New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Anders, Charlie Jane. Rock Manning Goes for Broke [Subterranean Press]
Publisher's Description

Vikings vs. Steampunks! Ice cream sundae hearse disasters! Roman gladiators meet vacuum-cleaner salesmen! Inappropriate uses of exercise equipment and supermarket trolleys! Unsupervised fires, and reckless destruction of public property! Nothing is off limits.

Rock Manning lives and breathes slapstick comedy, and his whole life is an elaborate tribute to the masters, like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Jackie Chan. With his best friend, Sally Hamster, he creates joyfully chaotic short movies that are full of mayhem and silliness.

But Rock and Sally are becoming famous at a time of unrest, when America's economy has collapsed and people are taking refuge in highly addictive drugs. America's youth are being drafted to take part in endless wars against imaginary enemies overseas, while at home, a fascist militia known as the Red Bandanas is rising to power. As America becomes more mired in violence and destruction, Rock Manning's zany comedy films become the escapist fun that everybody needs.

Over-the-top physical comedy and real-life brutality collide, as Rock and Sally find themselves unable to avoid getting sucked into the slow implosion of their country. The Red Bandanas want Rock Manning to star in propaganda films promoting their movement, and soon Rock and Sally are at the center of the struggle for the soul of America. The trauma and death that Rock witnesses begin to take a toll on him.

When a botched weapon test plunges the world into deeper chaos, Rock and Sally must confront once and for all the outer limits of comedy.

Why We Want It: It's a new book from Charlie Jane Anders. Right now, after how much I enjoy her short fiction and how good All the Birds in the Sky was, that's enough to get me in the door. Rock Manning Goes for Broke is an expansion of a series of stories published in John Joseph Adams' triptych of apocalyptic anthologies (The End is Nigh / Now / Has Come) and it remains a compelling and gonzo bit of storytelling.

Cook, Glen. Port of Shadows [Tor]
Publisher's Description

Glen Cook, the father of Grimdark, returns to the Chronicles of the Black Company with a military fantasy adventure in Port of Shadows.

The soldiers of the Black Company don’t ask questions, they get paid. But being “The Lady’s favored” is attracting the wrong kind of attention and has put a target on their backs--and the Company’s historian, Croaker, has the biggest target of all.

The one person who was taken into The Lady’s Tower and returned unchanged has earned the special interest of the court of sorcerers known as The Ten Who Were Taken. Now, he and the company are being asked to seek the aid of their newest member, Mischievous Rain, to break a rebel army. However, Croaker doesn’t trust any of the Taken, especially not ones that look so much like The Lady and her sister…

Why We Want It: Port of Shadows is the first new Black Company novel in 18 years. The series was finished. It had an ending. But then A Pitiless Rain And Port of Shadows showed up as proposed future volumes and my interest was piqued. New Black Company. This is boots on the ground dirty military fantasy and at its best, The Black Company is one of my favorite fantasy series.

Howard, Kat. A Cathedral of Myth and Bone [Saga]
Publisher's Description

From the acclaimed author of Roses and Rot— a “Brothers Grimm tale for the contemporary reader” (School Library Journal, starred review)—Kat Howard’s exquisite shorter works, nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and performed on WNYC's Selected Shorts.

Kat Howard has already been called a “remarkable young writer” by Neil Gaiman and her “dark and enticing” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel, Roses and Rot, was beloved by critics and fans alike.

Now, you can experience her collected shorter works, including two new stories, in A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. In these stories, equally as beguiling and spellbinding as her novels, Howard expands into the enchanted territory of myths and saints, as well as an Arthurian novella set upon a college campus, “Once, Future,” which retells the story of King Arthur—through the women’s eyes.

Captivating and engrossing, and adorned in gorgeous prose, Kat Howard’s stories are a fresh and stylish take on fantasy. “Kat Howard seems to possess a magic of her own, of making characters come alive and scenery so vivid, you forget it exists only on the page” (Anton Bogomazov). 

Why We Want It: I'm not familiar with Kat Howard's short fiction, but her two novels (Roses and Rot, An Unkindness of Magicians) are spectacular. Though it is a different skill set to be able to write an excellent novel and an excellent short story, I'm looking forward to checking out her shorter fiction. If they are anywhere near as good as those two novels we're in for a treat.

