Black Gate

Jacket design by Laywan Kwan

You gotta wonder about the pitch for this novel. “I got this idea, you know, for a book about a highly contagious virus. The country is unprepared, people die by the thousands, the president says it will be cured soon, but then there’s mass layoffs, the borders are closed and California is quarantined.” I can see the editorial team exchanging glances, shrugging and saying, “It’s far-fetched and crazy, but I like that bit about California under quarantine. Does it affect surfers?”

Katie M. Flynn’s debut The Companions was published March 3, perfect timing for a viral-apocalypse novel. It got all the press you’d expect. The New York Times included it in “Your Quarantine Reader” (alongside Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain and Stephen King’s The Stand), and it was listed in Bustle’s “16 Novels About Viral Outbreaks To Make You Feel Less Alone,” and The Hollywood Reporter’s “8 Pandemic-Themed Books to Read Amid Coronavirus,” among similar lists. I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing that opens wallets these days, but you know what they say. No such thing as bad publicity.

Lumping The Companions in with other viral-outbreak entertainment probably does this book a disservice, however. Yes, it opens with a plague, but the novel also addresses questions about identity in a world of machines, and wraps it all up in a compelling story of a 16-year old trying to solve her own murder.

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Katharine Kerr’s science fiction novels include Polar City Blues, Palace (with Mark Kreighbaum), and Snare. But she’s much more well known for sixteen epic fantasy novels set in the world of Deverry, starting with Daggerspell (1986), Darkspell (1987), and The Bristling Wood (1989).

Kerr’s roots are firmly in fantasy gaming, which immediately increases her cred in my book. She was introduced to fantasy gaming in in 1979, and she quickly began writing articles for gaming magazines. She was a contributing editor to Dragon magazine, and authored adventure modules for TSR and Chaosium’s Pendragon role-playing game. Her first novel was published in 1986, and she’s never looked back. It’s fiction that brings the fame and the fast cars, so I guess I can’t blame her.

The last few years she’s been occupied with her Nola O’Grady urban fantasy series for DAW (which the author describes as a “female James Bond with magic rather than violence”). It’s been over a decade since we’ve seen a new novel in Deverry, though, and it’s good to see her return. Ralph Harris gave Sword of Fire a warm review at BookPage; here’s a sample.

Sword of Fire centers around a sociopolitical struggle against the unjust courts of the Kingdom of Deverry. While that certainly could be a backdrop for a bleak, dark struggle, Kerr’s novel is instead a lovely quest with an ever-optimistic, wholeheartedly enthusiastic crew of brilliant women and chivalrous men. Alyssa, our primary heroine, embarks on a trip to recover a book that can help usurp the old traditions of the courts with even older, supposedly more fair traditions….

With a lightly magical, extremely familiar setting and lovable cast of characters, Kerr sets out to take the reader through the Kingdom of Deverry’s evolution to a (hopefully) more just world. She doles out plot points via chatty gossip between noble families and secret messages sent by way of servants… Meandering through the pages of Kerr’s Sword of Fire was escapism of the finest quality. For readers looking for a dark drama of epic proportions, these 380 pages will hold nothing for you. Here, you will only find charming banter, happy endings and optimism in prose form.

Sword of Fire is the opening volume in The Justice War. It was published by DAW on February 18, 2020. It is 384 pages, priced at $27 in hardcover and $13.99 in digital formats. The cover was designed by Katie Anderson. Read an excerpt from Chapter One here.

See all our recent New Treasures here.

When I published my first novel The Robots of Gotham (written under the name Todd McAulty), John Scalzi was enormously kind to me, helping me promote it by featuring me on his blog Whatever, one of the most popular SF sites in the country. I used the opportunity to conduct a mock interview with an ill-fated Sovereign Intelligence machine character, and it was a lot of fun.

