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Future Treasures: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Future Treasures: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

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The Light Brigade-smallKameron Hurley’s debut novel God’s War, which eventually became part of her Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy, was nominated for a Nebula Award; she won a Hugo in 2014 for Best Related Work. Her big space opera from last year, The Stars Are Legion, showed a very difference side to her, and was one of the most acclaimed books she’s ever published, with an Honorable Mention for the James Tiptree Award, a nomination for the Campbell Award, and a fifth-place finish for the Locus Award for Best SF Novel.

Her latest is something new again — a science fiction thriller about a futuristic war during which soldiers are broken down into light in order to get them to the front lines on Mars. It’s based on a short story with the same title originally published in John Joseph Adams’ Lightspeed Magazine (read it here); the novel version arrives in hardcover from Saga Press in two weeks.

They said the war would turn us into light. I wanted to be counted among the heroes who gave us this better world.

The Light Brigade: it’s what soldiers fighting the war against Mars call the ones who come back… different. Grunts in the corporate corps get busted down into light to travel to and from interplanetary battlefronts. Everyone is changed by what the corps must do in order to break them down into light. Those who survive learn to stick to the mission brief — no matter what actually happens during combat.

Dietz, a fresh recruit in the infantry, begins to experience combat drops that don’t sync up with the platoon’s. And Dietz’s bad drops tell a story of the war that’s not at all what the corporate brass want the soldiers to think is going on.

Is Dietz really experiencing the war differently, or is it combat madness? Trying to untangle memory from mission brief and survive with sanity intact, Dietz is ready to become a hero — or maybe a villain; in war it’s hard to tell the difference.

The Light Brigade will be published by Saga Press on March 19. It is 354 pages in hardcover, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $7.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Eve Ventrue.

See all our recent Future Treasures here.

New Treasures: The Witchlands by Susan Dennard

New Treasures: The Witchlands by Susan Dennard

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Truthwitch-small Windwitch-small Sightwitch-small Bloodwitch-small

In her enthusiastic Black Gate review of Susan Dennard’s Something Strange and Deadly, the opening novel in a dark fantasy trilogy, Zeta Moore wrote:

For readers with dark tastes and a deep-seated love for romance… Dennard has a supreme understanding of how to enhance gothic themes with an addictive steampunk flourish, and captivate her readers with antagonists you come to enjoy more than the protagonists.

Dennard’s latest series is the far more ambitious Witchlands saga, which opened with Truthwitch (2016), which Robin Hobb called:

A cake stuffed full of your favorite fantasy treats: highway robbery, swordplay, deep friendships, treachery, magic, piracy on the high seas, and romance. This book will delight you.

Dennard has followed with a new book every year: Windwitch (2017), the novella Sightwitch (2018), and now Bloodwitch (February 12, 2019), just arrived in hardcover. All four are published by Tor Teen. Here’s the back covers for the first two.

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A Mystery in the Ruins of the Future: The Bannerless Saga by Carrie Vaughn

A Mystery in the Ruins of the Future: The Bannerless Saga by Carrie Vaughn

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Bannerless-small The Wild Dead-small

Bannerless, the opening novel in Carrie Vaughn’s new science fiction saga, was based on the short story of the same name in the John Joseph Adams & Hugh Howey anthology of post-apocalyptic fiction The End Has Come (2015). It was one of the most acclaimed books of the year, and won the Philip K. Dick Award for best original science fiction paperback. The sequel, The Wild Dead, arrived in trade paperback from John Joseph Adams Books last summer.

When he selected it as one of the premier titles of July 2017, Andrew Liptak at The Verge wrote:

Carrie Vaughn is best known for her urban fantasy novels, but she’s been shifting gears quite a bit lately. Earlier this year, she published Martians Abroad, a YA space opera, and with Bannerless, she’s looking into what happens after society collapses. In this world, the Coast Road is thriving after the fall of civilization, rebuilding with a culture of households. The population is controlled as people earn the right to bear children, displaying their privilege by hanging banners outside their homes. Enid of Haven is an Investigator, who is called upon to mediate disputes in the community. When a dead body turns up, she begins to investigate, finding cracks in society that makes her question everything she’s been raised to believe. You can read the original short story here.

These are complex, ambitious books with a thoroughly original take on post-apocalyptic society. Here’s the back covers to both.

