Black Gate

When I arrived at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Chicago two weeks ago, I was given a bag with a generous number of book and magazines donated by various publishers. This is a common (and much loved) practice at many awards banquets and professional conventions. There was a fine assortment of books and advance galleys from some big names in my bag, but oddly the one I started reading first was from a debut writer, Melinda Salisbury. Chalk that up to an absolutely gorgeous cover, and an intriguing synopsis that includes court intrigue, treason, royal secrets, young love, and the incarnation of a goddess whose very touch brings death…

Seventeen-year-old Twylla lives in the castle. But although she’s engaged to the prince, Twylla isn’t exactly a member of the court.

She’s the executioner.

As the Goddess embodied, Twylla instantly kills anyone she touches. Each month, she’s taken to the prison and forced to lay her hands on those accused of treason. No one will ever love a girl with murder in her veins. Even the prince, whose royal blood supposedly makes him immune to Twylla’s fatal touch, avoids her company.

But then a new guard arrives, a boy whose easy smile belies his deadly swordsmanship. And unlike the others, he’s able to look past Twylla’s executioner robes and see the girl, not the Goddess. Yet Twylla’s been promised to the prince, and knows what happens to people who cross the queen.

However, a treasonous secret is the least of Twylla’s problems. The queen has a plan to destroy her enemies, a plan that requires a stomach-churning, unthinkable sacrifice. Will Twylla do what it takes to protect her kingdom? Or will she abandon her duty in favor of a doomed love?

The Sin Eater’s Daughter was published by Scholastic Press on February 24, 2015. It is 311 pages, priced at $17.99 in hardcover and $9.99 for the digital edition. The cover artist is uncredited.

There’s nothing quite like a fine debut. And Gideon, the first novel from Midwest author Alex Gordon, looks like a fine blend of mystery, urban fantasy, horror, romance, and the supernatural. It’s out now in trade paperback from Harper Voyager.

When Lauren’s father dies, she makes a shocking discovery. The man she knew as John Reardon was once a completely different person, with a different name. Now, she’s determined to find out who he really was, even though her only clues are an old photograph, some letters, and the name of a town — Gideon.

But someone — or something — doesn’t want her to discover the truth. A strange man is stalking her, appearing everywhere she turns, and those who try to help her end up dead. Neither a shadowy enemy nor her own fear are going to prevent her from solving the mystery of her father — and unlocking the secrets of her own life.

Making her way to Gideon, Lauren finds herself more confused than ever. Nothing in this small Midwestern town is what it seems, including time itself. Residents start going missing, and Lauren is threatened by almost every townsperson she encounters. Two hundred years ago, a witch was burned at the stake, but in Gideon, the past feels all too chillingly present…

Gideon was published by Harper Voyager on January 6, 2015. It is 419 pages, priced at $14.99 in trade paperback and $10.99 for the digital version. The cover was designed by Richard L. Aquan.

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One of the more enjoyable parts of the Nebula Awards weekend was the autograph session late Saturday night — when folks like Greg Bear, Larry Niven, Connie Willis, Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Jack McDevitt, Aliette de Bodard, Tobias Buckell, and dozens more sat down to sign autographs for fans. The author with the biggest line was unquestionably Cixin Liu, author of Nebula-nominated The Three-Body Problem, who’d flown all the way from China, but there was plenty of love to go around. Greg Ketter from Dreamhaven was doing a brisk business in the middle of the room, selling books to eager autograph hounds. I decided to limit myself to one book and, oddly enough, despite the rare opportunities to get autographs from some of my favorite authors, the title I couldn’t resist was Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction, from an author who wasn’t even in attendance. It’s a beautiful limited edition hardcover from Tacyhon Publications. I’d heard rumors it was almost sold out, and when I saw Greg had a single copy, I snatched it up.

Inside the firewall, the city is alive. Buildings breathe, cars attack, angels patrol, hyperintelligent pets rebel.

Hannu Rajaniemi (The Quantum Thief) is always on the cutting edge. His postapocalyptic, postcyberpunk, and posthuman tales are full of extraordinary beings and unpredictable optimism. With his remarkable agility at merging science with storytelling, Rajaniemi makes the impossible possible — or even probable.

