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Andrew Liptak on 33 SF and Fantasy Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2017

Andrew Liptak on 33 SF and Fantasy Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2017

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The Collapsing Empire John Scalzi-small Luna Wolf Moon-small The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter Theodora Goss-small

I don’t know about you, but given the choice between reading the best books of 2017 and the ones everyone’s talking about…. I think I’d go with the latter. Because books that aren’t talked about are soon forgotten, and forgotten books are irrelevant books. And who wants to waste their time on irrelevant books?

Fortunately, we’re here to talk about the 2017 books that are already generating a lot of buzz. Today’s arbiter of excellence is Andrew Liptak who, in an article for The Verge, has compiled a list of 33 SF & fantasy titles that will dominate the conversation over the next year. His list includes novels by Mur Lafferty, Nnedi Okorafor, Kameron Hurley, Chuck Wendig, V. E. Schwab, Kim Stanley Robinson, Ada Palmer, Allen Steele, Timothy Zahn, Cory Doctorow, Brian Staveley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Robin Hobb, Yoon Ha Lee, Max Gladstone, Peter V. Brett, N.K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, and many others.

Here’s a look at some of the most interesting titles on Andrew’s list, starting with The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi.

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New Treasures: Department Zero by Paul Crilley

New Treasures: Department Zero by Paul Crilley

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Department Zero Paul Crilley-small Department Zero Paul Crilley-back-small

I don’t know much about this Paul Crilley fellow. He’s a South African writer who’s written a previous series for Pyr, the steampunk Tweed & Nightingale Adventures, a Daredevil prose novel, several YA titles, and much of the Bioware game Star Wars: The Old Republic.

His newest novel, Department Zero, is a beast of a different stripe, however. It’s the tale of a single dad who works cleaning up crime scenes… and who accidentally stumbles upon universe-hopping gates that connect a hidden multiverse of alternate realities. There he meets Havelock Graves, the top cop in the Interstitial Crime Department…. and discovers that a sinister cult is planning nothing less than to awaken Cthulhu from his slumber in the Dreamlands. (That’s another thing Harry discovers: “Everything H.P. Lovecraft wrote is true, Like, everything.”)

As you can probably tell, the book is not entirely serious. Publishers Weekly says it’s “Fast-paced and fun… The humor is on point… Lovecraft fans might have a lot of fun with this one.” Yeah, I bet I might. Department Zero was published by Pyr on January 24, 2017. It is 301 pages, priced at $17 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cool cover art is by Patrick Arrasmith. Click the images above for bigger versions.

A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison

A Storm of Wings by M. John Harrison

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oie_701145jxuo14zKNine years, another novel, and ten short stories after the publication of The Pastel City (read last week’s piece on that here), M. John Harrison returned to the world of the city of Viriconium in A Storm of Wings (1980). Its title taken from a line in the previous book, A Storm of Wings largely recycles the plot of the that novel as well. Once again, alien forces are threatening the city of Virconium and only a ragtag band of heroes has a chance of staving off destruction. Other than setting and basic similarity of narratives, this second novel in the series exists on a whole different plane of storytelling, both in style and intent.

A new religion has risen up in and around the city of Viriconium, the Brotherhood of the Locust. Its origins are a mystery and its teachings appear to have arrived from beyond mortal thoughts.

Who knows exactly where it began, or how? For as much as a century (or as little as a decade: estimates vary) before it made its appearance on the streets, a small group or cabal somehwere in the city had propagated its fundamental tenet — that the appearance of “reality” is quite false, a counterfeit or artefact of the human senses.

This creed stands at the nucleus of A Storm of Wings, both the story on the page, and at what Harrison has to say about fiction. As the “world” of Viriconium comes under attack from a force that twists and alters its “reality,” we are, page by page, reminded any stability the “land” has comes from its creator and can be wiped away with a tap of the backspace key.

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Lawrence Ellsworth’s New Translation of Dumas’ The Red Sphinx

Lawrence Ellsworth’s New Translation of Dumas’ The Red Sphinx

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Dumas The Red Sphinx

Lawrence Ellsworth (known to gaming fans as Lawrence Schick, creator of White Plume Mountain, and the lead writer for The Elder Scrolls Online), has written many popular articles for Black Gate over the years, including one of our top posts of 2015, “The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History,” and more recently his fabulous Silent Screen Swashbucklers series.