Older, Malka. State Tectonics [Tor.com Publishing]
Publisher's Description

Campbell Award finalist Malka Older's State Tectonics concludes The Centenal Cycle cyberpunk poltical thriller series.

The future of democracy must evolve or die.

The last time Information held an election, a global network outage, two counts of sabotage by major world governments, and a devastating earthquake almost shook micro-democracy apart. Five years later, it's time to vote again, and the system that has ensured global peace for 25 years is more vulnerable than ever.

Unknown enemies are attacking Information's network infrastructure. Spies, former superpowers, and revolutionaries sharpen their knives in the shadows. And Information's best agents question whether the data monopoly they've served all their lives is worth saving, or whether it's time to burn the world down and start anew.

Why We Want It: State Tectonics is the third volume of the Centenal Cycle, a series of short novels dealing with a future global democracy teetering on the brink of either fully establishing itself or collapse. Older infuses the novels with a sense of hope rather than of despondent inevitability (such as we might be feeling today), but her proposed democracy is something to fight for and something that requires work, trust, and engagement (huh). Though I didn't love Null States quite as much as Infomocracy, I remain excited to see how Older will close out the series.

Tan, Shaun. Tales from the Inner City [Scholastic]
Publisher's Description

TALES OF THE INNER CITY is an anthology of twenty-five stories, each about a particular animal — tiger, snail, hippopotamus, shark, and so on — and how we as humans might respond to their unexpected presence with in a concrete, steel, and glass landscape: the place so many of us now call home.

Some stories deal with love and kinship, the way animals can elevate out spirit; others are about cruelty and disrepect. All are intended to be thought-provoking without being moralizing or overly political, and strange enough to invite variable readings, not unlike a series of interesting dreams.The author sees this collection as both for children and adults.  

Why We Want It: If Tales from the Inner City is much like Tales From Outer Suburbia, we should expect an art book that is also a collection of short stories. Tan's art is exceptional and weird and always worth seeking out.

Williams, Walter Jon. The Accidental War [Harper Voyager]
Publisher's Description

Blending fast-paced military science fiction and space opera, the first volume in a dynamic trilogy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Praxis, set in the universe of his popular and critically acclaimed Dread Empire’s Fall series—a tale of blood, courage, adventure and battle in which the fate of an empire rests in the hands of a cadre of desperate exiles.

It’s been seven years since the end of the Naxid War. Sidelined for their unorthodox tactics by a rigid, tradition-bound military establishment, Captain Gareth Martinez and Captain the Lady Sula are stewing in exile, frustrated and impatient to exercise the effective and lethal skills they were born to use in fighting the enemy.

Yet after the ramshackle empire left by the Shaa conquerors is shaken by a series of hammer blows that threaten the foundations of the commonwealth, the result is a war that no one planned, no one expected, and no one knows how to end.

Now, Martinez, Sula, and their confederate Nikki Severin must escape the clutches of their enemies, rally the disorganized elements of the fleet, and somehow restore the fragile peace—or face annihilation at the hands of a vastly superior force

Why We Want It: Years ago I bounced off of one of Williams' standalone short novels and I've been avoiding him ever since, at least until I read his novella Impersonations (put out Tor.com Publishing, from which I read almost everything) and wanted so much more. I still have not read his Dread Empire's Fall series (beginning with The Praxis and continuing on to Impersonations), but I very much want and need to. The Accidental War is part of that larger series and the first of a new trilogy. I loved Impersonations and this might just be a perfect place to jump in to the series.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 & 2018 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. 

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Gailey, Sarah. Taste of Marrow [Tor.com Publishing, 2017]

Publisher's Description:

Campbell finalist Sarah Gailey's hippo mayhem continues in Taste of Marrow, the sequel to rollicking adventure River of Teeth.

A few months ago, Winslow Houndstooth put together the damnedest crew of outlaws, assassins, cons, and saboteurs on either side of the Harriet for a history-changing caper. Together they conspired to blow the dam that choked the Mississippi and funnel the hordes of feral hippos contained within downriver, to finally give America back its greatest waterway.

Songs are sung of their exploits, many with a haunting refrain: "And not a soul escaped alive."

In the aftermath of the Harriet catastrophe, that crew has scattered to the winds. Some hunt the missing lovers they refuse to believe have died. Others band together to protect a precious infant and a peaceful future. All of them struggle with who they've become after a long life of theft, murder, deception, and general disinterest in the strictures of the law. 