Rajaniemi’s much-anticipated first collection contains seventeen stories, with two original tales, a neurofiction experiment, and his Twitter micro-fiction. Journeying deep into inner and outer space, he asks us, how will human nature evolve when the only limit to desire is creativity? What happens when the distinction between humans and gods is as small as nanomachines — or as large as the universe? So whether you think the next big leap in technology might be genetic engineering, unlimited energy, or space travel, know this: Hannu Rajaniemi the arbiter of what happens after.

Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction was published by Tachyon Publications on May 19, 2015. It is $25.95 for the limited edition hardcover; there is no digital edition. The cover art is by Lius Lasahido.

Toronto press Chizine Publications is one of the hottest publishers in the business. I was so impressed with their recent output that, after returning from the World Fantasy Convention in November of last year, I sat down to compose a survey of their catalog.

But it wasn’t just their 2014 releases that grabbed me. I was also highly intrigued by Probably Monsters, the debut collection from British Fantasy Award-winning author Ray Cluley, author of Water for Drowning (August 22, 2014). It was released in April, and I finally had a chance to get my hands on a copy yesterday, at the Nebula Awards weekend here in Chicago. I love a good monster story, and these look very promising indeed.

From British Fantasy Award-winning author Ray Cluley comes Probably Monsters — a collection of dark, weird, literary horror stories. Sometimes the monsters are bloodsucking fiends with fleshy wings. Sometimes they’re shambling dead things that won’t rest, or simply creatures red in tooth and claw. But often they’re worse than any of these. They’re the things that make us howl in the darkness, hoping no one hears. These are the monsters we make ourselves, and they can find us anywhere…

Probably Monsters was published by ChiZine Publications on April 14, 2015. It is 352 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback, and $7.99 for the digital version. The cover art is by Erik Mohr, with design by Samantha Beiko.

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Paula Guran edits The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror every year, and her most recent anthology was Blood Sisters, packed full of vampire stories by women. So it’s good to see her deliver something outside the horror genre… or, perhaps, it’s good to see her keen eye for dark fantasy brought to bear on a subgenre that’s usually associated with The Little Mermaid. 

In Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep, Paula has assembled a wide range of fiction by Tanith Lee, Peter S. Beagle, Samuel R. Delany, Neil Gaiman, Delia Sherman, Gene Wolfe, and others. Here’s a brief snippet from her introduction:

Powerful and incomprehensible, the oceans were thought to be the home of many monstrous creatures — sea serpents and dragons; the Norse Kraken, Greek Charybdis, Japanese Isonade, Biblical Leviathan. Rivers have monsters, too, like the Yacumama of the Amazon River or the malevolent zin, who live in the Niger River. As for lakes, even if you’ve never heard of the Welsh afanc, you know the Scottish Loch Ness monster.

The waters of the world were also believed to contain mythological creatures whose behaviors were as inconstant as our feelings about the mysteries of the deep. As Jane Yolen has said, “It is the allure of the beautiful, unattainable, mysterious Other. In every culture in every clime, there are stories of such creatures in the oceans, rivers, ponds, wells. Water is such a mutable, magical substance itself, the human imagination simply cannot believe it’s not peopled as the earth is. We want there to be such underwater civilizations and — not finding them — we invent them and then turn around and believe in our own invention.”

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Although the release date is Wednesday, S.M. Stirling’s new anthology of stories in the Emberverse is now for sale on Amazon.

You can purchase it here.

ALL-NEW STORIES OF THE EMBERVERSE
by S.M. Stirling, Harry Turtledove, Walter Jon Williams, John Birmingham, John Barnes, Jane Lindskold, and more…

“[A] vivid portrait of a world gone insane,”* S. M. Stirling’s New York Times bestselling Novels of the Change have depicted a vivid, utterly persuasive, and absorbingly unpredictable postapocalyptic wasteland in which all modern technology has been left in ashes, forcing humankind to rebuild an unknowable new world in the wake of unimaginable — and deliberate — chaos.

Now, in this startling new anthology, S. M. Stirling invites the most fertile minds in science fiction to join him in expanding his rich Emberverse canvas. Here are inventive new perspectives on the cultures, the survivors, and the battles arising across the years and across the globe following the Change.

In his all-new story Hot Night at the Hopping Toad, Stirling returns to his own continuing saga of the High Kingdom of Montival. In the accompanying stories are fortune seekers, voyagers, and dangers — from the ruins of Sydney to the Republic of Fargo and Northern Alberta to Venetian and Greek galleys clashing in the Mediterranean.

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