amaze your friends at parties!)

Blackthorne, the sequel to Cold Iron, arrives in hardcover next month from Saga Press. I have an advance copy in house and, damn. This is a big book. The first two volumes total nearly 1,400 pages. If flintlock fantasy is your thing, this book is like five pounds of Christmas. (Also, if flintlock fantasy is your thing, you’re clearly a lot more hip than I am. Don’t get excited, that ain’t much of an accomplishment.)

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New Treasures: Scourge by Gail Z Martin

New Treasures: Scourge by Gail Z Martin

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Scourge Gail Z Martin-smallAccording to the publicity material I have on hand, Gail Z. Martin is a bestselling writer… but that doesn’t mean I know which of her various novels have actually cracked the bestseller lists. There’s a lot of possibilities. She’s produced no less than four series in the last ten years, including seven volumes in the Chronicles of the Necromancer, four in the Ascendant Kingdoms series, three Deadly Curiosities books, and Iron and Blood, the opening book in a new steampunk series co-authored with her husband Larry N. Martin.

Her latest is Scourge, in which three brothers must find out who is controlling the abominations in a city beset by monsters. It’s the opening novel in the brand new Darkhurst series, on sale now from Solaris.

The city-state of Ravenwood is wealthy, powerful, and corrupt. Merchant Princes and Guild Masters wager fortunes to outmaneuver League rivals for the king’s favor and advantageous trading terms. Lord Mayor Ellor Machison wields assassins, blood witches, and forbidden magic to assure that his powerful patrons get what they want, no matter the cost.

Corran, Rigan, and Kell Valmonde are Guild Undertakers, left to run their family’s business when guards murdered their father and monsters killed their mother. Their grave magic enables them to help souls pass to the After and banish vengeful spirits. Rigan’s magic is unusually strong and enables him to hear the confessions of the dead, the secrets that would otherwise be taken to the grave.

When the toll exacted by monsters and brutal guards hits close to home and ghosts expose the hidden sins of powerful men, Corran, Rigan and Kell become targets in a deadly game and face a choice: obey the Guild, or fight back and risk everything.

Scourge was published by Solaris on July 11, 2017. It is 400 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 in digital format.

No Slimy Monsters, No Princesses: The Bantam Spectra Omnibus Robert Silverberg

No Slimy Monsters, No Princesses: The Bantam Spectra Omnibus Robert Silverberg

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Robert Silverberg The Masks of Time Born With the Dead Dying Inside-small Robert Silverberg Three Novels The World Inside Thorns Downward to the Earth-small

Robert Silverberg practically introduced me to science fiction. His novel Collision Course was one of the first SF novels I ever read, and he’s one of the first authors I collected. Like a lot of Campbell-era SF, Collision Course is about humans thrusting out into space in an aggressive age of empire-building, and our first encounter with an equally aggressive alien race with the same dreams. The copy I read was the 1977 Ace edition with a cover (by an uncredited artist) that casually gave away the ending.

Ace Books, run by Jim Baen and publisher Tom Doherty, was Silverberg’s paperback publisher in the US for many years. By the 80s, however, Silverberg had been lured over to the Bantam Spectra line under Lou Aronica. Bantam pulled out all the stops for Silverberg, reprinting much of his vast backlist with gorgeous new artwork by Welsh artist Jim Burns. My collection includes over a dozen Bantam Silverberg’s, including his Majipoor novels, Gilgamesh the King (1984), To Open the Sky (1984), and many others,

But it was only a few months ago that I discovered that Bantam produced two omnibus Silverberg collections in 1988. It was purely by luck, as I was hunting down a copy of Downward to the Earth, and instead found a seller offering something called Three Novels: The World Inside, Thorns, Downward to the Earth for just $3. I quickly searched around and found there was a least one earlier volume, collecting The Masks of Time, Born With the Dead, and Dying Inside. I expect they had very low circulation, because I’ve never seen them before.

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July 2017 Clarkesworld Now Available

July 2017 Clarkesworld Now Available

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Clarkesworld July 2017 smallIn his editorial this issue, Neil Clarke reflects on the heart attack that nearly killed him five years ago.

When the universe calls, you have no choice but to listen. Five years ago this month, it sent me a message in the form of a near-fatal heart attack. It was the sort of thing that not only caught me off guard, but my family, friends, and doctors as well. As I lay there in the critical care unit, the weight of what happened hit me hard, providing an odd sort of clarity and a revised outlook on life. I had some choices to make, a lot of alone time before visitors to think about it.

