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New Mysteries Around Every Corner: The Sibyl’s War Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

New Mysteries Around Every Corner: The Sibyl’s War Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

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Pawn A Chronicle of the Sibyl's War-small Knight A Chronicle of the Sibyl's War-small Queen A Chronicle of the Sibyl's War-small

Covers by Stephen Youll

I’ve come to rely on Goodreads more and more often for unbiased book reviews. It started two years ago, while I was religiously checking the great feedback on my just-released The Robots of Gotham. Goodreads is filled with amateur reviewers, but I discovered many of them had spot-on critiques of my first novel. Always a pleasure to see those 4- and 5-star reviews of course, but in the end I found those readers able to articulate problems were far more valuable.

Yes, you’ll always find the occasional 1-star, 1-word review (“Unreadable’ was my favorite), but I was able to get something useful out of pretty much every other negative review, and quite a bit more than that from many. In fact, one of the best insights on my book came from a negative review by Goodreads member Jrubino, who wrote:

The complexity and depth of this novel is wonderful, yet its impact is greatly diminished by a video-game pacing… this formula is tiresome. That’s too bad as the world-building is unique and interesting.

I think that’s right on point, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I need to hear as I plunge into writing the second book. I’m fond of the way I set up The Robots of Gotham, with all my main characters trapped in a Chicago hotel in the middle of an unfolding robot apocalypse, but — as several readers have helpfully now pointed out — chapter after chapter, that constant “action and return” becomes repetitive, especially in a longer book. If I can fix that in The Ghosts of Navy Pier — and I’m pretty sure I can — I think it’ll be a much better book.

Goodreads has become enormously useful as a broad measure of public opinion, which is a darn useful thing for a writer trying hard to get better. And surprise, surprise… it’s also pretty useful when you’re looking for a good series to read, like Timothy Zahn’s Sibyl’s War trilogy, which wrapped up this month with the release of Queen.

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Goth Chick News: Stoker Winners Are Going to Need a Bigger Mantel…

Goth Chick News: Stoker Winners Are Going to Need a Bigger Mantel…

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Coyote Rage-small The Bone Weaver's Orchard-small Oware Mosaic-small

Each year around this time I experience a fit of jealousy for those lucky few individuals who receive a Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association (HWA). Not only are there far fewer of them than Oscars or Emmys, but let’s be honest, they are far cooler to look at. Interestingly enough, you will never find one for sale or auction, as clearly horror writers at this level are never hard up enough for money to sell their trophies (believe me, I’ve looked). When you Google “replica Oscar statues for sale” you find nearly 2 million hits… but can you guess how many hits you get when you Google “replica Stoker awards for sale”?

Exactly zero.

That’s right – no cheesy dollar-store models of this little gem. No inflatable, larger-than-life Stokers, no Stoker costumes, no Stoker greeting cards. And why is that? Because it’s rare and amazing and too incredible for words, in spite of the fact I’d pay big bucks, even one made by those ceramic Christmas house people (if any of those are listening).

Nope. Only the best of the best, of the best, get to take home a Stoker. Back in January I gave you the list of lucky nominees. Little did I know we’d all end up with plenty of time to read each and every one. This week the HWA dashed the hopes of most writers on that list to arrive at 12 winners and the subsequent “finalist nominees” who do not get to go home with the coolest award ever created. In fact, this year they are at least spared the agony of having their pictures taken next to the winner, standing near to, but not being allowed to touch the coveted Stoker award.

Sigh.

So, without further pontificating, here are the talented winners, and the finalists…

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Cycles of History and the Eternal Church: Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

Cycles of History and the Eternal Church: Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz

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Canticle1959Lippincott

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. First Edition: J.B. Lippincott, 1959.
Cover by Milton Glaser (click to enlarge)

A Canticle for Leibowtiz
by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
J.B. Lippincott (320 pages, $4.95 in hardcover, 1959)

This 1959 novel is one of the most popular and celebrated science fiction novels of all time. It won a Hugo Award and has a long list of critical citations. It’s set in the years following an atomic war, it portrays religion in a relatively favorable way (in contrast to the dismissive attitude of much other SF), and it dwells on the theme of man’s destiny, and its possibly inevitable fate in cycles of building and self-destruction. It’s sober and deadly-serious in parts, and it’s also quite funny in parts, which I hadn’t remembered since reading it decades ago. Something else I discovered when rereading recently: it doesn’t end the way I remembered that it did.

