Black Gate

I enjoy genre mash-ups.  When done right, they highlight the strengths of both genres, and that’s a hard thing to pull off. Think horror-comedies like Ghostbusters or Zombieland, or science fiction mysteries like Asimov’s I, Robot stories. Or zombie westerns like the Bloodlands novels, or Dead Reckoning.

Not every mash-up succeeds, of course. (Did anyone see Seeking A Friend For the End of the World, Steve Carell’s romantic comedy cum apocalypse movie from 2012? No? That’s what I thought.)

But sometimes a mash-up is so brilliant I have to buy it immediately  That’s what happened with The Last Policeman, a police procedural set in Earth’s last days.

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?

Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.

The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job — but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week — except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

The first in a trilogy, The Last Policeman offers a mystery set on the brink of an apocalypse. As Palace’s investigation plays out under the shadow of 2011GV1, we’re confronted by hard questions way beyond “whodunit.” What basis does civilization rest upon? What is life worth? What would any of us do, what would we really do, if our days were numbered?

Now there’s an original use for an apocalyptic setting. Give me a impending extinction-level event and a relentless investigator too stubborn to give up, and you have my attention. I bought this book after reading the first two paragraphs of the plot summary, and for a jaded book purchaser like me, that’s saying something.

Ben H. Winters is a New York Times best-selling author and an Edgar Award nominee. His last novel was Bedbugs. The Last Policeman was published by Quirk Books in trade paperback July 2012. It is 316 pages and priced at $14.95 ($14.95 for the digital edition).

I love bargain books. I love pirate books. And I love Gene Wolfe books. So I don’t need to tell you how I feel about bargain pirate novels by Gene Wolfe.

Pirate Freedom was released in hardcover in November 2007, and in trade paperback three years later. It’s a swashbuckling adventure novel — Sci-Fi Weekly called it “straight up adventure in the mold of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini, or even the Pirates of the Caribbean films” — but as you’d expect from Wolfe, he adds an unexpected twist or two.

It begins in a monastery in Cuba the day after tomorrow, where a boy named Chris realizes he’s not meant for the priesthood, and sets out for the streets of Havana. From there it becomes a tale of time travel and fantasy adventure. The San Francisco summed it up thusly:

Plenty of action, romance, and historical color. Nearly every pirate cliche is given a new spin, from mutinous crews to cursed ships, from beautiful women in disguise to treasure beyond imagining.

Still, I hadn’t gotten around to picking up a copy until this week, when I noticed that Amazon had marked down the price by 60% — to $9.98 for the hardcover, and just $6.40 for the trade paperback. If you’re interested in a copy, act quickly; there are only about half a dozen left.

Pirate Freedom was published by Tor Books. It is 320 pages, and was originally priced at $24.95 for the hardcover, and $15.95 for the trade paperback. The gorgeous cover is by David Grove (click on the image at right for a larger version).

Long before I heard about Saladin Ahmed’s first novel Throne of the Crescent Moon, I heard great things about its author.

In 2009-2010, Saladin was busy making a name for himself with a series of very well-received short stories, published in such places as Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons. His “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela,” which originally appeared in Mike Allen’s Clockwork Phoenix 2, was a finalist for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. By the time I met him at the World Fantasy Convention in Columbus, Ohio in 2010, the buzz was unmistakable. This was a writer who was going places.

Our Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones spoke enthusiastically about Saladin’s upcoming novel on a panel on Arabian Fantasy at WFC, saying he was a writer who brought a genuine love of Arabian history and a natural storyteller’s talent to adventure fantasy.

When you’ve been in the industry as long as I have, you get used to young writers getting talked up at conventions. But when Throne of the Crescent Moon arrived last February, it exceeded all expectations. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called it “A delight in every imaginable way,” and io9 said it was “The best fantasy swashbuckler of the year so far.” Howard was right: with a single novel, Saladin Ahmed has vaulted to the front rank of modern adventure fantasy writers.