Over the years, I’ve blogged and editorialized many of the details of that time, but today is about celebrating an anniversary and pushing forward. Not only did I survive, but I learned a lot of valuable lessons. It was a crappy way to get the message, but I’m very glad I did. At the end of the first year, I took back the anniversary by returning to Readercon — the scene of the crime — and successfully ending the Kickstarter campaign for Upgraded, my first anthology.

Five years later, I have a year’s best series and several more anthologies, watched Clarkesworld turn ten, and made it to my fiftieth birthday. Earlier this year and thanks to my wife’s return to the workforce, I was able to quit the day job and have the time to pursue my dream of becoming a full-time editor. Technically, I am full-time now, but the goal was always to be making a full-time income — with healthcare covered — and I’m still working towards that.

Speaking as someone who still believes SF magazines are the heart of the field, I’m enormously grateful Neil is still with us.

The July Clarkesworld contains original fiction from Zhang Ran, Rich Larson, Robert Reed, Bo Balder, and Nicole Kornher-Stace, plus reprints by Joe Haldeman and Lavie Tidhar. The cover, “Genetics Lab,” is by Eddie Mendoza.

Nicole Kornher-Stace, author of Archivist Wasp, writes that her tale is “the first short story I’ve written in approximately forever. It’s also the first tie-in story I’ve written in the Archivist Wasp world. More of those to come.”

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Super-Intelligent Cats, Shape-Shifting Aliens, and Mysterious Footprints in the Snow: Rich Horton on 9 Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy

Super-Intelligent Cats, Shape-Shifting Aliens, and Mysterious Footprints in the Snow: Rich Horton on 9 Tales of Space and Time, edited by Raymond J. Healy

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9 Tales of Space and Time-small 9 Tales of Space and Time-back-small

Earlier this week I wrote a brief Vintage Treasures piece about Raymond J. Healy’s groundbreaking anthology New Tales of Space and Time. Groundbreaking because it virtually invented the original science fiction anthology, way back in 1951. I was inspired to write that article by Rich Horton’s review of Healy’s follow-up, 9 Tales of Space and Time, at his blog Strange at Ecbatan. Here’s Rich.

Raymond J. Healy (1907-1997) is primarily remembered within the SF field for his role as co-editor (with J. Francis McComas, one of the founding editors of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) of the absolutely seminal 1946 anthology Adventures in Time and Space, with was the first introduction in book form to short SF for many post-War readers. It was reprinted numerous times, including a Modern Library edition in 1957.

Healy edited three other SF anthologies, one more reprint book with McComas, the much shorter and less good More Adventures in Time and Space (1955); and two original anthologies on his own: New Tales of Space and Time (1951) and the book at hand, 9 Tales of Space and Time (1954)… Both books are very good, and both seem to have been quite significant at the time, but I don’t think they are much remembered. The first book had two major stories, Kris Neville’s “Bettyann” and Anthony Boucher’s “The Quest for Saint Aquin,” as well as contributions from the likes of Asimov and Bradbury. The second book has no story as good as those, but it is still quite interesting.

Like Rich, I consider Healy’s first book, Adventures in Time and Space, to be enormously important, perhaps the most important SF anthology of the Twentieth Century.

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Apex Magazine on the Best Short Fiction Reviews

Apex Magazine on the Best Short Fiction Reviews

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Apex Magazine June 2017-smallIn his editorial in last month’s Apex Magazine, Jason Sizemore salutes some of the best short fiction reviewers out there.

There are some reviewers that stand head and shoulders above the rest, and I want to direct our readers to them.

Charles Payseur (Quick Sip Reviews) writes entertaining and smart reviews. His pairing of alcoholic drinks with his favorite stories of the month is amusing. If a reviewer can have “heart,” then Charles has it.

Maria Haskins is incredibly well-read and she takes the time to write a list of her favorite stories along with capsule reviews on her blog. She’s a great advocate for short fiction and short fiction publications.

A.C. Wise contributes a monthly review column to the Apex Magazine website titled “Words for Thought” with some of the smartest analysis you’ll find.

Paula Guran regularly reviews work outside her comfort zone and adds much needed life and variety to the short fiction reviews in Locus Magazine.

There are others (though not as many as there should be). If you have a favorite reviewer let me know!

To that list I would add the hard-working team at Tangent Online, the Hugo-nominated Rocket Stack Rank, the excellent short fiction reviews by Gardner Dozois and Rich Horton in Locus… and of course our very own Fletcher Vredenburgh, Adrian Simmons, and Michael Penkas.

The June issue of Apex also contains brand new fiction by Aimee Ogden, Pip Coen, K.A. Teryna (trans. by Alex Shvartsman), and Tobias S. Buckell, plus an excerpt from Mary Turzillo’s new novel Mars Girls, and a reprint by Maureen McHugh. The cover art is by Irina Kovalova. Read the complete issue for free here. We last covered Apex with the May issue.

