Black Gate

Another reason I love the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog is that they don’t settle for one measly Best of the Year list. Oh no. They have three — Best Novels, Best Collections and Anthologies, and Best Horror. It’s almost as if they love lists as much as I do.

Their Best Horror of 2016, selected by their editors and captured by Sam Reader, includes books by Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Jason Arnopp, Joe Hill, Nick Mamatas, Christopher Buehlman, and many more. They don’t slouch on the evocative descriptions, either. Here’s their take on Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January).

By now, those who follow the horror articles here have heard of this book at least three times. If that’s not a recommendation enough, consider this a last appeal. A lyrical, dark, and haunting work, Mr. Splitfoot travels the darker sections of Appalachian New York, mixing fundamentalist cults, foreboding woods, ghost stories, and psychic phenomena fraudulent and otherwise to tell the story of two women bound by family and an event in the past. If that doesn’t sell it for you, then understand we’re not alone in our adulation: the book has drawn comparisons to Kelly Link and Aimee Bender, good company to be in if your aim is lyrical horror with strong elements of the weird.

And The Brotherhood of the Wheel, by R.S. Belcher (Tor Books, March).

…

Read More Read More

We continue our tour through the more reputable Best of the Year lists. Today’s stop: Kirkus Reviews, with their slideshow celebrating the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of 2016.

This is a much more selective list than most (a scant 10 titles), but it’s still a nice mix of repeats from other lists, and fresh names. It includes books by Charlie Jane Anders, Cixin Liu, Malka Older, Michael Swanwick, Brian Staveley, Yoss, and N.K. Jemisin. It calls out excellent titles such as Peter Hamilton’s latest Commonwealth novel A Night Without Stars (Del Rey, September).

Hamilton’s latest (a relatively slender 704 pages) brings to a furious boil the two-book saga (The Abyss Beyond Dreams, 2014) describing human colony planet Bienvenido’s unremitting battle against the hostile alien Fallers. Read full book review

And Patricia A. McKillip’s Kingfisher (Ace, February)

A delicately wrought, twinkle-eyed fantasy from the accomplished author of The Bards of Bone Plain (2010, etc). Read full book review

…

Read More Read More

One of the reasons I love the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog? Because they split up their Best of the Year selections into multiple lists. Why would anyone do that? To cram in more books! Duh.

Their second such list this year is The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Collections and Anthologies of 2016, selected by their editors and jotted down for us by Joel Cunningham. It includes books by Ken Liu, Patricia A. McKillip, Joe Abercrombie, Brandon Sanderson, Greg Bear, Eleanor Arnason, Gardner Dozois, Michael Swanwick, and many more. Titles such as Slipping: Stories, Essays, and Other Writing, by Lauren Beukes (Tachyon Publications, November).

In two lean, lethal sci-fi novels and two murderous, fantasy-tinged mainstream thrillers, Lauren Beukes has become one of the most exciting voices in genre writing to emerge over the last decade. Now, she’s released her first collection of short fiction, she brings the same verve for black humor, sharp satire, and mind-altering tech to stories of living artwork attacking Tokyo, corporate raids on other worlds, tears that mysteriously fall upward, and near-future marketing schemes in which brand loyalty becomes entirely literal. Standout stories: “Unathi Battles the Black Hairballs,” “Ghost Girl”

And there’s a fine shout-out for A Natural History of Hell (Small Beer Press, July), by Black Gate author Jeffrey Ford.

…

Read More Read More

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, which means it’s time to get hopping on all those Year’s Best lists I promised myself I’d cover. Wednesday we reported on Barnes & Noble’s Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog list, which means I should probably give equal time to Amazon today.

Their list pointed me towards some acclaimed fantasy that I’ve clearly overlooked, such as the first novel in Roshani Chokshi’s new Star-Touched Queen (April, St. Martin’s Griffin) series. In fact, it’s got lots of titles that B&N doesn’t mention — including a few I’ve never even heard of, like Sean Danker’s Admiral (May, Roc), the opening book in a brand new SF series (read Chapter One at Tor.com), and Lindsay Buroker’s Star Nomad (May, CreateSpace), a self-published novel about an interstellar alliance that topples before a tyrannical empire. Although Amazon’s editors did choose as their top pick Charlie Jane Anders debut novel All the Birds in the Sky (January, Tor), which has shown up on numerous Best of the Year lists so far.

In fact, I was rather surprised at the books which appear on both lists. They weren’t the big titles from major names that I might have expected. Here’s a complete list of the four novels that appear on both the B&N and Amazon lists as the best SF and fantasy novels of the year, as selected by the editorial staff of both companies.

…

Read More Read More

It’s the end of the year, the time when companies, magazines, and bloggers flood the airwaves with Year’s Best lists. Why do they bother? Because we love them! Lists, lists, lists. They’re the best.

One of my favorite genre sites, the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, is out with their annual Editor’s Picks for the Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of 2016, including Cixin Liu’s Death’s End, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, and a debut novel, Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer.

Palmer’s long-in-coming debut crafts a distinctly unique vision of a future world — a 25th century where technology has created abundance, where religion is outlawed but personal spirituality is encouraged, where criminals are sentenced to wander the world making themselves useful. It’s an imagined outcome rooted in threads visible all around us even today. The story involves an unlikely meeting between a convict serving a family named Mycroft Canner; a “sensayer,” or spiritual guide, named Carlyle Foster; and Bridger, a young boy who seems to possess the power to make his every wish come true — a power that could completely destabilize a world that is the very definition of stability. With lush prose that recreates the feel of a period novel, this is one of the year’s most striking debuts. Read our review..

The list also includes several novels we’ve recently covered at Black Gate. Here’s a partial list.

…

Read More Read More