Why We Want It: The follow up to Gailey's excellent River of Teeth. We loved it.  We want more of it. At this point we've moved beyond the awesomeness of just having hippos in America and we need the story to be excellent. Gailey delivered the goods in River of Teeth and I have no doubt she'll deliver the goods again in Taste of Marrow.

Howard, Kat. An Unkindness of Magicians [Saga Press, 2017]

Publisher's Description

There is a dark secret that is hiding at the heart of New York City and diminishing the city’s magicians’ power in this fantasy thriller by acclaimed author Kat Howard.

In New York City, magic controls everything. But the power of magic is fading. No one knows what is happening, except for Sydney—a new, rare magician with incredible power that has been unmatched in decades, and she may be the only person who is able to stop the darkness that is weakening the magic. But Sydney doesn’t want to help the system, she wants to destroy it.

Sydney comes from the House of Shadows, which controls the magic with the help of sacrifices from magicians.

Why We Want It: Howard's debut, Roses and Rot, just missed out on being in my top 9 novels of 2016. It was a stunning debut, assured and confident and - not to put too fine a point on it, magical. I'm excited to see what Howard has in store for us next.

Leckie, Ann. Provenance [Orbit, 2017]

Publisher's Description:

Following her record-breaking debut trilogy, Ann Leckie, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Awards, returns with an enthralling new novel of power, theft, privilege and birthright. 

A power-driven young woman has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned.

Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find their planet in political turmoil, at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world, before they are lost to her for good. 

Why We Want It: Ancillary Justice (my review) won the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke, and Locus awards. Ancillary Sword and Mercy were finalists for each of those awards (and both winning the Locus Award for Science Fiction). The good news is the novels more than lived up to the hype and that Leckie has more than earned the accolades she has earned for her fiction. A new novel from Ann Leckie is a cause for celebration, and - I believe this is set in her Imperial Radch milieu, though not specifically tied to the previous three novels.

Newitz, Annalee. Autonomous [Tor, 2017]

Publisher's Description

The highly anticipated science fiction debut from the founder of io9! 

Earth, 2144. Jack is an anti-patent scientist turned drug pirate, traversing the world in a submarine as a pharmaceutical Robin Hood, fabricating cheap scrips for poor people who can’t otherwise afford them. But her latest drug hack has left a trail of lethal overdoses as people become addicted to their work, doing repetitive tasks until they become unsafe or insane.

Hot on her trail, an unlikely pair: Eliasz, a brooding military agent, and his robotic partner, Paladin. As they race to stop information about the sinister origins of Jack’s drug from getting out, they begin to form an uncommonly close bond that neither of them fully understand.

And underlying it all is one fundamental question: Is freedom possible in a culture where everything, even people, can be owned? 

Why We Want It: Since Newitz does not yet have a track record as a science fiction novelist, I fall back to the answer I could give to each work on this list: It looks awesome and I think I'd like to read it. There's been a certain amount of hype building for Autonomous and my hope is that the book will live up to it.

Older, Malka. Null States [Tor.com Publishing, 2017]
Publisher's Description:

Null States continues Campbell Award finalist Malka Older's Centenal Cycle, the trilogy beginning with Infomocracy 

The future of democracy is about to implode.

After the last controversial global election, the global infomocracy that has ensured thirty years of world peace is fraying at the edges. As the new Supermajority government struggles to establish its legitimacy, agents of Information across the globe strive to keep the peace and maintain the flows of data that feed the new world order.

In the newly-incorporated DarFur, a governor dies in a fiery explosion. In Geneva, a superpower hatches plans to bring microdemocracy to its knees. In Central Asia, a sprawling war among archaic states threatens to explode into a global crisis. And across the world, a shadowy plot is growing, threatening to strangle Information with the reins of power.

Why We Want It: Infomocracy was on my list of the top books of 2016. Null States is the sequel. I loved Older's concept of micro-democracy and Information, and I immediately wanted to start on Null States after finishing Informocracy. I'll have the chance this September.

Strahan, Jonathan (editor). Infinity Wars [Solaris, 2017]
Publisher's Description

CONFLICT IS ETERNAL

We have always fought. War is the furnace that forges new technologies and pushes humanity ever onward. We are the children of a battle that began with fists and sticks, and ended on the brink of atomic Armageddon. Beyond here lies another war, infinite in scope and scale.

