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New Treasures: The Dev Harmer Mission Series by James Lovegrove

New Treasures: The Dev Harmer Mission Series by James Lovegrove

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I’m very intrigued by James Longrove’s Dev Harmer Mission series, and I may add it to my Fall Reading Program. (I’m also intrigued by his 8-volume Pantheon series, but let’s remain realistic, shall we?) Dev Harmer is a reluctant agent of mega-corporation Interstellar Security Solutions, dispatched to various hotspots around the galaxy. He wakes up in a brand new cloned body every time. His original body, back on Earth, reportedly no longer exists, so Hammer has to earn enough to afford a new one… and that means doing the dirty jobs no one else wants.

Each of these jobs takes him to a very different locale — starting with Alighieri, a planet perpetually in flames, and the setting for the opening novel in the series, World of Fire.

Dev Harmer, reluctant agent of Interstellar Security Solutions, wakes up in a newly cloned host body on the planet Alighieri, ready for action. It’s an infernal world, so close to its sun that it surface is regularly baked to 1,000°C, hot enough to turn rock to lava. But deep underground there are networks of tunnels connecting colonies of miners who dig for the precious helium-3 regolith deposits in Alighieri’s crust.

Polis+, the AI race who are humankind’s great galactic rivals, want to claim the fiery planet’s mineral wealth for their own. All that stands between them and this goal is Dev. But as well as Polis+’s agents, there are giant moleworms to contend with, and a spate of mysterious earthquakes, and the perils of the surface where a man can be burned to cinders if he gets caught unprotected on the day side…

Giant worms, hostile AIs, hell planet… that’s all the essentials for a rousing space adventure, right there.

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io9 on All the New Scifi and Fantasy Books You Absolutely Must Read This Fall

io9 on All the New Scifi and Fantasy Books You Absolutely Must Read This Fall

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Fall officially begins on Thursday (here in the Northern Hemisphere, at least). Which means I can officially give up on the wreckage of my Summer Reading Plan, and start all over again with a brand new, crazy ambitious and supernaturally awesome Fall Reading Plan. Yeah!

I love the planning stages of my quarterly reading plans, ’cause they’re filled with crazy optimism. Shall we throw the 10-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen in there? Why the hell not! It’s only September!

It’s at this stage of the quarter that I find articles like Cheryl Eddy’s “All the New Scifi and Fantasy Books You Absolutely Must Read This Fall,” published at io9 at the end of August, so very helpful. Eddy lists over two dozen major books launching this fall, including A Night Without Stars by Peter F. Hamilton, Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and new books by Connie Willis, Cixin Liu, Christopher Pries, Ken Liu, Margaret Atwood, Mel Brooks, Mark Frost, Bruce Sterling, and many others. Here’s her take on A City Dreaming by Daniel Polansky.

An ageless magician fond of drinking beer and sleeping late visits New York City to visit old friends, only to find the city has changed in unexpected ways — and a supernatural war is brewing on its fringes.

See the complete article here.

October 2016 Analog Now on Sale

October 2016 Analog Now on Sale

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analog-science-fiction-october-smallPeople have been watching Trevor Qachari’s rein as the new editor of Analog pretty closely. It’s been four years exactly since he took over from Stanley Schmidt in September of 2012, plenty of time to get a sense of his editorial taste.

One thing I’ve noticed is that Trevor is a bit more experimental than Stan, especially in his willingness to blend genres a little. The October issue features a pair of stories that playfully mix SF and pulp thrillers, including perhaps the last thing I would have expected to see in Analog: a Shadow homage by Robert R. Chase, “Revenge of the Invisible Man.” Here’s a snippet from Jason McGregor’s review at Tangent Online.

The Shadow gets on the trail of the Invisible Man. Sort of. In the near future, a company has been working on human invisibility and has succeeded in making a human invisible — but not in getting rich off it, which means the guinea pig gets no reward either and, worse, it turns out not to be reversible. So the heads of the company start falling down stairs and having their throats cut. This prompts a call to a mysterious Power who sends his agent, our protagonist, in to discover how the invisible man has been committing these crimes from the locked room in which the company holds him. The agent adopts the name Kent Allard (one of the Shadow’s real names) for this mission (which… seems likely to be one of a series) and proceeds to investigate. The strongest feature of this story is probably the direct, sinewy prose… a good read.

While we’re at it, he’s a sample from Jason’s review of the other SF thriller, Adam-Troy Castro’s novella “The Soul Behind the Face.”

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Future Treasures: The Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard

Future Treasures: The Fall of the House of Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard

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the-fall-of-the-house-of-cabal-smallJonathan is a marvelously talented fantasy author. We published two of his stories featuring Kyth the Taker, the cunning and resourceful thief whose commissions somehow always involve her in sorcerous intrigue: “The Beautiful Corridor,” (Black Gate 13) and its sequel, “The Shuttered Temple” (BG 15).

