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New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, edited by Greg Bear

New Treasures: Nebula Awards Showcase 2015, edited by Greg Bear

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Nebula Awards Showcase 2015-smallThere are a lot of new anthologies released every year, including around a dozen Year’s Best volumes. I frequently get asked which is the best single-volume collection showcasing the finest science fiction and fantasy of the year. And year after year, I always suggest the same book: the annual Nebula Awards Showcase, which contains the stories selected by the Science Fiction Writers of America for the prestigious Nebula Awards. It also includes many of the runners-up, author appreciations, yearly wrap-ups, novel excerpts, and other fascinating articles.

The annual Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published every year since 1966. The 2015 volume contains some of the most talked-about fiction of the past several years, including Rachel Swirsky’s “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,” Sophia Samatar’s “Selkie Stories Are For Losers,” Aliette de Bodard’s “The Waiting Stars,” and many others. Here’s the description.

The Nebula Awards Showcase volumes have been published annually since 1966, reprinting the winning and nominated stories of the Nebula Awards, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The editor, selected by SFWA’s anthology Committee (chaired by Mike Resnick), is American science fiction and fantasy writer Greg Bear, author of over thirty novels, including the Nebula Award-winning Darwin’s Radio and Moving Mars. This year’s volume includes the winners of the Andre Norton, Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, Rhysling, and Dwarf Stars Awards, as well as the Nebula Award winners, and features Ann Leckie, Nalo Hopkinson, Rachel Swirsky, Aliette de Bodard, and Vylar Kaftan, with additional articles and poems by authors such as Robin Wayne Bailey, Samuel R. Delany, Terry A. Garey, Deborah P Kolodji, and Andrew Robert Sutton.

We covered the previous volume, Nebula Awards Showcase 2014, edited by Kij Johnson, last May (and the TOCs for the now-classic first three volumes are here). Read all about this year’s Nebula winners here.

Nebula Awards Showcase 2015 was published by Pyr Books on December 8, 2015. It is 347 pages, priced at $18 in trade paperback and $11.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by John Harris.

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Season’s Greetings: Some Recommendations To Warm Your Cold Cockles

Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: Season’s Greetings: Some Recommendations To Warm Your Cold Cockles

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Regardless of whether you’re more a Scrooge or a Tiny Tim, I’ve got two recommendations that make perfect reading for the season (and a viewing and listening recommendation, if you haven’t got time to read both books).

The first is Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett (available in HC, ppb & ebook), set in the popular Discworld series. If there are still F/SF readers who haven’t encountered this quirky world before, it is a place much like our own. Magic may be real, but the wizards and witches and guards on the City Watch are as human, and eccentric, as any neighbor you’d want to meet. Pratchett’s novels defy fantasy conventions and rise above any preconceptions you might have about that sort of novel. They’re funny, and filled with wry social commentary and compassion for human weakness.

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Wandering the Worlds of C.S. Lewis, Part I: Boxen

Wandering the Worlds of C.S. Lewis, Part I: Boxen

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BoxenC.S. Lewis loved walking, and in one letter to his friend Arthur Greaves he wrote of a fifty-mile three-day expedition he undertook alongside other friends: walking by day through woods and river valleys, at evenings stopping at local houses where the company might discuss the nature of the Good. Bearing this image in mind I’ve decided to begin wandering through the terrain of Lewis’ fiction. It is well-trodden ground, as many others have done this before me. But there’s a certain charm in seeing things for oneself. It is also just possible that another pair of eyes may spot something new in even the most familiar landscape, if the terrain is varied enough. And Lewis’ writing, as a whole, stands out as heterogeneous indeed.

I have read some, though far from all, of Lewis’ non-fiction; I intend to talk about it only insofar as I see a bearing on his fiction. I’m interested in seeing what images, tones, ideas, and approaches unite a fairly disparate corpus of writing. I want to see how Lewis’ approach to storytelling developed over his life, and how motifs and themes recurred in his work. I hope that by doing this I’ll better understand his individual books. At any rate, I’ll begin here with a look at Lewis’ published juvenilia. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at his early collection of poetry, Spirits in Bondage, then the day after that his long poem Dymer. Next Sunday I’ll move on to his first long prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, and see what sort of schedule I can manage from there until I reach Lewis’ last novel, Till We Have Faces.

Note that these posts will be merely my own impression of Lewis’ work, rather than, say, an attempt to read Lewis by his own lights. So while Lewis believed that a writer’s biographical details were by and large irrelevant to their literary accomplishments, I’m a little more interested in how the story of a writer’s life maps onto the stories they choose to tell. Some chronological landmarks therefore follow by which to survey Lewis’ early writings.