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Future Treasures: Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer

Future Treasures: Driving the Deep by Suzanne Palmer

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Finder Suzanne Palmer-small Driving the Deep-small

Cover art by Kekai Kotaki

Suzanne Palmer won a Hugo Award for her 2018 Clarkesworld novelette “The Secret Life of Bots,” and her 2019 debut novel Finder was widely praised. Kirkus Reviews called it “A nonstop SF thrill ride until the very last page,” and Maria Haskins at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog sums it up as “a Ridiculously Fun Science Fiction Adventure… a rollicking ride from a hardscrabble space colony at the outer edge of the galaxy to the conflict-ridden settlements of colonized Mars and back again.”

The highly anticipated sequel Driving the Deep arrives in hardcover in two weeks, featuring the return of interstellar repo man and professional finder Fergus Ferguson in what sounds like a standalone adventure. Publishers Weekly seems to like it.

Palmer’s spaceborne repo man Fergus Ferguson returns in this lighthearted star-skipping adventure through a futuristic solar system… Fergus is on Earth for the first time in years when he learns that his friends, a team of engineers who man the shipyard on Pluto, have been kidnapped for their scientific expertise. He tracks them to Enceladus, a watery moon of Saturn, where they are being held hostage. Fergus goes undercover to gather intel, taking a job as the pilot of an underwater vessel and making many allies (and a handful of enemies) along the way…

We discussed Finder here. Driving the Deep will be published by DAW Books on May 5, 2020. It is 426 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Kekai Kotaki. Read an excerpt from Chapter One of Finder at the Penguin Random House website.

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

Help! I’ve Fallen into Varney the Vampire and I Can’t Get Out!

Help! I’ve Fallen into Varney the Vampire and I Can’t Get Out!

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(1) Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood-small

Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood

In the six years that I’ve been writing for Black Gate (Mr. O’Neill says that my basement cubicle will be ready any day now and I’ll be able to stop working out of my car – oh, wait a minute… I just got a memo that says that due to the current crisis, not only will I be staying in my car, now I’ll be working from the trunk), I’ve written about a lot of books, and when selecting a volume to blather about I’ve had only two simple rules. When I write about a book, it must be one that I like, and it must be one that I have actually read.

I will admit to once or twice breaking the first rule; it can be a lot of fun teeing off on a bad book, seeing just how witty you can be at its expense. By and large, though, the Black Gate mission is a celebratory one. I think we all keep coming back here to find new things to love, not new things to hate, which are already being thrust upon us every minute of our lives.

As for the second rule, that might seem so obvious as to not need to be stated, but haven’t we all finished reading a review of some work we happen to be familiar with and thought, “There’s no way that reviewer can have actually read that book!” (That never happens here, of course.)

My friends, today you are privileged to be present at a historic event. I am now going to break both rules. I don’t like Varney the Vampire, and I make this judgment without having read it – or not read it completely, anyway. My Wordsworth paperback edition runs to 1,118 pages and my bookmark currently rests at page 541. Fine, you say; just push on and finish the thing and then say your peace. Well… I can’t. I just can’t.

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New Treasures: Overruled edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

New Treasures: Overruled edited by Hank Davis and Christopher Ruocchio

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Overruled!-smallI’m a bit worried about Hank Davis, to be honest with you. After we covered a few of his excellent early anthologies for Baen Books he reached out, and for several years we conducted a lively correspondence. We even helped him out when he was looking for content for his next book, Space Corsairs, due out later this year.

But one night last July, before heading to bed, he sent me a note confessing that it was getting harder and harder for him to read email due to ongoing eye problems. That was the last time I heard from him.