A Treasure Trove of Classic Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels and Stories from the Library of America

A Treasure Trove of Classic Ursula K. Le Guin: The Hainish Novels and Stories from the Library of America

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The Hainish Novels and Stories Library of America

Here’s a delightful find: buried in all the usual news on forthcoming books and new releases I get every week was an understated announcement about this massive compilation of all of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hanish novels and stories, to be published in the attractive slip case above by the Library of America.

And I do mean massive. The two volume set is a whopping 1,921 pages. It contains 8 complete novels (include her Hugo and Nebula Award-winning volumes The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed) and 17 stories, including the complete story cycle Five Ways to Forgiveness, plus several appendixes. It will be edited by Brian Attebery, and both volumes include new introductions by Le Guin. It arrives in hardcover on September 5, 2017.

Now you know one of the reasons I’m excited about this book is that it contains the complete text of over half a dozen vintage paperbacks, including a pair of the most acclaimed science fiction novels of the 20th Century, in handsome archival-quality hardcovers. And you know what that means — I can’t resist showing you the original paperback covers (front and back). Here they are.

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The July Fantasy Magazine Rack

The July Fantasy Magazine Rack

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Asimovs-Science-Fiction-July-August-rack Back Issue July 2017-small Grimdark Magazine 12 2017-rack The-Dark-July-2017-rack
Occult-Detective-Quarterly-2-rack Beneath Ceaseless Skies 229-rack Shimmer-July-2017-rack The-Digest-Enthusiast-6-June-2017-rack

I’m trying something a bit different with our Magazine Rack this month. Rather than just recap the last eight magazines we’ve covered, I want to make this report a little more useful by actually focusing on magazines cover-dated July 2017. That means there are three magazines above — Back Issue, Grimdark, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies — that we’ve haven’t covered yet this month. But I’m including them here because they’re cool, they came out in July, and you should know about them. Plus, they look good.

As usual, you can get details on the other magazines above by just clicking on the thumbnail images. Our additional magazine coverage in the past few weeks includes Bookriot‘s entertaining post on on 5 SF and Fantasy Magazines You Should Be Reading, Fletcher’s May Short Story Roundup, Rich Horton’s Retro-Review of Amazing Stories, October 1963, and Adrian Simmons’ Retro-Review of Amazing Stories, November 1969.

Our June Fantasy Magazine Rack is here.

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New Treasures: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

New Treasures: Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

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meddling kids-smallEdgar Cantero is the author of The Supernatural Enhancements. His follow-up, Meddling Kids, continues in the horror-comedy vein with perhaps the most brilliant premises I’ve encountered this year: a group of young detectives, who foiled the plot of a small-time crook years ago, find themselves drawn back together as adults to pick up the threads of their original investigation… threads that lead to a much more insidious threat involving an interdimensional horror. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says, “For anyone who finds the triangle formed by Scooby-Doo, Lovecraft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer a cozy place to be, here’s your beach book.” It’s on sale this month in hardcover.

SUMMER 1977. The Blyton Summer Detective Club (of Blyton Hills, a small mining town in Oregon’s Zoinx River Valley) solved their final mystery and unmasked the elusive Sleepy Lake monster — another low-life fortune hunter trying to get his dirty hands on the legendary riches hidden in Deboën Mansion. And he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.

1990. The former detectives have grown up and apart, each haunted by disturbing memories of their final night in the old haunted house. There are too many strange, half-remembered encounters and events that cannot be dismissed or explained away by a guy in a mask. And Andy, the once intrepid tomboy now wanted in two states, is tired of running from her demons. She needs answers. To find them she will need Kerri, the one-time kid genius and budding biologist, now drinking her ghosts away in New York with Tim, an excitable Weimaraner descended from the original canine member of the club. They will also have to get Nate, the horror nerd currently residing in an asylum in Arkham, Massachusetts. Luckily Nate has not lost contact with Peter, the handsome jock turned movie star who was once their team leader… which is remarkable, considering Peter has been dead for years.

The time has come to get the team back together, face their fears, and find out what actually happened all those years ago at Sleepy Lake. It’s their only chance to end the nightmares and, perhaps, save the world.

A nostalgic and subversive trip rife with sly nods to H. P. Lovecraft and pop culture, Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids is a strikingly original and dazzling reminder of the fun and adventure we can discover at the heart of our favorite stories, no matter how old we get.

Meddling Kids was published by Blumhouse on July 11, 2017. It is the first Blyton Summer Detective Club Adventure, which implies there will probably be more. It’s 336 pages, priced at $26.95 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Michael J. Windsor.