But who will fight the wars of tomorrow? Join Elizabeth Bear, Indrapramit Das, Aliette de Bodard, Garth Nix, An Owomoyela, Peter Watts, and many, many more in an exploration of the furthest extremes of military science fiction… 

Why We Want It: With his Infinity Project, Jonathan Strahan has been putting out solid anthology after solid anthology. Infinity Wars is the sixth and presumably penultimate entry in the Infinity Project (so presumed because next year's title is Infinity's End) and after Meeting Infinity and Bridging Infinity, I can't wait to see what stories Strahan has gathered together for Infinity Wars.


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 2017 Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Writer / Editor of the mostly defunct Adventures in Reading since 2004. Minnesotan. 

6 Books with Fantasy Author Kat Howard

Photo Credit: Shane Leonard

Kat Howard has approximately 40 professional short fiction sales. Her work has been performed on NPR, included in year's best and best of anthologies, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the WSFA Small Press Award. Her novella with Maria Dahvana Headley, The End of the Sentence, was chosen as one of NPR's Best Books of 2014. Her debut novel, Roses and Rot, will be published in May 2016 by Saga Press and she has a forthcoming short story collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone, due out in 2018.

Today she shares her 6 books with us...

1. What book are you currently reading?

I'm currently reading Liz Hand's latest Cass Neary book, Hard Light. I love Liz's writing - she's a huge influence and I think one of the best writers currently working in our genre. Hard Light is smart and stark and occasionally seriously creepy, and I'm loving it as much as I hoped I would.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

There are always books that I am really excited about - I can't wait for Cloudbound by Fran Wilde. Updraft  was one of my favorite books of last year. I'm also super excited for Victoria Schwab's This Savage Song. And while it will be out when these questions are posted, it's not as I'm answering, so I'm going to sort of cheat and mention Roshani Chokshi's debut novel, The Star-Touched Queen - it's so gorgeous, and I want everyone else to be excited for it, too.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?

I reread a lot, actually. The next thing up will probably be a full-series reread of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle books, since the series will be finished at the end of April, and I'll want the experience of reading them all back to back.







4. How about a book you've changed your mind about - either positively or negatively?

Like many of us probably have, I've definitely had the experience of going back to a beloved book from childhood and realizing that my memory of it was much better than the book itself was. In terms of positive change, I don't tend to go back to books that I've bounced off of - there are a lot of books waiting to be read, and not every book is for every reader and that's fine.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

If I'm only allowed to pick one, well, I'm still going to cheat a bit and name a series, rather than a book: Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series. This was the place where I fell hard and fast for the Arthurian legend, and for the idea of being able to retell old stories in new shapes. Speaking of rereading, it's a series I reread every year.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is actually my debut novel, Roses and Rot. It's a riff on the Tam Lin ballad, set in a modern day artists' colony that's ... mostly in New Hampshire. It's about sisters and art and love and sacrifice and fairy tales and Publishers Weekly just named it one of the best SFF books of Summer 2016.





POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004, Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015, editor since 2016. Minnesotan.      

New Books Spotlight

Welcome to another edition of the New Books Spotlight, where each month or so we curate a selection of 6 forthcoming books we find notable, interesting, and intriguing. It gives us the opportunity to shine a brief spotlight on some stuff we're itching to get our hands on.

What are you looking forward to? Anything you want to argue with us about? Is there something we should consider spotlighting in the future? Let us know in the comments!

Cover Design by Jaya Miceli

DeLillo, Don. Zero K [Scribner, 2016]

Publisher's Blurb

The wisest, richest, funniest, and most moving novel in years from Don DeLillo, one of the great American novelists of our time—an ode to language, at the heart of our humanity, a meditation on death, and an embrace of life.

Jeffrey Lockhart’s father, Ross, is a billionaire in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to a life of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say “an uncertain farewell” to her as she surrenders her body.

“We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate?”

These are the questions that haunt the novel and its memorable characters, and it is Ross Lockhart, most particularly, who feels a deep need to enter another dimension and awake to a new world. For his son, this is indefensible. Jeff, the book’s narrator, is committed to living, to experiencing “the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth.”

Don DeLillo’s seductive, spectacularly observed and brilliant new novel weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, plague—against the beauty and humanity of everyday life; love, awe, “the intimate touch of earth and sun.”