I’ve complained (to just about anyone who will listen) over the last few years about the demise of the mass market reprint anthology. The exception that proves the rule has been Hank. He’s edited many excellent ones in the past few years, including Things from Outer Space, If This Goes Wrong…, and especially Space Pioneers, also edited with Christopher Ruocchio.

In the past decade, in fact, Hank has produced over a dozen top-notch SF anthologies, and he’s proven to be one of the most entertaining and reliable editors this industry has. I hope his career has not been cut short by eye problems, or indeed, by health problems of any kind.

Hank has vanished from email and social media, but I was very pleased and relieved to see that the most recent anthology he delivered to Baen, co-edited with Christopher Ruocchio, arrive in bookstores (those few that are open) earlier this month. Overruled, which Hank described to me as “law and lawyers in space,” is a fat 400-page volume containing new and reprint fiction from Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Sheckley, Larry Niven, Robert Silverberg, Tony Daniel, Susan R. Matthews, Algis Budrys, and many others. It’s the kid of fun, far-ranging volume that Baen (and Hank) specialize in, and it reminds me very much of the old days, when a great SF anthology was a sure-fire way to discover at least 2-3 new writers you’d enjoy.

Here’s the description.

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Vintage Treasures: Wondermakers, edited by Robert Hoskins

Vintage Treasures: Wondermakers, edited by Robert Hoskins

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Wondermakers-small Wondermakers 2-small

Cover art: uncredited (left) and FMA (right)

Robert Hoskins was a pretty familiar name on paperback racks in the 1970s. He was a senior editor at Lancer Books from 1969-1972, and during that time published and edited five volumes of the prestigious Infinity SF anthology series. Overall he edited over a dozen science fiction anthologies, including First Step Outward (1969), Swords Against Tomorrow (1970), and Against Tomorrow (1979). He also wrote ten novels, including three for Roger Elwood’s Laser imprint.

Between 1969-1979 he produced roughly 30 paperbacks, an extraordinary period of output. After 1979 he vanished, and frankly I don’t blame him. If I had to write and package 30 books in 10 years, I’d probably avoid the publishing industry for the rest of my life too. Hoskins died in 1993, and his eyes were probably still bloodshot. His entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia says “Hoskins’s books made no claims to be anything more than entertaining action adventures,” which I think is a fair assessment.

In 1972 and 1974 he produced two odd reprint anthologies, Wondermakers: An Anthology of Classic Science Fiction and Wondermakers 2. My best guess is that these were aimed at the academic market; a big clue is the ad on the back page encouraging Teachers, Librarians and School administrators to “Send for your free Fawcett catalog today!” The rather stiff intro by Robin Scott Wilson opens with “It has become commonplace for students of science fiction to assert the antiquity of the genre,” and that’s as far as I got before I dozed off. The text on the back covers (see scans below) drones on about “Science Fiction’s development” and something about “Man’s questioning, searching beyond the boundaries of his immediate present and into the future.” I’ve never seen books that sound so much like my high school English teacher in my entire life.

But setting aside the dull packaging, these are actually pretty interesting. How many anthologies do you know include Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Theodore Sturgeon, and James Blish under one cover? That’s just the first one; Wondermakers 2 is even more intriguing.

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John DeNardo on the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Reads for April

John DeNardo on the Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Reads for April

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Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth-small The Last Emperox-small Creeping Jenny-small

One thing about a global pandemic… at least it doesn’t interfere with my reading time. Book stores may be closed and book sales may be down, but books continue to be published, and I continue to enjoy them. And the always dependable John DeNardo at Kirkus Reviews showed up on time (as always) to give us his read on the best SF and Fantasy for April, making sure I’m kept abreast of the month’s top releases. Here’s a few of his recommendations.

Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 438 pages, $26.99 hardcover/$14.99 digital, April 7)

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Ten years after a group of ordinary teenagers, the Chosen Ones, were trained by the government to fulfill a prophecy of killing an all-powerful entity called the Dark One who was decimating entire cities, things are far from normal. While the world has largely moved on, the five heroes — still the world’s most popular celebrities — are having a rough time. One of them, Sloane, suffers from PTSD, and is harboring secrets. When one of the Chosen Ones dies and the others gather for the funeral, they discover that the Dark One’s ultimate goal was perhaps more sinister than they or the government could ever have imagined.

