Black Gate

I love discovering new authors, and Julia Verne St. John’s debut The Transference Engine, a fantastical steampunk novel of magic and machines set in an alternate 1830s London, looks like a particularly intriguing discovery. The ISFB reports that “Julia Verne St. John” is actually a pseudonym for Irene Radford, author of the Dragon Nimbus novels and the six books in the Merlin’s Descendants series, but what the heck. I still think it counts as a debut.

RT Reviews says, “It’s oddly delightful to read a ripping Victorian, steam-powered yarn set in a world where Byron, Shelley, Polidori, etc., are mostly known… as depraved necromancers and mad scientists,” and that’s just about the most enticing one-sentence review I’ve read all year.

Madame Magdala has reinvented herself many times, trying to escape Lord Byron’s revenge. She destroyed the Transference Engine Byron hoped to use to transfer his soul into a more perfect body and perpetuate his life eternally. A fanatical cult of necromancers continues Byron’s mission to force Magdala and Byron’s only legitimate child — Ada Lovelace — to rebuild the machine and bring Byron back.

Magdala now bills herself as the bastard daughter of a Gypsy King. She runs a fashionable London coffee salon and reading room while living a flamboyant lifestyle at the edge of polite society. Behind the scenes, she and Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, use the massive library stored at the Bookview Cafe to track political and mercantile activity around the world. They watch to make certain the cult of necromancy surrounding Lord Byron, the poet king who worshipped death, cannot bring him back to life.

On the eve of Queen Victoria’s coronation in June of 1838, rumors of an assassination attempt abound. Both the Bow Street Runners and Magdala’s army of guttersnipe spies seek to discover the plot and the plotters. Who is behind the mysterious black hot air balloon that shoots searing light from a hidden cannon, and who or what is the target? And who is kidnapping young girls from all walks of life?

Desperately, Magdala and her allies follow the clues, certain that someone is building a new Transference Engine. But is it to bring back the dead or destroy the living?

This edition also includes a special bonus story, “Dancing in Cinders.”

The Transference Engine was published by DAW on July 5, 2016. It is 320 pages, priced at $7.99 for both the print and digital editions. The gorgeous cover is by Chris McGrath. Read an excerpt here.

Mary W. Shelley’s gothic horror masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, was published in 1818, shortly after the author turned 20. As we approach the 200th anniversary of one of the greatest horror novels in history, we can expect to see plenty of tribute volumes. But for my money, the only one you need is Stephen Jones’ massive In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus, a 712-page tome which collects pulp stories from Astounding and Weird Tales, modern riffs on the legend of Frankenstein, and three complete novels.

Frankenstein… His very name conjures up images of plundered graves, secret laboratories, electrical experiments, and reviving the dead. Within these pages, the maddest doctor of them all and his demented disciples once again delve into the Secrets of Life, as science fiction meets horror when the world’s most famous creature lives again.

Here are collected together for the first time twenty-four electrifying tales of cursed creation that are guaranteed to spark your interest — with classics from the pulp magazines by Robert Bloch and Manly Wade Wellman, modern masterpieces from Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Karl Edward Wagner, David J. Schow, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and new contributions from Graham Masterson, Basil Copper, John Brunner, Guy N. Smith, Kim Newman, Paul J. McAuley, Roberta Lannes, Michael Marshall Smith, Daniel Fox, Adrian Cole, Nancy Kilpatrick, Brian Mooney and Lisa Morton. Plus, you’re sure to get a charge from three complete novels: The Hound of Frankenstein by Peter Tremayne, The Dead End by David Case, and Mary W. Shelley’s original masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

As an electrical storm rages overhead, the generators are charged up, and beneath the sheet a cold form awaits its miraculous rebirth. Now it’s time to throw that switch and discover all that Man Was Never Meant to Know.

In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus is a revised an updated edition of The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein (Carroll & Graf, 1994), and if you have that volume, you probably don’t need this one. This new hardcover edition adds a new Foreword by Neil Gaiman and one new story, Stephen Volk’s “Celebrity Frankenstein,” from Postscripts 28/29 (2012), bringing the total to 24 stories. Diabolique Magazine calls the new edition “a stunning array of stories;” check out their complete review here. In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus was published by Pegasus Books on July 5, 2016. It is 712 pages, priced at $27.95 in hardcover and $26.23 for the digital edition.

When I was at the Nebula Awards weekend I had a chance to catch up with my friend Jacob Weisman, publisher of Tachyon Books, and I asked him about his upcoming anthology Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature. I had assumed it was a collection of alien invasion tales but, as he patiently explained to me, that’s not it at all. Jacob has gathered a superb batch of stories by literary authors who have invaded science fiction — and left distinct footprints behind. Here’s the Publishers Weekly review.

In this very fine reprint anthology, Weisman has brought together 22 SF stories by authors who, although not generally associated with the genre, are clearly fellow travelers (not the ominous invaders suggested by the title). Among the major names are Pulitzer Prize–winner Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Katherine Dunn, Jonathan Lethem, Amiri Baraka, W.P. Kinsella, Steven Millhauser, Robert Olen Butler, and Molly Gloss. Among the best of the consistently strong stories are Díaz’s “Monstro,” the horrifying tale of a disease outbreak in Haiti; Gloss’s near-perfect first-contact story, “Lambing Season”; Kinsella’s totally bizarre “Reports Concerning the Death of the Seattle Albatross Are Somewhat Exaggerated”; Ben Loory’s fable-like “The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun”; and Saunders’s “Escape from Spiderhead,” a deeply sexy tale of wild experimental science. In general, the stories tend toward satire and emphasize fine writing more than hitting genre beats — technology is usually a means to an end rather than the center of the story — but most of them could easily have found homes in SF magazines. This volume is a treasure trove of stories that draw equally from SF and literary fiction, and they are superlative in either context.

Here’s the complete table of contents.

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Amazon.com’s high concept series The Man in the High Castle, based on the famous novel by Philip K. Dick, became a major hit for the online retailer, and it was renewed for a second season late last year.

I have not yet seen the series, but I find myself in total agreement with Peter Tieryas’s implied critique of the whole concept: that it would be 300% better with giant robots. Seriously, I think this Tieryas guy is on to something. Sure, there isn’t an artistic or creative endeavor in Western Civilization that wouldn’t be improved by adding giant robots (“Are you enjoying that double scoop pistachio ice-cream cone, young lady? Here, try it with giant robots.” See what I mean?), but there’s something about World War II alternate history that just screams, “More giant robots, please!” Come on, you know what I’m talking about.

I received a free copy of Tieryas’ second novel United States of Japan at the Nebula Awards back in April, and I finally settled in with it yesterday. It seems to be exactly what it promises: an action-packed detective story/alternate history successor to The Man in the High Castle. With honkin’ big robots. Financial Times says that “With its giant military robots, sumo wrestlers and body-transforming technology, [it’s] a gleeful love letter to Japanese pop culture,” and Lightspeed calls it “A hell of a ride, with plot twists as history is written and rewritten right in front of you… an ending as powerful as the iron grip of the godlike Emperor.”

United States of Japan was published by Angry Robot on March 1, 2016. It is 398 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by John Liberto. Amazon.com currently has the Kindle version available for just $1.99 — grab it while you can.