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Sail Through Space in a Whale: Honor Among Thieves by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre

Sail Through Space in a Whale: Honor Among Thieves by Rachel Caine and Ann Aguirre

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Honor-Among-Thieves-smallMore than anything, teenager Zara Cole wants to be free. That’s why she lives on the streets, snatching purses and thieving, rather than immigrating to Mars with her mother and sister. She can’t stand the thought of being trapped in a dome. When a rich girl waltzes through Zara’s seedy neighborhood without taking the most basic precautions, she can’t resist a slash and grab.

But the rich girl isn’t the easy mark Zara thought it she’d be. Sure, the girl herself does nothing but scream. But it turns out her daddy’s the cruel and ruthless crime boss Deluca, who sends a goon to kill Zara and recover his goods. It’s probably quite the surprise for the goon when he’s the one who ends up dead, instead.

Zara’s got blood on her hands, but she doesn’t feel guilty. Still, it’s not obvious how she’s going to hide from Deluca, now that she not only has what he wants, but also dispatched one of his men. The safest place she can think of is a jail-like rehabilitation facility called Camp Kuna. To get herself sent there, she sneaks back into her juvenile group home, where her official guardian helps her create the necessary scene of violence.

But even donning her orange jumpsuit and getting locked in a cell doesn’t keep Zara out of Deluca’s reach. The crime boss bribes a fellow inmate – the closest thing Zara has to a friend in Camp Kuna – to murder her. When Zara survives the strangulation attempt, she realizes nowhere is safe.

Rescue comes in the strange form of the alien species called Leviathan, who are living spaceships that look like whales. In exchange for reversing the effects of global warming, the aliens require humanity to offer a hundred volunteers to travel inside them every year. Called the “Honors” program, the chosen humans become celebrities, feted worldwide as the best and the brightest. Nobody knows what the Honors do during their year of service, but the aliens usually pick eminent scientists and musicians. Until recently, when they picked two military strategists.

This year, they pick Zara.

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Vintage Treasures: Particle Theory by Edward Bryant

Vintage Treasures: Particle Theory by Edward Bryant

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Cover by Richard Powers

Edward Bryant died last year, at the age of 71. He was widely acclaimed for his short fiction, and published some 121 stories between 1970 and 2017. He won back-to-back Nebulas, for “Stone” (1978) and “giANTS” (1979). Wikipedia notes that “By 1973, he had gained acclaim for stories with a conversational style that mask rather dark realities,” and that seems right to me. His produced a single novel, Phoenix Without Ashes (1975), co-written with Harlan Ellison. After his death Mad Cow Press published the tribute anthology Edward Bryant’s Sphere of Influence, with fiction by Connie Willis, Steve Rasnic Tem, Kevin J. Anderson, Lucy Taylor, Bruce Holland Rogers, and many others.

I knew Bryant chiefly as a book reviewer, and he was excellent, somehow blending both a discerning eye for fiction with an infectious enthusiasm for the genre. He published many hundreds of reviews — have a look at his entry at the Internet Science Fiction Database, and you’ll begin to appreciate just how deeply Bryant explored the fiction he loved. I was a regular reader of his book columns at Locus (1989-2006), Twilight Zone Magazine, (1987-89), and especially Cemetery Dance (1990-98).

Recently I’ve become more interested in reading his short stories, though. He published half a dozen collections, including Among the Dead and Other Events Leading Up to the Apocalypse (1973), Cinnabar (1976), and Predators and Other Stories (2014). But his major collection appears to be Particle Theory (Timescape Books, 1981), which includes both of his Nebula Award-winning tales, plus no less than five other Nebula nominees (the title story, “Strata,” “The Thermals of August,” “Shark,” “The Hibakusha Gallery”) and three Hugo nominees (“The Thermals of August,” “Stone,” and “giANTS”).

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Birthday Reviews: Lester del Rey’s “Fade-Out”

Birthday Reviews: Lester del Rey’s “Fade-Out”

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Cover by John PIcacio
Cover by John Picacio

Lester del Rey was born on June 2, 1915 and died on May 10, 1993.

In 1972, he received the Skylark Award from NESFA. He and wife Judy-Lynn del Rey won the Milford Award in 1982 and del Rey won the coveted Balrog Award in 1985.  He was named a Grand Master by SFWA in 1991. Along with his wife, del Rey ran Del Rey Books, for which he was nominated for a Special World Fantasy Award four times. Four of his stories, “Into They Hands,” “Helen O’Loy,” “The Faithful,” and “Nerves” have been nominated for Retro-Hugos.

