Black Gate

I think of Marcus Sakey chiefly as a thriller writer. Mostly because he is.

Publications like The Chicago Sun-Times call him “a modern master of suspense” and he gets blurbed by fellow thriller writers like Michael Connell (who called him “one of our best storytellers.”) His previous efforts, including The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes and Good People, were contemporary suspense novels. Sounds like a thriller writer to me.

So at first I didn’t pay much attention to his newest book, Brilliance. My mistake. Set in an alternate reality that diverged from ours in 1980 when 1% of births became people with extraordinary gifts, the novel follows federal agent Nick Cooper, born with the talent to hunt the world’s worst criminals, on the trail of a brilliant whose talent could lead to unheard-of destruction.

In Wyoming, a little girl reads people’s darkest secrets by the way they fold their arms. In New York, a man sensing patterns in the stock market racks up $300 billion. In Chicago, a woman can go invisible by being where no one is looking. They’re called “brilliants,” and since 1980, one percent of people have been born this way. Nick Cooper is among them; a federal agent, Cooper has gifts rendering him exceptional at hunting terrorists. His latest target may be the most dangerous man alive, a brilliant drenched in blood and intent on provoking civil war. But to catch him, Cooper will have to violate everything he believes in — and betray his own kind.

For those of you who care about such things, the novel has already been optioned by Legendary Pictures (makers of 300, Watchmen, The Dark Knight, Man of Steel, and this summer’s best movie, Pacific Rim). For me, the premise alone is intriguing enough to get my attention.

Brilliance will be published tomorrow by Thomas & Mercer, a division of Amazon.com that focuses on mystery and thrillers. It is 452 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback. The Kindle edition lists at $9.99, but is currently just $3.99 — check it out.

See all of our recent New Treasures here.

I love novellas, and I think they’re the perfect length for SF and fantasy. Long enough to really explore characters and setting, short enough to demand ruthless pacing — and to read in one sitting. I bought as many as I could fit for Black Gate (a few more than I could fit, truthfully), and writers were always grateful. Time and again I was told that the novella was a hard sell these days… only a handful of markets would take them.

One editor who does regularly feature novellas is Gordon van Gelder, for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Even though each issue is a massive 256 pages, however, he’s still limited in how many he can fit. So I was pleased to see the recent appearance of Lonely Souls, an anthology of four novellas just published by Gordon’s Spilogale press.

Many science fiction writers view the novella as the optimal length-short enough to be read in one sitting, but long enough to build a world. And what better world can we build and examine, than the landscape of our lonely souls? Gordon Van Gelder has brought together a set of four novellas that dig deeper into the recesses of our beings.

In “Goliath of Gath,” Jan Lars Jensen offers us a look at figure of legend not usually considered: Goliath. One of the last of his people, the giants, in a changing social and political landscape. A pacifist manipulated into death with the promise of peace. A man whose story is rarely examined in favor of David, the plucky hero of the Bible.

Then Eric Carl Wolf brings us to a grassy, cowboy-country, beef-herding planet as barren as the Old West in “Demands of Ghosts,” where we meet a former assassin seeking anonymity and redemption.

In “One Day at the Zoo” by Rand B. Lee a young girl with special powers is “saved” from being experimented on by the closest person to her, her mother, who seeks instead to destroy her.

In a strange, violent, debauched future, an assassin confronts a new technology that enables immortality, destroying the value of death, and he begins a quest for oblivion, so goes “Final Kill” by Chris DeVito.

Spilogale also publishes digital versions of Fourth Planet from the Sun (covered here) and F&SF. We covered the July/August issue of F&SF here.

Lonely Souls is currently available in electronic format. It is 267 pages, priced at $5.99. There is currently no print edition. Learn more here. Check it out and support great short fiction at a great price!