His most recent novel was Carter & Lovecraft (October 2015). He published his first novel, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, in 2009; his newest novel The Fall of the House of Cabal is the fifth to feature gentleman necromancer Johannes Cabal and his comrades, including his vampiric brother, Horst. It arrives in hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books at the end of the month.

Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has come into possession of a vital clue that may lead him to his ultimate goal: a cure for death. The path is vague, however, and certainly treacherous as it takes him into strange territories that, quite literally, no one has ever seen before. The task is too dangerous to venture upon alone, so he must seek assistance, comrades for the coming travails.

So assisted ― ably and otherwise ― by his vampiric brother, Horst, and by the kindly accompaniment of a criminologist and a devil, he will encounter ruins and diableries, mystery and murder, the depths of the lowest pit and a city of horrors. London, to be exact.

Yet even though Cabal has risked such peril believing he understands the dangers he faces, he is still underestimating them. He is walking into a trap of such arcane complexity that even the one who drew him there has no idea of its true terrors. As the snare closes slowly and subtly around them, it may be that there will be no survivors at all.

We’ve covered most of Jonathan’s recent releases here at Black Gate — including his article on writing the Johannes Cabal series, “Some Little Infamy.”

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A Secret Conflict During the Civil War: The House Divided Series by Sean McLachlan

A Secret Conflict During the Civil War: The House Divided Series by Sean McLachlan

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Sean McLachlan, our Wednesday afternoon blogger, is primarily known around our offices as the guy with the enviable travel budget. His recent travelogues have taken him to Roman ruins in Spain, Wallingord Castle in England, a volcanic island in the Canary Islands, the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, a writing retreat in Tangier, Morocco, and even more exotic places.

But Sean is also a prolific author. A former archaeologist, he is now a full-time writer who specializes in history, travel, and fiction. He won the 2013 Society of American Travel Writers Award for his Iraq reportage, and his historical fantasy novella “The Quintessence of Absence” appeared in Black Gate. He currently has several series on the go, including Toxic World, a post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure, and the Trench Raiders action series set in World War One. And his contemporary thriller, The Last Hotel Room, will be released later this month.

But my current favorite is his Civil War horror series House Divided, which so far consists of two novels: A Fine Likeness and The River of Desperation. Here’s what Sean told me when I asked him about the origin of the series.

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The September Fantasy Magazine Rack

The September Fantasy Magazine Rack

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I’ve been relying more and more on Charles Payseur’s Quick Sip Reviews to point me towards the fiction that will interest me each month. Charles doesn’t just tell me why he enjoys each story… he gives me enough detail to let me know which stories will grab my attention right out of the gate. Here he is on Rich Larson’s 12,000-word novelette “The Green Man Cometh” in the latest issue of Clarkesworld, for example.

This is a rather thrilling story about technology and damage, about ideology and fanaticism… [it] shows a nicely cyberpunk vision of Earth post-Calamity (which sounds familiar and I can’t remember if I’ve read a story or stories set in this world before), where most of the population has concentrated into one megacity. And in that megacity Eris is a cab driver with prosthetic arms and a bit of a chip on her shoulder because she was born on a neoprimitive colony and then sent away because of her disability… The action is fierce and the characters are fun. I quite liked the play between Eris and Kit, the government agent that gets assigned to her. The tech and the setting are richly explored and it’s a fun story with some nice points… Eris has to grapple with her own frustrations with the system against the terror that is what the cult plans. And yeah, it’s fun and it’s fast and it hits a lot of nice beats with its twists and turns. For an edge-of-your-seat thrilling science fiction, look no further. Very fun and very worth checking out!

Read his complete review of the issue here.

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New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois

New Treasures: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois

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When my copy of The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Third Annual Collection arrived last week, I was pleased (and a little flattered) to see this quote on the back.

There are roughly ten Year’s Best volumes currently being published in the speculative fiction market, but they all bow before Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction… To read Gardner’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction every year is to get the pulse of the entire industry. All the new writers, literary movements, shake­ups, and happenings in the field ― it’s all there at your fingertips. ― Black Gate

That’s taken from my article on last year’s volume, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Second Annual Collection.

I’ve covered eight Best of the Year anthologies so far this year, from editors like Rich Horton, Jonathan Strahan, Neil Clarke, and John Joseph Adams. But the gold standard remains Gardner Dozois’ massive The Year’s Best Science Fiction, now in its 33rd annual volume.

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It’s Not Too Late to Sample Theresa DeLucci’s 5 Horror Reads for Summer

It’s Not Too Late to Sample Theresa DeLucci’s 5 Horror Reads for Summer

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The last day of summer is September 22. Which means I have four days left to keep the promise to myself I made when I read Theresa DeLucci’s Tor.com article Bright Days, Dark Fiction: 5 Horror Reads for Summer, and read at least two of her tantalizing selections. Top of my list right now are Michael Wehunt’s Greener Pastures and I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas. But I’m also considering Daniel Braum’s debut collection The Night Marchers.