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Future Treasures: City of Light by Keri Arthur

Future Treasures: City of Light by Keri Arthur

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City of Light Keri Arthur-smallKeri Arthur is the New York Times bestselling author of the Souls of Fire and Dark Angels novels. Next month she introduces a brand new futuristic fantasy with City of Light, Book 1 in the Outcast Series, the tale of an invasion of wraiths, demons, and death spirits, and the super-soldiers who form Earth’s last defense.

When the bombs that stopped the species war tore holes in the veil between this world and the next, they allowed entry to the Others — demons, wraiths, and death spirits who turned the shadows into their hunting grounds. Now, a hundred years later, humans and shifters alike live in artificially lit cities designed to keep the darkness at bay….

As a déchet — a breed of humanoid super-soldiers almost eradicated by the war — Tiger has spent her life in hiding. But when she risks her life to save a little girl on the outskirts of Central City, she discovers that the child is one of many abducted in broad daylight by a wraith-like being — an impossibility with dangerous implications for everyone on earth.

Because if the light is no longer enough to protect them, nowhere is safe…

The second novel, Winter Halo, is scheduled to arrive November 2016.

City of Light will be published by Signet on January 5, 2016. It is 368 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the paperback and digital versions. Learn more at Keri Arthur’s website.

Barnes and Noble Picks the Best SF and Fantasy of 2015

Barnes and Noble Picks the Best SF and Fantasy of 2015

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Twelve Kings in Sharakhai-small2The closer we get to the end of the year, the more Best of the Year lists start popping up. Some are more reliable than others, however.

I’ve had good luck with Barnes & Noble’s lists, which have steered me towards some excellent fiction in years past. This year their Best Science-Fiction & Fantasy of 2015 is authored by Joel Cunningham, and it includes the acclaimed first volume in Bradley P. Beaulieu’s ambitious new fantasy series, Twelve Kings in Sharakhai.

Beaulieu launches his second epic fantasy trilogy (following The Lays of Anuskaya) with the story of 19-year-old Çeda, a gladiator in the fighting pits of Sharakhai, a desert kingdom ruled over by 12 immortal lords who live in luxury while their subjects must scrape to survive. Determined to avenge her mother, who was executed by the Twelve Kings, Çeda schemes and searches for a way to upset their ironclad rule — and comes to uncover hidden truths about the source of their power, and her own destiny, that could upset the balance of the entire world. Beaulieu’s intricate world-building and complex characters are quickly becoming the hallmarks of his writing, and if this opening volume is any indication, The Song of the Shattered Sands will be one of the next great fantasy epics. Read our review.

The list also includes Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente, The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher, Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson, Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman, Half-Resurrection Blues by Daniel José Older, and many others.

See the complete list here.

Vintage Treasures: The Etched City by K.J. Bishop

Vintage Treasures: The Etched City by K.J. Bishop

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The Etched City-smallThe Etched City, the debut novel by Australian writer K. J. Bishop, was published in a small print run by Prime Books in 2003. It rapidly accumulated a lot of attention — not to mention stellar reviews — and was nominated for both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award. Publishers Weekly said it combines “equal parts of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and China Mille’s Perdido Street Station,” and James Sallis, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, called it:

An ambitious and casually brilliant debut, erudite, lavishly written… Though it borrows from both, this is neither heroic fantasy nor romance-fantasy chockfull of magic swords, witches, and wizards unaware. It’s fantasy as high literature, our world skewed to a hard right angle…

Here’s the book description:

Gwynn and Raule are rebels on the run, with little in common except being on the losing side of a hard-fought war. Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor… a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just — and lost — causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom…

The Etched City was first published by Prime Books in 2003, and reprinted by Bantam Spectra in December 2004. It is 382 pages, priced at $14 in trade paperback. The cover is by Paul Youll. It is still in print, and there is also an $11.99 digital edition.

A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

A Biography Worthy of the Creator of D&D: Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination

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Empire of the Imagination-small Empire of the Imagination back-small

Anyone who has grown up in a small town knows how much of an unrelenting pest, nay enemy, boredom can be. And if you grew up in the days before the internet, or before fairly inexpensive computers or game systems, and when cable television was just getting going, boredom was even more of a specter. However, my young friends and I had one constant respite from boredom: role-playing games (RPGs)! And like most from my generation, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was our starting point.