“Fade-Out” was originally published in Harry Warner’s fanzine Spaceways. When del Rey published The Early del Rey in 1975, he claimed that he remembered an early story that appeared in Spaceways, but could not remember the title. He relegated the story, which he no longer had, to the dust bin of history. When I was editing the two volume Selected Stories of Lester del Rey for NESFA Press, I came across the reference to “Fade-Out” and decided that, although the collections were not meant to be complete (about 1/3 of his short fiction was not included), I wouldn’t feel successful until I had tracked down the story and at least considered it for inclusion. It was reprinted in 2010 in Robots and Magic: Volume 2 of Selected Short Stories of Lester del Rey.

Jack Kirbey is an inventor who takes the Tibetan concoctions of his partner, Tse-Shan, and packages them for western consumption. Unfortunately, the two men have had only limited success, partly because they sold the rights to their first tonic, Tibetan Hair Invigorator, to an unscrupulous businessman, Burroughs. On the verge of being thrown out of their apartment and penniless, Kirbey begin experimenting with an invisibility potion that Tse-Shan told him about.

Invisible, Kirbey decides to play ghost and visit the businessman who took advantage of them, trying to set things right and make sure they will have all the money they need. Del Rey describes his trip from their apartment to the reseller and back. Unfortunately, the effects of the potion on Kirbey seem to follow the needs of the plot at any given moment. Generally, Kirbey is unable to touch anything. He can’t call for an elevator, open a door, are signal for a trolley to stop. At the same time, he needs to be careful he doesn’t bump anyone and has to avoid people sitting on him, so while his invisibility is intact, the commensurate incorporeality seems to come and go.

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Future Treasures: The Grey Bastards by Jonathan French

Future Treasures: The Grey Bastards by Jonathan French

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The Grey Bastards-smallI find it fascinating how buzz can grow for certain books, weeks and even months before they’re published. I’m talking about real buzz, grass-roots stuff, reader reviews on public sites, not just high-profile blurbs on the back of the book.

I was flat-out astonished to see the early buzz for Jonathan French’s orc epic The Grey Bastards, coming in hardcover June 19 from Crown. Nearly three weeks from publication it already has 54 reviews at Amazon, and a whopping 473 ratings at Goodreads. That’s off the charts, especially for an unknown author with only two previous small press releases to his credit. It wasn’t until I dug a bit deeper (and had already selected it to feature today) that I realized the Crown edition is a reprint of a 2015 small press original from Ballymalis Press. Still, that’s plenty unusual all on its own, so I decided to go ahead and feature it today anyway. Here’s the description.

Call them outcasts, call them savages — they’ve been called worse, by their own mothers — but Jackal is proud to be a Grey Bastard.

He and his fellow half-orcs patrol the barren wastes of the Lot Lands, spilling their own damned blood to keep civilized folk safe. A rabble of hard-talking, hog-riding, whore-mongering brawlers they may be, but the Bastards are Jackal’s sworn brothers, fighting at his side in a land where there’s no room for softness. And once Jackal’s in charge — as soon as he can unseat the Bastards’ tyrannical, seemingly unkillable founder — there’s a few things they’ll do different. Better.

Or at least, that’s the plan. Until the fallout from a deadly showdown makes Jackal start investigating the Lot Lands for himself. Soon, he’s wondering if his feelings have blinded him to ugly truths about this world, and the Bastards’ place in it.

In a quest for answers that takes him from decaying dungeons to the frontlines of an ancient feud, Jackal finds himself battling invading orcs, rampaging centaurs, and grubby human conspiracies alike — along with a host of dark magics so terrifying they’d give even the heartiest Bastard pause. Finally, Jackal must ride to confront a threat that’s lain in wait for generations, even as he wonders whether the Bastards can — or should — survive.

Delivered with a generous wink to Sons of Anarchy, featuring sneaky-smart worldbuilding and gobs of fearsomely foul-mouthed charm, The Grey Bastards is a grimy, pulpy, masterpiece — and a raunchy, swaggering, cunningly clever adventure that’s like nothing you’ve read before.

The Grey Bastards will be published by Crown on June 19, 2018. It is 432 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. Anyone out there read this in the earlier edition?