Throne of the Crescent Moon follows the exploits of Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, “The last real ghul hunter in the great city of Dhamsawaat,” who’s more interested in a quiet cup of tea than adventure. But the Crescent Moon Kingdoms are on a knife’s edge as a power struggle between the iron-fisted Khalif and the master thief known as the Falcon Prince reaches a boiling point. As the city begins to slide into open rebellion, a series of mysterious and brutal supernatural murders strike even greater fear into the populace. When Adoulla and his companions learn the murders are somehow connected to the rebellion, they’re swept up in a plot that threatens to destroy their city.

Throne of the Crescent Moon is the first volume in The Crescent Moon Kingdoms trilogy. It was released in hardcover in February 2012, and finally arrived in paperback on December 31. It is 367 pages in paperback, priced at $7.99 for the print and digital versions. The mass market edition is sure to reach an even wider audience and grow Saladin’s already vast legion of fans. Don’t be one of the last to catch on.

Seems like I’ve done an awful lot of New Treasures posts this week. So I guess one more won’t matter.

Good thing too, because I’m dying to tell you about Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, a new anthology from Ekaterina Sedia and Prime Books.

Have you ever seen a book and wanted it immediately? I mean, you just got the concept instantly, and knew it was what you were looking for?  What am I talking about — of course you have.

Well, that’s what happened with me and Circus. I was innocently browsing on Amazon, shopping for… well, I forget exactly. Anyway, there it was, displayed in 76-pixel glory in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought widget (and man, the anonymous software engineer who invented that damn thing has cost me a fortune, lemme tell you.)

And I got it: a reprint anthology featuring classic fantasy tales of circuses light and dark. I was sold the moment I laid eyes on the terrific cover by Malgorzata Jasinska (click on the image at right for the full-sized version). Here’s Ekaterina Sedia from her introduction:

We have collected tales of children running away to join the circus and circuses doing the same, stories of circuses not of this world (in all senses of the word), circuses futuristic, nostalgic, filled with existential dread and/or joy. Acts mundane, and spectacular, and incomprehensible. Clowns and extinct animals. Magicians and werewolves. Acrobats and living musical instruments… Because we cannot help but love them — for the sake of the children we once were, or for the sake of the better adults we long to become.

Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top includes tales by Peter Straub, Jeff VanderMeer, Genevieve Valentine, Barry B. Longyear, Howard Waldrop, Neal Barrett Jr, Kij Johnson and many more. Complete Table of Contents after the jump.

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James P. Blaylock is something of a hero to Steampunk fans. We don’t go so far as to say he invented the genre single-handed, but he was definitely in the laboratory when Igor threw the switch and it took its first lumbering steps.

I first encountered Blaylock in the late 80s, when he was making a name for himself with brilliant short fiction like “Paper Dragons” (1986), which won the World Fantasy Award, and novels like The Elfin Ship (1982) and The Digging Leviathan (1984).

But his steampunk pedigree dates back to his Langdon St. Ives novels, starting with Homunculus (1986) and Lord Kelvin’s Machine (1992) — collected in The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives, a handsome omnibus edition that also included four related short stories, published by Subterranean Press in 2008.

So you can understand the excitement when Titan Books recently announced the first full-length Langdon St. Ives novel in two decades: The Aylesford Skull, a rollicking new steampunk adventure, from one of the genre’s pioneers, that takes us into the dangerous underworld of 19th Century England, through the foggy depths of the Cliffe Marches and the lairs of smugglers and pirates, and into the sewers, lost rivers, and sorcerous underworld of London:

It is the summer of 1883 and Professor Langdon St. Ives — brilliant but eccentric scientist and explorer — is at home in Aylesford with his family. However, a few miles to the north a steam launch has been taken by pirates above Egypt Bay; the crew murdered and pitched overboard. In Aylesford itself a grave is opened and possibly robbed of the skull. The suspected grave robber, the infamous Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, is an old nemesis of Langdon St. Ives.

When Dr. Narbondo returns to kidnap his four-year-old son Eddie and then vanishes into the night, St. Ives and his factotum Hasbro race to London in pursuit…

The Aylesford Skull will be published January 15th by Titan Books. It is 425 pages in trade paperback, priced at $14.95 for both the print and digital versions.

You can see all of our recent New Treasures here.