Black Gate

I’m hearing a lot of buzz about this book.

I first heard about it in Andrew Liptak’s March newsletter (the “15 science fiction and fantasy books to check out this March” installment), in which he wrote:

I’m a big fan of military fiction, especially stuff that’s close to the horizon when it comes to predicting the future, like P.W. Singer and August Cole’s Ghost Fleet. This new novel comes from Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, and is set nearly a decade from now, chronicling how a world war between the US and China might occur.

I’ve been reading an advance copy of this, and it’s a chilling read, one that looks at the plausible future when it comes to cybersecurity, military hardware, and geopolitics.

Wired devoted an entire issue to an excerpt of the novel, which includes the first six chapters.

Wired in fact calls it “A rippingly good read… even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.” Kirkus says it’s “A frightening look at how a major-power showdown might race out of control… This compelling thriller should be required reading for our national leaders.”

2034 is written by two former US military officers, and the publisher describes it as

A chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034 — and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.

2034: A Novel of the Next World War was published by Penguin on March 9, 2021. It is 320 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover, $14.99 digital, and $24.99 in audio formats.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

You lot know how much I enjoy a good fantasy debut. The only thing that changes is how I go about finding them.

I use to browse bookstores, like a normal person. Then came the internet, and this blog. Gradually I grew to rely on review copies and contacts with publicists. Then came the pandemic, and I turned to the professional review sites I knew I could trust, like Locus Online, Tor.com, and Publishers Weekly.

But lately I find that I’m being guided successfully by reader reviews, at places like Goodreads and Amazon. For example, the best review I’ve found for Lynne Bertrand’s debut YA novel City of the Uncommon Thief — and the one that made me want to track down a copy immediately — was this one by Melissa Mitchell at Amazon. Check it out:

In a quarantined city of mile-high buildings, the streets are full of monsters, and people pass their entire lives indoors. No one has ever seen this city on a map. There are no animals within the wall shielding it. And an entire year passes between supply deliveries from the outside world. In the prime of their lives, teenagers are chosen from each guild building as runners, where they dwell on the rooftops, zipping from roof to roof among the clouds, playing pranks on each other, delivering supplies between guilds. They are the only form of connection in a city that may as well consist of a hundred ships on the water. When Errol Thebes, well known hero among runners of all guilds, steals a powerful weapon, uncommon in ever way, he learns exactly what kind of darkness lurks beneath the city…

We all have tales to tell, especially Odd Thebes, and what a tale he weaves! The world building is fascinating, centered around the runners who fly from roof to roof, carrying messages, supplies, and bridging the connection between each building…

There’s something dark happening in the city. What starts as a very tight scope, broadens. Everyone who lives in the city accepts things for the way they are… They live in mystery. But Errol Thebes rips everything apart when he finds himself on the streets below. He becomes the hero the city needs.

City of the Uncommon Thief was published by Dutton Books on February 9, 2021. It is 400 pages, priced at $19.99 in hardcover, $10.99 digital, and $34.99 for the audio edition. Read a 2-page excerpt at The Nerd Daily. See all our recent New Treasures here.

I made my monthly pilgrimage to Barnes & Noble today, to pick up the latest issues of Asimov’s SF and Analog, and the last print issue of Interzone. And also to browse the SF section to see what was new.

I found a deep-sea horror novel by Mira Grant that I’ll probably write about later, the opening novel in a new Iron Druid spin-off series by Kevin Hearne, and The Revisionaries, a 600-page debut novel by A.R. Moxon that sounded very intriguing. When I came home and did a quick search, I found a lot of acclaim and tantalizing plot summaries — none of which gave me a true sense of what the book was about.

Martin Seay (author of The Mirror Thief) calls it “A headlong adventure yarn set in a vividly-imagined cityscape,” and The New York Times labeled it “A spectacular invention… One shudders to imagine what Moxon would do with the means to make a horror movie.” And writing at NPR, Black Gate blogger emeritus Amal El-Mohtar says “I’m almost irritated by how much I enjoyed it… I’m astonished by how compulsively readable it is.” Here’s a clip from her full review.

The Revisionaries takes place in at least three locales across at least four levels of reality and is composed in at least five typefaces. It is, by turns and often at once, surreal, absurd, horrifying, earnest and satirical….

I could say that it begins in a derelict place called Loony Island, with the sudden release of patients from a mental hospital, and becomes a retelling of the Biblical story of Jonah by way of a travelling circus and heaps of metafictional meditation on the difference between gods and authors, and that would be a start. It’s a literary puzzle-box that also put me in mind of a tidier, more self-conscious The Filth, and if I keep making comparisons to comics it’s because the book invites them, from its epigraph at the beginning quoting Scott McCloud to the transformation of a key character into a villainous caricature of Superman to the literal appearance, on page 415, of a really good cartoon.