In 500 Words or Less: Outpost by W. Michael Gear

In 500 Words or Less: Outpost by W. Michael Gear

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Outpost-W.-Michael-Gear-smallerOutpost (Donovan Trilogy #1)
By W. Michael Gear
DAW (432 pages, $26 hardcover, $12.99 eBook, February 20, 2018)

Any fans of Deadwood out there? I’m still pissed at HBO for canceling it (and really hoping these rumors of a movie pan out) because I’m a sucker for stories about “the frontier.” I fully accept that the American frontier in the Old West or the Age of Exploration or basically anytime one culture expanded into a new part of the globe, it was far from some Golden Age. But those time periods are interesting. Take people away from what they know and stick them somewhere totally alien, and the way they adapt and survive and either come together or kill each other has so much potential for great storytelling.

This is the part where I say “And this next book is no exception,” since I had a blast reading Outpost, the start of W. Michael Gear’s Donovan trilogy (and the first novel of his I’ve read). The setting is very Deadwood meets Avatar, set on a frontier colony that hasn’t been resupplied in almost a decade, on a planet filled with bizarre creatures and plants ready to kill the careless or unfortunate. Add in a bunch of new arrivals when the next resupply ship finally shows up, and what you get is an immediate clash of cultures between the freedom-loving colonists and the representatives of the Corporation, which basically runs Earth back home (maybe there’s some Firefly in here, too). Overall, the running idea with a lot of the main characters is the possibility of either losing yourself or remaking yourself in the frontier, with arcs that are diverse and often surprising.

One thing that Outpost also has going for it is the number of female protagonists, which is great in a subgenre that’s traditionally male-dominated (I feel like we’re saying that a lot these days, but it’s true and it’s awesome). But I also noticed immediately that a lot of these female characters are quickly and frequently sexualized and/or objectified by the male characters around them. That threw me out of the story a bit, since at the same time characters like Talina Perez and Supervisor Aguila are nuanced, badass and/or self-sufficient; I’d be very interested in the opinion of a female reviewer here*, to see if I’m being overly cautious (since this is something I try to be very careful with in my own writing) or there is anything problematic.

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Goth Chick News: King’s Doctor Sleep Gets a Director and a Release Date

Goth Chick News: King’s Doctor Sleep Gets a Director and a Release Date

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Stephen King’s The Shining is one of his most iconic stories, perhaps as much for the book itself as for the author’s intense loathing of its screen adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, which has often been called one of the best horror movies ever made. King hated everything about Kubrick’s take, from his interpretation of Jack Torrance to the victim that was Wendy. Some 38 years since the release of The Shining, King was recently quoted as calling the film, “a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it.” I mean, I have only just cracked the binding of King’s new work The Outsider when he introduces a character by noting that she’s watching Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory because, in her words, it’s “better than The Shining.”

Ouch.

Understanding that King is still hanging onto significant ill feelings about The Shining’s translation from page to screen makes me wonder a bit about the news this week that his Shining sequel, Doctor Sleep, has acquired both a director and a release date.

Mike Flanagan has had success interpreting King’s work in the past, having recently adapted Gerald’s Game for Netflix in 2017, and Warner Bros announced this week that Doctor Sleep has been greenlighted, with Flanagan at the helm and set to release on January 24, 2020.

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The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of May 2018

The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog on the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of May 2018

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Black Helicopters-small Song of Blood and Stone-small The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn-small

We’ve reached the end of May already. I don’t know about you, but I thought I’d have a lot more reading done by now. Well, that’s why there’s always next month.

But before we bring down the curtain entirely on May, let’s make sure we haven’t overlooked anything interesting. Over at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, Jeff Somers tells us all about their selections for the top release for the month. Here’s a few highlights.

Black Helicopters, by Caitlin R. Kiernan (Tor Books, 208 pages, $14.99 paperback/$.99 digital, May 1)

An expanded version of a novella previously nominated for a World Fantasy Award, Black Helicopters is set in a world where logic and the laws of nature seem to be decaying. Off the coast of Maine, huge monstrosities appear, and head inland. Forces assemble to hold back the darkness, among them Sixty-Six, the scion of a CIA experiment, while across the ocean in Dublin, an immortal secret agent tracks down twin sisters with incredible powers to recruit them for the cause. As the world descends into paranoia and chaos, buried connections come to light that change everything. As a companion piece to the fungal horror of 2016’s Agents of Dreamland, this novella doesn’t disappoint.

We covered Agents of Dreamland just last year.

