Black Gate

Peter Brown is the author of The Curious Garden and My Teacher is a Monster; The Wild Robot is his first science fiction book. In a lengthy post on his website, The Wild Robot Lives!, he writes about the genesis of the book.

I wanted to tell a different kind of robot story. I wanted to tell the story of a robot who finds harmony in the last place you’d expect… What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? To answer that question, I invented a robot character named Rozzum (a subtle nod to Čapek’s play), and tried to imagine how she’d handle life in the wilderness.

Eight years later, The Wild Robot has finally arrived in hardcover from Little, Brown. Here’s the description.

Can a robot survive in the wilderness?

When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is — but she knows she needs to survive. After battling a fierce storm and escaping a vicious bear attack, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to adapt to her surroundings and learn from the island’s unwelcoming animal inhabitants.

As Roz slowly befriends the animals, the island starts to feel like home — until, one day, the robot’s mysterious past comes back to haunt her.

The Wild Robot was published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers on April 5, 2016. It is 288 pages, priced at $16.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version. The cover is by Peter Brown.

I remember when Guy Gavriel Kay’s three volume Fionavar Tapestry appeared in my native Canada in the mid-80s. It was an instant hit, and put Kay on the map as a major fantasist immediately (to understand why, see Fletcher Vredenburgh’s retrospective of the first two volumes, The Summer Tree and The Wandering Fire). He followed with Tigana (1990), A Song for Arbonne (1992), The Lions of al-Rassan (1995), and The Sarantine Mosaic (Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors). Kay isn’t particularly prolific, producing a new fantasy volume every three years or so. In his review of Kay’s 2010 novel Under Heaven, fellow Canadian Todd Ruthman wrote:

We don’t have that many rituals in our home. One is the creeping countdown to Guy Gavriel Kay’s newest novel. I am always a little sad when it finally comes, though, because it means years before I will see his next one.

There hasn’t been a new Kay novel since River of Stars (2013). It’s been three years, and along comes his newest, like clockwork. Children of Earth and Sky, a standalone fantasy set in a world inspired by Renaissance Europe, was released in hardcover on May 10, and called “Magnificent” by Library Journal.

From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request — and possibly to do more — and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif — to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming. As these lives entwine, their fates — and those of many others — will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world…

Children of Earth and Sky was published May 10 by NAL. It is 592 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover, and $13.99 for the digital edition.

Back in March, when I posted a Future Treasures article about the upcoming fantasy novel A Shadow All of Light by the distinguished poet Fred Chappell, Sarah Avery left this intriguing comment:

They’re not kidding about the “distinguished poet” bit. Have you seen this guy’s bio? Whoa.

I dutifully checked it out, and I see what she means. Here’s a snippet:

Acclaimed poet and novelist Fred Chappell was born on a small farm in Canton, North Carolina in 1936. He attended Duke University, where he befriended fellow writers Anne Tyler, Reynolds Price, and James Appelwhite. The author of over a dozen books of poetry, a handful of novels and short story collections, and two books of critical prose, Chappell has received numerous awards for his work, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Bollingen Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and the best foreign book prize from the Academie Française. He was named North Carolina Poet Laureate in 1997, a position he held until 2002.

In addition to all those laurels, Fred Chappell also won a World Fantasy Award for his short story “The Lodger” (1993). He’s the author of the classic horror novel Dagon (1968) and I Am One of You Forever (1985), and was the subject of a deluxe Masters of the Weird Tale volume from Centipede Press last December. Read his complete bio here.

His latest, A Shadow All of Light, is an epic adventure featuring pirates, master thieves, monsters, and fantasy detectives. It was published by Tor Books on April 12, 2016. It is 384 pages, priced at $27.99 in hardcover and $14.99 for the digital edition. Read a lengthy excerpt at Tor.com.

Anna Smaill is the author of one book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring, but beyond that I don’t know much about her. Except that her debut fantasy novel is being called “What might be the most distinctive debut of the decade” by Tor.com, and “A melodic, immersive dystopian tale set in a London where writing is lost and song has replaced story” by Kirkus Reviews. And Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks calls it “”A highly original dystopian masterpiece, an intricately imagined, exquisitely invoked world in which music instills order and ravages individuality.”

Sounds like I need to check it out. It goes on sale in hardcover this week from Quercus Books.

After the end of a brutal civil war, London is divided, with slums standing next to a walled city of elites. Monk-like masters are selected for special schooling and shut away for decades, learning to write beautiful compositions for the chimes, played citywide morning and night, to mute memory and keep the citizens trapped in ignorance.

A young orphan named Simon arrives in London with nothing but the vague sense of a half-forgotten promise, to locate someone. What he finds is a new family — a gang of scavengers that patrols the underbelly of the city looking for valuable metal to sell. Drawn in by an enigmatic and charismatic leader, a blind young man named Lucien with a gift for song, Simon forgets entirely what originally brought him to the place he has now made his home.

In this alternate London, the past is a mystery, each new day feels the same as the last, and before is considered “blasphony.” But Simon has a unique gift — the gift of retaining memories — that will lead him to discover a great injustice and take him far beyond the meager life as a member of Lucien’s gang. Before long he will be engaged in an epic struggle for justice, love, and freedom.

The Chimes will be published by Quercus on May 3, 2016. It is 287 pages, priced at $26.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital edition. The cover artist is uncredited.

Black Gate is a fantasy site, and there’s more than enough fantasy releases to keep us busy every month. But sometimes adventure SF — especially off-world space opera — reads an awful lot like great fantasy. It’s too early to see if Melissa Landers’s latest novel Starflight will go down in the annals as classic space opera, but it’s sure got the ingredients… including a plucky heroine, lawless outer realms, long-buried secrets, and an eccentric crew on a fast ship.

Solara Brooks needs a fresh start, someplace where nobody cares about the engine grease beneath her fingernails or the felony tattoos across her knuckles. The outer realm may be lawless, but it’s not like the law has ever been on her side. Still, off-world travel doesn’t come cheap; Solara is left with no choice but to indenture herself in exchange for passage to the outer realm. She just wishes it could have been to anyone besides Doran Spaulding, the rich, pretty-boy quarterback who made her life miserable in school.

The tables suddenly turn when Doran is framed for conspiracy on Earth, and Solara cons him into playing the role of her servant on board the Banshee, a ship manned by an eccentric crew with their own secrets. Given the price on both Doran and Solara’s heads, it may just be the safest place in the universe. It’s been a long time since Solara has believed in anyone, and Doran is the last person she expected to trust. But when the Banshee‘s dangerous enemies catch up with them, Solara and Doran must come together to protect the ship that has become their home – and the eccentric crew that feels like family.

Starflight was published by Disney-Hyperion on February 2, 2016. It is 368 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital version.