WHY YOU MIGHT LIKE IT: YA author Roth’s first adult novel looks behind the usual superhero tropes and examines the psychological impacts of fading fame and having served one’s purpose.

I’m a sucker for a good superhero tale. Veronica Roth is the author of the international bestselling Divergent Series and Carve the Mark.

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Network Effect is the First Full Novel in the Martha Wells’ Epic Murderbot Saga

Network Effect is the First Full Novel in the Martha Wells’ Epic Murderbot Saga

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All Systems Red-small Artificial Condition-small Rogue Protocol-small
Exit Strategy-small Network Effect-small

Covers by Jaime Jones

Martha Wells exploded into the big time with Murderbot. Black Gate readers, of course, know and love Martha from her Ile-Rien tales “Holy Places,” “Houses of the Dead,” and “Reflections,” which originally appeared in the pages of our print magazine (and her Nebula-nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer, which we serialized online in its entirely here.) But the world at large didn’t truly know her the way we did until the first Murderbot tale All Systems Red appeared in 2017, sweeping all the awards — including the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus — and kicking off one of the most successful SF series of the 21st Century. Sequel Artificial Condition (2018) won the Hugo and Locus, and she declined the nominations that came her way for the third and fourth installments (there’s a tradition of Black Gate writers declining Hugo Awards, beginning with Matthew David Surridge, but that’s another story.)

Network Effect, the first full-length Murderbot novel, is one of the most anticipated books of 2020, and it arrives in less than three weeks. I’ve heard plenty of glowing reports from folks who received advance copies, but my favorite came from Martha’s fellow BG writer C.S.E. Cooney, who wrote:

Finished reading Martha Wells’ Murderbot 5 Network Effect aloud to Carlos and Sita.

From time to time, I’d come across a sentence that would make me — and then Carlos too, and then my mama, in solidarity — just yell out: “MAARRTHHAA!!!”

Anyway. That was my second read, and it just keeps getting better.

Network Effect will be published by Tor.com on May 5, 2020. It is 352 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Jaime Jones. Read Chapter One of All Systems Red at Tor.com.

Future Treasures: Shorefall, Book 2 of The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

Future Treasures: Shorefall, Book 2 of The Founders Trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett

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Foundryside-small Shorefall-small

Cover design by Will Staehle

It’s a damn tough time to be publishing new books, with virtually every bookstore in the country closed and Amazon drastically increasing shipping times for books and other non-essential items. So I very much appreciate those authors and publishers who continue to do it. Lord knows I need good books more than ever these days.

Shorefall, the second volume in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders Trilogy, arrives next week from stalwart fantasy publishers Del Rey, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, former Black Gate blogger Amal El-Mohtar called first volume Foundryside “Absolutely riveting… A magnificent, mind-blowing start to a series.” It was selected as one of the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2018 by The B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog; here’s what they said:

The author of the Divine Cities trilogy (a nominee for Best Series at the 2018 Hugo Awards) begins a new trilogy that’s as fun to read as its world is well-imagined. The city state of Tevanne runs on magic and pillage, as the four dominant merchant houses exploit the lands around them (not to mention the poor denizens who crouch outside their walls in a precarious shantytown known as Foundryside), as their scrivers create incredible machines and accomplish feats that look a lot like magic by way of intricate sigils that bend and break the laws of reality. Sancia Grado is a Foundryside thief who comes into possession of Clef, a sentient golden key — and is pursued by police captain Gregor Dandolo, reluctant scion of one of the richest houses. The unwitting Sancia falls into a scheme to destroy the power of the scrivers; putting a stop to it will bring her and Dandolo together as unlikely allies in the greatest theft theft in history, with the lives of everyone in Tevanne on the line. Read our review.

Robert Jackson Bennett is also the author of the BFA and Shirley Jackson Award winner Mr. Shivers, The Troupe, American Elsewhere, and Vigilance (as well as possibly being Chris Pratt in disguise). Here’s the publisher’s description for Shorefall.

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