Black Gate

I always look forward to the Best of the Year anthologies. It’s an annual ritual, like the arrival of spring, heralding new hope and rebirth for the land. Or something.

Over the next few months, we’ll see several of them, from Rich Horton, David Hartwell, Gardner Dozois, Stephen Jones, and Paula Guran, just to name a few. But the season kicks off every year with Jonathan Strahan’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, certainly one of the most interesting volumes for fantasy fans.

Like the preceding six volumes, it is published by Night Shade Books, who are experiencing difficulties. Likely this will be the last one, at least in this format.

In short: if you’re at all interested in a generous collection of some of the finest SF and fantasy from the best writers in the genre, do what I did and buy it now while it’s still available.

Here’s what we know about the stories:

Four artificial intelligences struggle towards life on the icy moon of Callisto; insect love means something deeply disturbing in a world of mantis wives; an elderly woman matches wits with Death in a battle for her life; a birthday party on a spaceship is haunted by ghosts from afar; a UFO researcher finds far more than she’s looking for in the backwoods of Missouri; a grand tour of the solar system ends in an unexpected discovery; a researcher strives to make one last grand discovery before the stars wink out a final time…

And here’s the complete table of contents.

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You can’t judge a book by its cover.

But you know what you can judge by the cover? The cover. And since that’s an important part of a book, I guess you can make a successful partial judgment just by holding a book at arms length for a few seconds. Admit it — you do it all the time, I’m just giving you some air cover here.

Come to think of it, it’s a pity you can’t judge books by their covers. Because, man, that would save me a lot of reviewing time that I could put to good use playing Mass Effect.

Until that happy day, we’re stuck doing things the old fashioned way, with hours of bleary-eyed reading late into the night. Unless you’re like me, of course, picking through the weekly new arrivals until you find a cover that makes you say, “Whoa. That looks cool. I should tell people about it.”

Which brings us nicely to Sarah Pinborough’s new novel A Matter of Blood, the first volume of The Forgotten Gods trilogy. Which, if you haven’t guessed, has a great cover, with an upside-down London skyline and a cracked overlay that looks like reptilian skin.

And the book description sounds pretty intriguing too.

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You’re not reading enough great short fiction.

You know it’s true. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

I have a suggestion (I know — when do I not?) You should read Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction.

Solaris has been a fast-rising brand in science fiction and fantasy for the past six years, since they were founded in 2007. Just in the past few weeks, we’ve covered several recent titles of note, including Juliet E. McKenna’s Dangerous Waters and The Good The Bad and the Infernal by Guy Adams. See? These guys are serious.

They’re serious about great short fiction, too. They started with three annual volumes of The Solaris Book Of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann and published between 2007 and 2009. They relaunched the series last year as Solaris Rising, under new editor Ian Whates, and the book was a significant critical success.

Solaris Rising 2 looks like one of the best volumes yet. It includes stories by Mike Allen, Kay Kenyon, Nancy Kress, James Lovegrove, Robert Reed, Norman Spinrad, Liz Williams, Allan Steele, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Paul Cornell, Eugie Foster, Nick Harkaway, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Vandana Singh, and many others.

Editor Ian Whates is no newbie to SF and fantasy. His novels City of Dreams & Nightmare and City of Hope & Despair were published by Angry Robot and The Noise Within and The Noise Revealed were released by Solaris. You should take advantage of expertise like that, and let him guide you to some quality fiction.

Solaris Rising 2: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction was published by Solaris Books on March 26. It is 448 pages, priced at $8.99 in paperback. There is no digital edition.

Ann Aguire is a very, very busy woman.

In the last five years alone she’s written six novels in the Sirantha Jax science fiction adventure series (Grimspace, Wanderlust, and four others); five Corine Solomon urban fantasies (beginning with Blue Diablo and Hell Fire); the YA post-apocalyptic dystopian Razorland trilogy (Enclave, Outpost, Horde); the paranormal romantic suspense Skin series (written as Ava Gray; four volumes beginning with Skin Game); the apocalyptic romance Dark Age Dawning (three so far, co-written with Carrie Lofty, under the name Ellen Connor); and the upcoming dark SF series The Dred Chronicles (starting with Perdition, scheduled for release in August).

That’s 22 novels since 2008. Allow me to express my sincere admiration, with a heartfelt WOW.

Now, you’d think someone with six series on the go already wouldn’t feel particularly pressured to launch a new sequence of steampunk noir fantasy novels. But apparently, you’d be wrong.

The Apparatus Infernum novels are co-written with her husband Andres Aguirre, and released under the name A.A. Aguirre. They sound like an appealing mix of steampunk and mystery.

Here’s the back cover copy for Bronze Gods, the first volume.

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In 2009, Warren Fahy released Fragment on an unsuspecting world.

An unassuming paperback about the cast and crew of a reality show on a long-range research vessel in the South Pacific, who receive a distress call from the mysterious Henders Island, Fragment wasn’t just a great modern adventure tale. It was also an over-the-top monster thriller, a glimpse at how life on Earth might have looked if evolution had taken a very different turn half a billion years ago. Henders Island proved to be a fragment of a lost continent, packed with the kind of creatures that could wipe out our fragile ecosystem.

Since the release of Fragment, fans have been waiting for Fahy’s next monster-laden follow up, and it has finally arrived in the form of Pandemomium, a new hardcover from Tor.

Deep beneath the Ural Mountains, in an underground city carved out by slave labor during the darkest hours of the Cold War, ancient caverns hold exotic and dangerous life-forms that have evolved in isolation for countless millennia. Cut off from the surface world, an entire ecosystem of bizarre subterranean species has survived undetected — until now.

Biologists Nell and Geoffrey Binswanger barely survived their last encounter with terrifying, invasive creatures that threatened to engulf the planet. They think the danger is over until a ruthless Russian tycoon lures them to his underground metropolis, where they find themselves confronted by a vicious menagerie of biological horrors from their past — and by entirely new breeds of voracious predators. Now they’re rising up from the bowels of the Earth to consume the world as we know it.

Yup, that sounds pretty much like what I was waiting for. Pandemomium was published by Tor Books on February 28. It is 306 pages (with 11 extra pages of maps and illustrations of monster innards), priced at $24.99 in hardcover and $11.99 for the digital edition.