In addition to his renowned gaming work, Lawrence is also a popular author and translator in his own right. His most recent release is a brand new translation of a nearly forgotten novel by the great Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. (That’s Lawrence above, showing off both his new book and his dashing wardrobe.)

The Red Sphinx, a sequel to The Three Musketeers that picks up where that book ended, is a massive 837-page tome that Michael Dirda calls “As fresh as ever… excellent, compulsively readable” in the Washington Post. It was published in hardcover by Pegasus Books on January 3.

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A Lou Reed Song With a Knife to Your Throat: Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba Trilogy

A Lou Reed Song With a Knife to Your Throat: Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba Trilogy

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Half-Resurrection-Blues-small Midnight Taxi Tango-small Battle Hill Bolero-small

The opening novel in Daniel José Older’s Bone Street Rumba trilogy, Half-Resurrection Blues, was selected as one of the Best Fantasy Books of 2015 by BuzzFeed, Barnes & Noble, and other sites. Portion of the second, Midnight Taxi Tango, were originally published at Tor.com as three original short stories: “Anyway: Angie,” “Kia and Gio,” and “Ginga.” All are still available for you to sample.

The novels follow the adventures of Carlos Delacruz, one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents. Saladin Ahmed, Hugo-nominated author of Throne of the Crescent Moon, says “Simply put, Daniel José Older has one of the most refreshing voices in genre fiction today,” and Richard Kadrey (Sandman Slim) calls Older “As real as fresh blood and as hard as its New York streets. A Lou Reed song sung with a knife to your throat.” The third novel in the series, Battle Hill Bolero, was finally released in paperback by Roc last month.

Read excerpts from all three novels at Tor.com.

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Future Treasures: In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle

Future Treasures: In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle

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In Calabria Peter Beagle-smallPeter S. Beagle, author of The Last Unicorn and The Folk of the Air, is one of the finest writers we have, and a new Beagle novella is a major event.

In Calabria, the tale of a lonely farmer in Italy’s scenic Calabria who finds himself a worldwide sensation when his farm becomes a haven for a host of unicorns, is a highly-anticipated return to the subject that made him famous. It’s available in trade paperback from Tachyon on Valentines’ Day.

Claudio Bianchi has lived alone for many years on a hillside in Southern Italy’s scenic Calabria. Set in his ways and suspicious of outsiders, Claudio has always resisted change, preferring farming and writing poetry. But one chilly morning, as though from a dream, an impossible visitor appears at the farm. When Claudio comes to her aid, an act of kindness throws his world into chaos. Suddenly he must stave off inquisitive onlookers, invasive media, and even more sinister influences.

Lyrical, gripping, and wise, In Calabria confirms Peter S. Beagle’s continuing legacy as one of fantasy’s most legendary authors.

Our previous coverage of Peter Beagle includes:

Future Treasures: Summerlong
The Mystery of Peter S. Beagle’s I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons
How to Support Peter S. Beagle with The Last Unicorn Blu-ray by Ryan Harvey
The Secret History of Fantasy, edited by Peter S. Beagle

In Calabria will be published by Tachyon Publications on February 14, 2017. It is 176 pages, priced at $19.95 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

B&N Blog on 96 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in 2017

B&N Blog on 96 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in 2017

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Witchy Eye DJ Butler-small Gilded Game Vic James-small Relics Tim Lebbon-small

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog has gradually become one of my favorite places on the web. It’s well written, entertaining, and has a lot of content — virtually all of it focused on books. What’s not to love?

It’s not afraid of tackling big projects either. While lesser blogs may give you a peek at 10 upcoming releases and then head down to the pub, the hard-working crew at the B&N Sci-Fi Blog labor late into the night to compile a monster list of nearly 100 of the best genre books coming your way. How do they do it? Here’s Joel Cunningham with the scoop.

We asked sci-fi and fantasy editors from all the major publishing houses to share with us the books they are most excited to release into the wild in 2017. Let us just say, these editors are very excited — so excited, the list quickly ballooned to nearly 100 books. That’s 100 books that we’re really excited about too, even if the knowledge that we can’t possibly hope to read every one of them makes us lament, again, our pesky mortality.