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Future Treasures: The Spin Trilogy by Andrew Bannister

Future Treasures: The Spin Trilogy by Andrew Bannister

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Creation Machine-small Iron Gods-small Stone Clock-small

Last week, in my article about Elizabeth Bear’s upcoming novel Ancestral Night, I included a quote from Publishers Weekly about the current “space opera resurgence.” The most common response to that piece has been, “There’s a space opera resurgence?”

You know, I think there might be. Just in the last few weeks we’ve talked about Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War books, Jesse Mihalik’s Polaris Rising, Lisanne Norman’s Sholan Alliance series, Alastair Reynolds’s Shadow Captain, Zenith by Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings, Tom Toner’s The Amaranthine Spectrum trilogy, Marina J. Lostetter’s Noumenon series, K.B. Wagers There Before the Chaos, and a whole lot more. That’s a critical mass of space opera, especially for a site that pretends to mostly cover fantasy books…. so yeah. I kinda think there’s a resurgence.

The latest evidence landed on my desk earlier this week, in the form of a new review copy from Tor. It’s the debut novel from British author Andrew Bannister, the first in a promised trilogy, and it received some enviable attention in the UK when it was first published there three years ago. Here’s the notice from The Guardian, from their May 2016 roundup of the Best Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels.

Space opera lends itself to the depiction of grand dimensions and great duration, but it’s one thing to talk big, quite another to present a vast universe through the eyes of fully rounded characters without the former overshadowing the latter. Many a novice has floundered, their vision ill served by technique. Fortunately, debut novelist Andrew Bannister comes to the genre with his talents fully formed in the ambitious, compulsively readable Creation Machine, the first volume in a trilogy. Fleare Haas, the maverick daughter of the industrialist tyrant Viklun Haas, is imprisoned in a monastery on the moon of Obel, her crime to join rebels opposed to her father’s ruthless regime. Her escape from prison and her headlong race across the galaxy to the Catastrophe Curve is just one of the novel’s many delights. Creation Machine has everything: intriguing far-future societies, exotic extraterrestrial races, artificial galaxies and alien machines dormant for millions of years. Bannister holds it all together with enviable aplomb.

Tor has scheduled the sequel, Iron Gods, for publication in July. It will be followed by Stone Clock. Here’s the back covers for the first two.

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Kelly Chiu Gives us 6 Reasons to Devour Ryōko Kui’s Delicious in Dungeon

Kelly Chiu Gives us 6 Reasons to Devour Ryōko Kui’s Delicious in Dungeon

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Delicious in Dungeon Volume One-small Delicious in Dungeon Volume Two-small Delicious in Dungeon Volume Three-small

Every few years I promise myself I’m going to do a better job keeping up with the latest fantasy manga, but I never really do. But last year I did manage to discover the delightful Delicious in Dungeon, written and illustrated by Ryōko Kui, and I consider that a major win.

Delicious in Dungeon is a Japanese fantasy comedy about a 6-member adventurer party very nearly wiped out in a Total Party Kill deep in a dungeon. In the last moments before she’s swallowed by a dragon, the magic-user Falin uses the last of her strength to teleport her brother Laios and the rest of the party to the surface. Defeated and demoralized, and faced with the loss of most of their coin and equipment, two members quit immediately, but Laios convinces the last two to join him in a desperate sprint back into the dungeon before his sister is digested and beyond the reach even of the most powerful healing magic. Famished and too penniless to provision, Laios concocts a foolhardy plan to eat the monsters they encounter on their way down.

That’s the basic set-up for a extremely imaginative and frequently hilarious dungeon romp featuring three hapless foodies in a gloriously elaborate monster haven. The setting in fact is a huge part of the charm of this series, and it will be warmly familiar to anyone who’s played D&D or a similar early RPG, with its crowded underground markets and well stocked trading outposts scarcely 50 yards from trap-infested monster gardens. The slimes, mushroom men, man-eating plants and other oddball creatures they come up against will also bring back fond memories of the classic dungeon delves of your youth. They’re delightfully wacky, just like the plans our heroes come up with to eat them.

Late last year Kelly Chiu at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog wrote a fine piece on the series, just before the English translation of the sixth volume arrived in stores. Kelly has a sharp sense for what makes the series so appealing to old school gamers and general comic fans alike, and in 6 Reasons to Devour Delicious in Dungeon she hit on many of the things I most enjoy about it. Here’s a few of her most on-target comments.

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New Treasures: American Hippo by Sarah Gailey

New Treasures: American Hippo by Sarah Gailey

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There are books that I ignore until I get a solid personal recommendation, those that win me over only with rave reviews, and those that I warm to, like, immediately. Sarah Gailey’s alternate history of an American west overrun by feral hippos is definitely the latter.