Braum has a knack for describing the indescribable in extraordinarily accessible language. No mean feat when one is relating stories of extra-dimensional creatures and ancient, pissed-off gods. The plight of the underrepresented features prominently in a number of stories, like the title story (conquered gods of Hawaii,) “The Ghost Dance” (Native American spirits,) and “The Green Man of Punta Cabre” (ancient gods of Guatemala.) The latter story in particular was full of pathos as a missionary struggles to understand the true gods of his flock, and the ugly exploitation they suffer at the hands of civil war and invading corporation’s greed… My favorites were the desert horror of “The Moon and the Mesa” and the final story, one original to this collection, “The Sphinx of Cropsey Avenue.” A melancholy surrealist piece about riddles, misfortune, and familial duty finds a man, his fortune-telling girlfriend, and her son all linked as a found family, inextricably connected to a larger universal mystery steeped in ambivalence.

Read Theresa’s complete article here.

Arin Komins on the September 2016 Locus

Arin Komins on the September 2016 Locus

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locus-september-2016-smallLocus magazine publishes a quarterly Forthcoming Books wrap-up, and have been doing so for at least the last 25 years, and the latest one appears in the new September issue. In years gone past I spent a lot of time pouring over those lists, making shopping lists and then calling Mark Zeising Books in California to make an order (or two). So reading the following brief post by my friend and follow book collector Arin Komins brought back a wave of nostalgia.

Spent the evening with the quarterly Locus Mag forthcoming books list in hand, highlighting happily (books to buy for the next 6 months or so.)

This will be followed by the quarterly pre-ordering frenzy, I suspect.

This says something sad about me, I am sure 🙁

It’s funny how publishers catch and lose my interest, too. Finding less and less on the Tor list (with a few notable exceptions), and more and more on the Titan one. Still have a few holdouts with Ace, Roc, Del Rey, etc, but Pocket is all but dead to me anymore.

Still, well pleased to see a new Norman Spinrad coming… and 2 new Kim Newman books. A couple of new Ken MacLeod. The expected 2 new L.E. Modesitt Jr books (of which Recluce Tales is what I am most waiting on.). No new non-Star Wars Alan Dean Foster (sad!). A handful of fun looking anthologies. Jared’s new book! New non-YA by Rachel. New Simon R. Green (Moonbreaker). Misc various others, including guilty pleasure reading (latest Cal Leandros book, newest Valdemar, Butcher anthology, new Chris Golden anthology, some Ari Marmell,etc.). Latest pretty thing from Charnel House that I won’t be able to afford.

Ah the exciting life of a book fiend. Don’t you envy me? (Hah!)

As a matter of fact I do, Arin! These days I spend all my time writing blog posts, and not nearly enough reading magazines. But I did recently renew my subscription to Locus. So that’s a step in the right direction.

See all the details on the September 2016 issue of Locus here. We last covered Locus with the July 2016 issue.

Future Treasures: The Ferryman Institute by Colin Gigl

Future Treasures: The Ferryman Institute by Colin Gigl

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Here’s another debut fantasy with an original and intriguing premise: ferryman Charlie Dawson, condemned to transport souls to the underworld for all eternity, finds his existence unraveling after he prevents a young woman from committing suicide. And his life — such as it is — rapidly gets very complicated. In her review, Jaclyn Fulwood at Shelf Awareness writes,

Since the moment of his near-death more than two centuries ago, Charlie has been in the employ of the shadowy Ferryman Institute, guiding newly deceased souls through the departure process. When a Ferryman fails to convince a spirit to cross over, it becomes a vengeful ghost; Charlie Dawson, star of the Institute’s stable, never fails… In an age when the Institute competes with comparable organizations like the Sisters of Valhalla, Charlie is simply too good to let go. Supported by his refined mentor Cartwright, but stalked by internal affairs liaison Inspector Javrouche (the only person who actively despises him), Charlie limps through his malaise until he receives a special assignment from the president of the Institute — to see to the soul of one Alice Spiegel, a soon-to-be suicide — and is surprised with options: “Be a Ferryman or save the girl. Your choice.”

Gigl pays homage to Greco-Roman mythology while poking fun at corporate structure, but this fast-paced fantasy has its serious side, taking the real-life problem of getting stuck in a dead-end job to a more mystical but still weighty extreme. Gigl seems to realize his concept treads familiar ground; readers will find easy laughs here, but more introspection than in novels with similar premises.

The Ferryman Institute will be published by Gallery Books on September 27, 2016. It is 432 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $7.99 for the digital edition. Click the images above for bigger versions, or read an excerpt at the Simon & Schuster website.