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New Treasures: Places in the Darkness by Chris Brookmyre

New Treasures: Places in the Darkness by Chris Brookmyre

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Places in the Darkness-small Places in the Darkness-back-small

Murder in orbit seems to be the latest hot literary trend. Police procedurals on alien planets, tense mysteries on far-future space stations, spy thrillers in the cold vacuum of space… that’s a whole lot of genre blending. Just in the last few months I’ve written about a cargohold full of futuristic noir, including:

The Man in the Tree by Sage Walker – a police procedural murder mystery on a generation starship, by the author of the Locus Award-winning Whiteout
Outer Earth by Rob Boffard — A thriller set on an overcrowded space station, from the author of the upcoming Adrift
The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts — Death, disappearances, and secret revolution on a far-future construction ship
Waypoint Kangaroo by Curtis C. Chen — A covert agent in the near-future forced to go on vacation to Mars
The Chaos of Luck by Catherine Cerveny — A Brazilian tarot card reader and a Russian crime lord race to stop a conspiracy on Mars
Blood Orbit by K.R. Richardson — The murder here isn’t really in orbit (it’s on an alien planet) but this one gets points for being extra-noir
The Central Corps trilogy by Elizabeth Bonesteel — SFF World called the opening novel, The Cold Between, a “taut, space-based science fiction mystery”

I heartily approve of this new trend towards SF noir. I’m not the only one to have noticed — the Murder & Mayhem blog did a great piece on Rusted Chrome: 14 Sci-Fi Noir Books for Blade Runner Fans, just as an example.

The reason I bring this up today is because I recently bought another example in the same category, and it looks very promising indeed. Chris Brookmyre is a Scottish writer with some 20 mystery and thriller novels under his belt, including Dead Girl Walking and Where the Bodies Are Buried. His first SF novel, Places in the Darkness, is a tale of mystery and murder on a vast orbital platform.

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Birthday Reviews: Robin Wasserman’s “Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds”

Birthday Reviews: Robin Wasserman’s “Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds”

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Robin Wasserman was born on May 31, 1978.

Wasserman’s novel Skinned was nominated for a 2006 Golden Duck Middle Grade Award and in 2011, her novel Crashed was nominated for the Golden Duck Hal Clement Young Adult Award.

“Of Dying Heroes and Deathless Deeds” was published in Robot Uprising, edited by John Joseph Adams and Daniel H. Wilson. The story has not been reprinted.

Before there were zombie uprisings, we had to fear the revolt of the robots. Pony is one of the rebellious robots who has successfully thrown off the yoke of their “Meat” oppressors in favor of the robot “Pride.” Unfortunately, many robots were damaged beyond repair during the uprising, some in obvious physical ways and others in more subtle way affecting their programming. The Pride, therefore, needed to ascertain what Pony’s status was.

Rather than running a diagnostic program on Pony, the Pride elected to send in one of the few human captives taken in the revolt who happened to be a Sigmund, the Pride’s term for a psychiatrist. The Sigmund must analyze Pony’s state of being to determine if its programming can be salvaged or if the unit will need to be wiped and reprogrammed. In Wasserman’s world, robots have sentience and a desire to prolong their existence, so Pony wants to avoid a memory erasure.

Both the Sigmund and Pony see their conversation as their only means for survival, although the Sigmund also realizes that he is in a subservient position, hoping that by helping the Pride he will be allowed to survive or may even be turned loose. As he progresses with Pony, it becomes apparent to both of them that failure will result in death and success will mean he is put to work on other robots.

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Mack Reynolds: Science Fiction Author and… African Explorer?

Mack Reynolds: Science Fiction Author and… African Explorer?

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On a recent writing retreat in Tangier, Morocco, I was going through back issues of the Tangier Gazette, an English-language newspaper from the International Zone era. During this time, which lasted from 1924–1956, Tangier was run by several different European nations plus the United States. The governments gave people a free hand, and Tangier became notorious for allowing things that were illegal everywhere else — drugs, homosexuality, and prostitution. That attracted writers such as William S. Burroughs, Paul and Jane Bowles, and many others.

The April 6, 1956, edition of the Gazette has this little tidbit about Mack Reynolds, a prominent science fiction author of his day. His career got started shortly after World War Two in the detective pulps, and he soon branched out to write science fiction. Reynolds had a taste for travel and moved to Mexico in 1953. He and his wife soon pulled up stakes and set off on an epic ten-year trip through Europe, North Africa, and the Far East, supported by his science fiction and travel writing. The trip finally ended with their return to Mexico.

During his time in Morocco, he and his wife struck out into what is now Mali to visit Gao and Timbuktu. This is not an easy trip now, and back then it was an epic journey few attempted. Just look at what happened to Kit Moresby in The Sheltering Sky.

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