Scalzi’s blog is a great way to discover new writers, in fact, and I’ve become a regular reader. It’s how I discovered J.T. Nicholas’ new novel Re-Coil, out this month from Titan. Here’s a snippet from his own guest post at Scalzi’s Whatever, published earlier this month:

The story – the plot – is a whodunnit at its heart, a mystery where the protagonists are trying to hunt down their would-be killers and stop the first truly existential threat to humanity since mankind uncovered the secrets of immortality. It’s part mystery, part space action romp, and part cyberpunk conspiracy tale. But writing those bits was the easy part. For me, the hard part of Re-Coil was creating the world, fleshing out the societies, and answering the questions my agent and editor posed. Big questions on race and sex and gender and identity and power that I hadn’t really intended to write about, but once I set up the basic premise, I couldn’t possibly avoid.

You can read Nicholas’ full article here. Here’s the publisher’s description for Re-Coil.

Carter Langston is murdered whilst salvaging a derelict vessel — a major inconvenience as he’s downloaded into a brand-new body on the space station where he backed up, several weeks’ journey away. But events quickly slip out of control when an assassin breaks into the medbay and tries to finish the job.

Death no longer holds sway over a humanity that has spread across the solar system: consciousness can be placed in a new body, or coil, straight after death, giving people the potential for immortality. Yet Carter’s backups — supposedly secure — have been damaged, his crew are missing, and everything points back to the derelict that should have been a simple salvage mission.

With enemies in hot pursuit, Carter tracks down his last crewmate — re-coiled after death into a body she cannot stand — to delve deeper into a mystery that threatens humanity and identity as they have come to know it.

Re-Coil was published by Titan Books on March 3, 2020. It is 359 pages, priced at $14.95 in trade paperback and $7.99 in digital format. The cover was designed by Vince Haig. Read an excerpt at Tor.com, and see all our recent New Treasures here.

Cover by Blacksheep UK

A new anthology by Jonathan Strahan is always an event. He’s been editing Year’s Best volumes since 2003, for ibooks, the Science Fiction Book Club, Night Shade, and Solaris, and just announced the contents of the first volume of The Year’s Best Science Fiction from Saga Press (if that Facebook link doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it; I’ll cover it in an upcoming Future Treasures post). He also edited the groundbreaking Infinity series for Solaris, seven volumes starting with Engineering Infinity (2010) and ending with Infinity’s End (2018), perhaps the most acclaimed original anthology series of the last decade.

His latest is Made To Order: Robots and Revolution, released yesterday by Solaris. Published on the 100th anniversary of the word “Robot” entering our modern lexicon, Made To Order contains brand new stories by Sofia Samatar, Peter Watts, Ken Liu, Sarah Pinsker, Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Annalee Newitz, Suzanne Palmer, Ian R. MacLeod, Rich Larson, and others. (To get a sense of the spirit of this anthology, read the first story “A Guide for Working Breeds” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, complete and completely free, at Tor.com. It’s a hilarious tale of two robot pals who couldn’t be more different, and it’s well worth your time.)

Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy lately, and I’m in the mood for something different. With impeccable timing, along comes Andy Davidson’s The Boatman’s Daughter, a supernatural thriller about a young woman facing down ancient forces in the depths of the bayou. It features the silhouette of a swampman with a plant growing out of his head on the cover, and that qualifies as sufficiently different in my book.

Andy Davidson is the author of In the Valley of the Sun, which was a finalist for the 2017 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. His second novel is getting even more attention… Kirkus Reviews says, “The remote Arkansas bayou is a swirling kaleidoscope of murder, greed, and dark, ancient magic… A stunning supernatural Southern Gothic.”

I like the sound of that. Here’s the publisher’s description.

Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm.

But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda’s peculiar and precarious life. And when the preacher makes an unthinkable demand, it sets Miranda on a desperate, dangerous path, forcing her to consider what she is willing to sacrifice to keep her loved ones safe.

With the heady mythmaking of Neil Gaiman and the heartrending pacing of Joe Hill, Andy Davidson spins a thrilling tale of love and duty, of loss and discovery. The Boatman’s Daughter is a gorgeous, horrifying novel, a journey into the dark corners of human nature, drawing our worst fears and temptations out into the light.

The Boatman’s Daughter was published by FSG Originals on February 11, 2020. It is 416 pages, priced at $16 in trade paperback and $9.99 in digital formats.

See all our recent New Treasures here.