Given all that, I’m astonished by how compulsively readable it is… Moxon’s a genuinely wonderful storyteller.

The Revisionaries was published by Melville House on December 1, 2020. It is 608 pages, priced at $19.99 in trade paperback. Get all the details here.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

Two years ago, when The Best of R.A. Lafferty was published by Gollancz SF Masterworks, I wrote an excited New Treasures article that began like this:

Fabulous! Lafferty is one of my favorite short story writers, and far too much of his work — virtually all of it, really — is either long out of print, or available only in very expensive collector’s editions from Centipede Press. The prospect of a generous collection of his best short fiction in a compact and affordable trade paperback edition… seemed too good to be true.

It almost was. The Gollancz edition was very hard to acquire in the US (and it still is). Fortunately Tor Books saw fit to reprint the book as part of their own Tor Essentials line earlier this month, and it’s now widely available in a handsome and affordable trade paperback edition. Here’s the publisher’s description.

Tor Essentials presents science fiction and fantasy titles of proven merit and lasting value, each volume introduced by an appropriate literary figure.

Acclaimed as one of the most original voices in modern literature, a winner of the World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement, Raphael Aloysius Lafferty (1914-2002) was an American original, a teller of acute, indescribably loopy tall tales whose work has been compared to that of Avram Davidson, Flannery O’Connor, Flann O’Brien, and Gene Wolfe.

The Best of R. A. Lafferty presents 22 of his best flights of offbeat imagination, ranging from classics like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” and “The Primary Education of the Cameroi” to his Hugo Award-winning “Eurema’s Dam.”

Introduced by Neil Gaiman, the volume also contains story introductions and afterwords by, among many others, Michael Dirda, Samuel R. Delany, John Scalzi, Connie Willis, Jeff VanderMeer, Kelly Robson, Harlan Ellison, Michael Swanwick, Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman, and Patton Oswalt.

This is a joyous, wonderful, and wholly surprising book that belongs in the collection of every serious science fiction reader. Here the complete Table of Contents.

…

Read More Read More

I don’t pay a lot of attention to the limited edition small press genre market here because, well, most of their output is overpriced and aimed squarely at collectors. The exception is Subterranean Press, who do fabulous work — and routinely produce much more reasonably priced editions of their high-end volumes.

The latest author to get the Subterranean treatment is Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares (1996), Bad Things (2009), and many other novels, and more than half a dozen short story collections, including What You Make It (1999), and More Tomorrow & Other Stories (2003). The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is a mammoth 568-page retrospective that gathers 30 of Smith’s best stories from his lengthy and successful career. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls it a standout collection:

This standout collection showcase Smith’s facility at imbuing genre tropes with humanity. Every entry offers something unexpected, while grounding inventive paranormal situations in recognizable emotion. Smith.. crafts a plausible sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” with “Window of Erich Zann,” successfully transplanting the tale from Europe to Haight-Ashbury and exploring the protagonist’s capacity to see into a terrifying alternate reality. Smith’s first published short story, “The Man Who Drew Cats,” which won the British Fantasy Award in 1991, offers a searing window into domestic violence…

Here’s the publisher’s description.

In 1990, British-born author Michael Marshall Smith burst on to the literary scene with his first story “The Man Who Drew Cats.” It won the prestigious British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, and he went on to win the award again the next year. In a career that has now spanned three decades he has written nearly 100 short stories, published more than a dozen best-selling novels around the world, and scripted numerous movie and television projects. Now, to celebrate his three decades as a writer, The Best of Michael Marshall Smith brings together thirty of his most emotive and powerful stories (including all his award-winning short fiction), along with extensive story notes by the author.

Featuring evocative heading illustrations by Les Edwards, this career-spanning collection includes such memorable tales as “Hell Hath Enlarged Itself,” “More Tomorrow,” “To Receive is Better,” “What You Make It,” “Later,” “The Dark Land,” “What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night,” “Always,” and many others, in their definitive versions.

By turns touching, disturbing, and frightening, these stories are not limited by theme or genre, but reveal a writer always in command, and whose imagination knows no bounds. The Best of Michael Marshall Smith is the ultimate compilation of the author’s work, and stands as a testament to his mastery of, and commitment to, his craft.

The Best of Michael Marshall Smith was published by Subterranean Press in a deluxe hardcover edition on December 31, 2020. It is 568 pages, priced at $44 in hardcover and $6.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Stefan Koidl; the interior story heading illustrations are by Les Edwards. Order directly from the Subterranean website.

See all our recent New Treasures here.