In her review of the first volume, River of Teeth, NPR reviewer and former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar said:

In 1909, the United States was suffering a shortage of meat. At the same time, Louisiana’s waterways were being choked by invasive water hyacinth. Louisiana Congressman Robert F. Broussard proposed an ingenious solution to both those problems: Import hippos to eat the water hyacinth; then, eat the hippos.

Luckily for the United States in our timeline, the fact that hippos are ill-tempered apex predators not amenable to being ranched was pointed out, the American Hippo Bill failed to pass by a single vote, and consequently, we don’t have hippos casually chomping on passers-by due to a lack of their usual forage. Sarah Gailey’s imagined United States, however, are differently fortuned.

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The Government We Take into Space: Imperial Stars, edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr

The Government We Take into Space: Imperial Stars, edited by Jerry Pournelle and John F. Carr

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Imperial Stars 1 The Stars at War-small Imperial Stars 2 Republic and Empire-small Imperial Stars 3 The Crash of Empire-small

Much early science fiction concerned itself with the rise and fall of galactic empires, and I admit being rather taken with the idea in my youth. There’s something rather romantic in the notion of man’s ultimate destiny being among the stars, testing himself against vast and incalculably ancient powers as he carves a home for himself across the parsecs, proving his worth on the greatest stage of all through gumption, guile, and fearless determination.

Today the whole idea seems rather quaint, and more than a little naive. As modern history has shown us, empires — all empires — are built on blood, and the notion that war could somehow be a noble pursuit died a well-deserved death in the trenches of World War I. Modern news reporting, which brought the brutal realities and costs of war into our living rooms in the 60s, has largely prevented us from making the appalling mistake of romanticizing war and conquest the way previous generations did.

In science fiction, galactic empires largely fell out of fashion by the late 70s, nudged off the stage by the more mature model of Star Trek‘s Federation (and ultimately done in for good, I think,  by the depiction of the ultimate Evil Empire in Star Wars.) Personally I think the arrival of more women writers in the 80s and 90s played a huge part in moving SF past its early infatuation with interstellar imperialism, but that’s debatable.

Jerry Pournelle made a career of writing and promoting military science fiction, and he made no secret of his belief that wherever man went among the stars, he’d bring war with him. In the three-volume anthology series Imperial Stars (Baen, 1986-89), he and his co-editor John F. Carr collected over 1,200 pages of fiction and non-fiction on the topic of galactic empires, from authors like John W. Campbell, Jr., Poul Anderson, Vernor Vinge, Harry Turtledove, C. M. Kornbluth, Rudyard Kipling, Norman Spinrad, Eric Frank Russell, Philip K. Dick, Gregory Benford, Theodore Sturgeon, Christopher Anvil, Algis Budrys, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Everett B. Cole, Donald Kingsbury, and many others. The series is long out of print, but I recently came across a set and found it strangely irresistible.

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Frazetta and Family: Ace Books House Ads, circa 1975

Frazetta and Family: Ace Books House Ads, circa 1975

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Ace Books House ad 1975-small

I bought a small collection of Mack Reynolds paperbacks on eBay last week, and they arrived yesterday. I settled in with them last night, and was surprised to find one of them, the 1975 title The Five Way Secret Agent and Mercenary From Tomorrow, which looked like a collection of two novellas from Analog, was actually an Ace Double. It didn’t have two covers in back-to-back dos-à-dos format, and the second book wasn’t printed upside down, but otherwise it was an Ace Double, with separate pagination for each novel and everything. It had the usual Ace house ads in the middle, which I normally flip past, but the double-page spread above brought me to a complete stop.

I mean, just look at this thing. Never mind the questionable tactic of trying to sell gloriously color Frazetta posters (for 3 bucks each) using muddy black & white images. Check out that house ad on the left: The number 1, formed from the names of the  most prominent authors in the Ace Books publishing family. And what a staggering list!

Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Leigh Brackett, John Brunner, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W. Campbell, Terry Carr, A. Bertram Chandler, Lester del Rey, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Philip Jose Farmer, Edmond Hamilton, Frank Herbert, Robert A. Heinlein, R.A. Lafferty, Damon Knight, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fritz Leiber, Stanislaw Lem, Andre Norton, Michael Moorcock, Barry Malzberg, Alexei Panshin, Frederik Pohl, Mack Reynolds, Joanna Russ, Bob Shaw, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Silverberg, Brian Stableford, Theodore Sturgeon, James Tiptree, Jr., EC Tubb, A.E. Van Vogt, Jack Vance, Jack Williamson, Roger Zelazny

It’s not just the amazing list of authors — which is, let’s face it, a nearly unprecedented line up of talent for a single SF publisher. It’s that fact that most of those authors are still revered today, and in fact more than a few — Philip Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, and others — have achieved even greater fame in the intervening four decades.