Grab a fresh cup of coffee or your beverage of choice, and settle in. This is a big one.

Yeah, Joel’s right about that. It took a lot of work with compile this list, and I guarantee you that you’ll find something that will catch your interest. Here’s a handful of titles that I found especially intriguing.

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Steven Brust’s Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed His Life

Steven Brust’s Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed His Life

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Zelazny Lord of Light Creatures of Light and Darkness-small

Over at Tor.com, Steven Brust (The Incrementalists, the Vlad Taltos novels) talks about what may be my favorite fantasy novel, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967).

You always get asked, “When did you know you wanted to be a writer?” And, of course, there’s no answer, or a thousand answers that are all equally valid. But I usually say, “In high school, when I read Zelazny’s Lord of Light.”

You see, until then, I had never known you could do that. I never knew you could make someone feel all those different things at the same time, with all of that intensity, just by how you used 26 characters and a few punctuation marks. What was it? Well, everything: Sam and Yama were the most compelling characters I’d come across; it was the first time I’d ever stopped reading to just admire a sentence; it gave me the feeling (which proved correct) that there were layers I wouldn’t get without a few rereadings; and, above all, it was when I became of what could be done with voice — how much could be done with just the way the author addressed the reader. I remember putting that book down and thinking, “If I could make someone feel like this, how cool would that be?” Then I started reading it again. And then I went and grabbed everything else of his I could find.

Steven uses this as a springboard to discuss Five Roger Zelazny Books that Changed My Life by Being Awesome, including the spiritual successor to Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969), which includes the brilliant “Madrak’s Possibly Proper Death Litany, or the “agnostic’s prayer” as it has come to be called.” Read the entire article here.

A Shaper of Myths: The Best of Cordwainer Smith

A Shaper of Myths: The Best of Cordwainer Smith

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The Best of Cordwainer Smith-small The Best of Cordwainer Smith-back-small

He and I stared at each other. Was this what culture was? Were we now men? Did freedom always include the freedom to mistrust, to fear, to hate?
— Cordwainer Smith, “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” p. 300

Such are the questions set in the context of Cordwainer Smith’s utopian, futuristic society where people are seeking to go back to being “human” again. But this is only one small time slice and representation of Smith’s massive mythos in The Best of Cordwainer Smith (1975). This volume was the fifth installment in Del Rey’s Classic Science Fiction Series, and the first to be edited by someone other than Lester Del Rey (1915–1993). John J. Pierce (1941–) edits this volume and provides a very fine introduction. Pierce is a science fiction critic and was once a very outspoken pundit against the 1960s New Wave in science fiction.

Whereas the cover art of the first four volumes was done by the late Dean Ellis (1920–2009), the cover for this book was by the late Darrell Sweet (1934–2011). Sweet’s artwork here is very reminiscent of Ellis’ work on the Classic Science Fiction Series. This is interesting, seeing how Sweet’s later artwork is very different from Ellis. (See this Black Gate memorial post to Sweet for later examples of his work.) It seems Sweet was attempting to keep with the aesthetic feel that Ellis had already established.

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The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

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The Pastel CityM. John Harrison, like Joan Vinge or J.G. Ballard, hails from my terra incognita of the universe of sci-fi/fantasy authors. Over the years I’ve read praises of his fiction but have never read a word of it. Searching my shelves for something to review this week, I saw a copy of the Bantam omnibus of his novels and stories of Viriconium, a city in the twilight days of Earth. I have no memory of how, when, or where it came into my possession, but there it was. So I figured it was about time to investigate its unknown literary landscapes.

Harrison came to my attention from a pair of essays he wrote on the creation of fantasy. The first, “What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium,” is an attack on the effort to codify and specifiy the nature of fantasy. It opens with this bold statement:

The great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren’t was countries with people in them.

For him, any effort to delineate geographical boundaries and the like in a work of fantasy undermines what really lies at its heart. He describes his own tales like this:

“Viriconium” is a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair. At the same time it is an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely so that we will try to put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh).

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