It’s hard to communicate just how new and different D&D was from other games that had previously been around. Before RPGs, most games were known for having a point or area of physical attention, e.g. a game-board with pieces, or playing cards. And most of these games had a “winner.” D&D had none of this. You had your player character (PC) sheet, pencil, dice, and graph paper to make a map. And though one’s PC could survive with treasure in a D&D adventure, there weren’t really any “winners,” meaning the game could go on and on and on… sometimes for days or weeks.

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New Treasures: The Redemption’s Heir Series by Anne M. Pillsworth

New Treasures: The Redemption’s Heir Series by Anne M. Pillsworth

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Summoned-small Fathomless-small

Here’s something interesting: a two-volume Young Adult series of Lovecraftian horror and mystery. I don’t often see YA fiction labeled “Lovecraftian,” but when I do, I pay attention.

The first volume, Summoned, was published in hardcover in June of last year, and just released in paperback by Tor in October. It’s the tale of a teenage boy in Arkham, who finds an ancient book in a rare book store… with an ad from a sorcerer seeking an apprentice, and an e-mail address. When he replies, the boy finds himself quickly drawn into strange secrets from Arkham’s history. And parts of Arkham’s history are very dark indeed.

The standalone sequel picks up the tale as Sean is offered a chance to study real magic, with a proper teacher. Fathomless arrived in hardcover from Tor in later October.

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Mysterion Submissions

Mysterion Submissions

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MysterionCoverI’ve discussed Mysterion: Rediscovering the Mysteries of the Christian Faith, the anthology my wife and I are editing and publishing, on Black Gate before (here and here). We’re nearing the end of our submissions period, so I thought I’d discuss some of what’s going on with us. There’s a week left until submissions close on December 25th, so there’s still time to submit if you’d like to.

I’ve been keeping track of submissions on a weekly basis. As of Wednesday, we’ve received 385 submissions since we opened on October 15th, of which we’ve responded to 315. Most of those were rejections, but we’re currently holding 39 stories that we’re interested in publishing.

We won’t select any stories to go into the anthology until we’ve read them all. Instead, when we read a story that we think would make a good addition to the anthology, we tell the author that we’re planning to hold their story. After we’ve finished, I expect we’ll have somewhere around 50 stories that we’re holding. From those we’ll select the the ones that will go into the anthology.

At this rate, it looks pretty certain that we’ll pass 400 submissions overall. It’s even possible that we’ll pass 500, if we get a surge in the last week equal to what we got in the first week, but I think we’ll probably end up somewhere between 425-450.

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Future Treasures: The Alchemy of Chaos by Marshall Ryan Maresca

Future Treasures: The Alchemy of Chaos by Marshall Ryan Maresca

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The Alchemy of Chaos-smallMarshall Ryan Maresca’s debut novel, The Thorn of Dentonhill, followed the adventures of Veranix Calbert, diligent college student by day and crime-fighting vigilante by night, in the crime-ridden districts of the port city of Maradaine. Library Journal said, “Veranix is Batman, if Batman were a teenager and magically talented,” and that’s not far off. Now comes word that the seqel, The Alchemy of Chaos, arrives from DAW in February, and I’m very much looking forward to it.

Veranix Calbert is The Thorn — the street vigilante who became a legend to the people of Maradaine, especially the gangs that run the neighborhood of Aventil. The Thorn continues to harass Willem Fenmere, the drug kingpin of the Dentonhill neighborhood. Veranix is still determined to stop Fenmere and the effitte drug trade, especially when he discovers that Fenmere is planning on using the Red Rabbits gang to bring the drug into Aventil.

But it’s also Exam Week at the University of Maradaine, where Veranix is a magic student. With his academic career — and future as a mage — riding on his performance, Veranix needs to devote himself entirely to studying and participating in a fellow student’s thesis experiments. There’s no time to go after Fenmere or the Red Rabbits.

Then a series of strange pranks begin to plague the campus, using a form of magic that Veranix doesn’t recognize. As the pranks grow increasingly deadly, it becomes clear that there’s someone with a vendetta against the university, and The Thorn may be the only one capable of stopping them. Between the prankster, the war brewing between the Aventil gangs, and the flamboyant assassins Fenmere has hired to kill him, Veranix may end up dead before the week is out. Which just might be preferable to taking his exams….

Maresca’s second novel, A Murder of Mages, began a second series set in Maradaine. The sequel, An Import if Intrigue, the second novel of The Maradaine Constabulary, is coming Fall 2016.

The Alchemy of Chaos, the second volume of The Maradaine Series, will be published by DAW on February 2, 2016. It is 400 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital versions. The cover is by Paul Young.