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Future Treasures: Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

Future Treasures: Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear

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Ancestral Night-smallElizabeth Bear is an author with ambition and big ideas, and that puts her in some rarefied company. Her new novel Ancestral Night, arriving in hardcover next month, is getting a lot of pre-release buzz — more than enough to pique my attention, anyway. Here’s a sample from the starred review at Publishers Weekly.

Anyone who enjoys space opera, exploration of characters, and political speculation will love this outstanding novel, Bear’s welcome return to hard SF after several years of writing well-received steampunk (Karen Memory) and epic fantasy (the Eternal Sky trilogy). As an engineer on a scrappy space salvage tug, narrator Haimey Dz has a comfortable, relatively low-stress existence, chumming with pilot Connla Kuruscz and AI shipmind Singer. Then, while aboard a booby-trapped derelict ship, she is infected with a not-quite-parasitic alien device that gives her insights into the universe’s structure. This makes her valuable not only to the apparently benevolent interstellar government, the Synarche, but also to the vicious association of space pirates… Amid a space opera resurgence, Bear’s novel sets the bar high.

Kirkus Reviews says the book “Offers plenty of big, bold, fascinating ideas…Impressive at the core.” Here’s the description.

A space salvager and her partner make the discovery of a lifetime that just might change the universe in this wild, big-ideas space opera from multi award-winning author Elizabeth Bear.

Halmey Dz and her partner Connla Kurucz are salvage operators, living just on the inside of the law… usually. Theirs is the perilous and marginal existence — with barely enough chance of striking it fantastically big — just once — to keep them coming back for more. They pilot their tiny ship into the scars left by unsuccessful White Transitions, searching for the relics of lost human and alien vessels. But when they make a shocking discovery about an alien species that has been long thought dead, it may be the thing that could tip the perilous peace mankind has found into full-out war.

Ancestral Night will be published by Saga Press on March 5, 2019. It is 512 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $7.99 in digital formats. It is the opening volume in the White Space series. We previously covered Bear’s novels Shattered Pillars (2013) and The Stone in the Skull (2017).

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

New Treasures: Fleet of Knives, Book 2 of Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

New Treasures: Fleet of Knives, Book 2 of Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

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Embers of Wars, the opening volume in Gareth L. Powell’s new space opera series, was selected as one of the Best of 2018 (So Far) by both the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog and Tor.com. The New York Journal of Books called it “Deep and juicy in the details,” Morning Star labeled it “Top class space fiction,” and The Guardian proclaimed it “Compulsively readable, expansive space opera.” But we all know it’s not a real space opera until the second book arrives, so I was very glad to see Fleet of Knives pub last week. Here’s the description.

The former warship Trouble Dog and her crew of misfits is called upon by the House of Reclamation to investigate a distress call from the human starship the Lucy’s Ghost. Her crew abandon their crippled ship and seek refuge aboard an abandoned, slower-than-light generation ship launched ten thousand years before by an alien race. However, the enormous ship contains deadly secrets of its own.

Recovered war criminal, Ona Sudak, faces a firing squad for her actions in the Archipelago War. But, at the last moment, she is smuggled out of her high security prison. The Marble Armada has called for her to accompany its ships as observer and liaison, as it spreads itself across the human Generality, enforcing the peace at all costs. The alien ships will not tolerate resistance, and all dissenters are met with overwhelming and implacable force. Then her vessel intercepts messages from the House of Reclamation and decides the Trouble Dog has a capacity for violence which cannot be allowed to endure.

As the Trouble Dog and her crew fight to save the crew of the Lucy’s Ghost, the ship finds herself caught between chaotic alien monsters on one side, and on the other, destruction at the hands of the Marble Armada.

We previously covered Embers of War here, and our 2013 discussion of Powell’s call to Escape Science Fiction’s Pulp Roots is here. Fleet of Knives was published by Titan Books on February 19, 2019. It is 405 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $8.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Julia Lloyd. Read a brief except from Embers of War here, and Fleet of Knives here, and see all our recent New Treasures here.