Zero K is glorious. 

Why We Want It: New DeLillo. If, somehow, that isn't enough to explain why we're excited that there is a new novel from the author or White Noise, Underworld, End Zone, and Falling Man, I'm not sure what to do.

Cover Artist: Unknown

Hill, Joe. The Fireman [William Morrow, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.

The fireman is coming. Stay cool.

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.

Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke. 

Why We Want It: Joe Hill is a master at telling a gripping story that refuses to let go (hence, the gripping) and as good as everything he has published so far has been, The Fireman sounds like it could be his best novel yet. Joe Hill is not to be missed.

Cover Design In House at Saga

Howard, Kat. Roses and Rot [Saga, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

Imogen and her sister Marin escape their cruel mother to attend a prestigious artists’ retreat, but soon learn that living in a fairy tale requires sacrifices, whether it be art or love in this haunting debut novel from “a remarkable young writer” (Neil Gaiman).

What would you sacrifice for everything you ever dreamed of?

Imogen has grown up reading fairy tales about mothers who die and make way for cruel stepmothers. As a child, she used to lie in bed wishing that her life would become one of these tragic fairy tales because she couldn’t imagine how a stepmother could be worse than her mother now. As adults, Imogen and her sister Marin are accepted to an elite post-grad arts program—Imogen as a writer and Marin as a dancer. Soon enough, though, they realize that there’s more to the school than meets the eye. Imogen might be living in the fairy tale she’s dreamed about as a child, but it’s one that will pit her against Marin if she decides to escape her past to find her heart’s desire

Why We Want It: Howard has dazzled with her short fiction in recent years. Roses and Rot is her first novel and I want to know more about how this post-grad school works and how it impacts Imogen's dreams and the sacrifice of family.

Cover Design by Will Staehle

Older, Malka. Infomacracy [Tor.com Publishing, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

It's been twenty years and two election cycles since Information, a powerful search engine monopoly, pioneered the switch from warring nation-states to global micro-democracy. The corporate coalition party Heritage has won the last two elections. With another election on the horizon, the Supermajority is in tight contention, and everything's on the line.

With power comes corruption. For Ken, this is his chance to do right by the idealistic Policy1st party and get a steady job in the big leagues. For Domaine, the election represents another staging ground in his ongoing struggle against the pax democratica. For Mishima, a dangerous Information operative, the whole situation is a puzzle: how do you keep the wheels running on the biggest political experiment of all time, when so many have so much to gain?

Infomocracy is Malka Older's debut novel.

Why We Want It: After reading Malka Older's story "Tear Tracks", we knew she was a writer to watch. Older's debut novel comes across as eerily prescient for a future where information is the true political power.

Cover Art by Victor Mosquera

Palmer, Ada. Too Like the Lightning [Tor, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.

The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labeling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world's population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competition is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.

And in this world, Mycroft and Carlyle have stumbled on the wild card that may destabilize the system: the boy Bridger, who can effortlessly make his wishes come true. Who can, it would seem, bring inanimate objects to life...

Why We Want It: A far future novel of bringing down a utopian society? Sign us up!

Cover Art by Dominic Harmon

Reynolds, Alastair. Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds [Subterranean Press, 2016]
Publisher's Blurb

The Guardian called Alastair Reynolds’ work “a turbulent, wildly entertaining ride” and The Times acclaimed him as “the mastersinger of space opera”. With a career stretching back more than 25 years and across fourteen novels, including the classic ‘Revelation Space’ series, the bestselling ‘Poseidon’s Children’ series, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, and most recently The Medusa Chronicles (with Stephen Baxter), Reynolds has established himself as one of the best and most beloved writers of hard science fiction and space opera working today.

A brilliant novelist, he has also been recognized as one of our best writers of short fiction. His short stories have been nominated for the Hugo, British Fantasy, British Science Fiction, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, Locus, Italia, Seiun, and Sidewise Awards, and have won the Seiun and Sidewise Awards.

The very best of his more than sixty published short stories are gathered in Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds, a sweeping 250,000 word career retrospective which features the very best stories from the ‘Revelation Space’ universe like “Galactic North”, “Great Wall of Mars”, “Weather”, “Diamond Dogs”, and “The Last Log of the Lachrymosa” alongside thrilling hard science fiction stories like Hugo Award nominee “Troika”, “Thousandth Night”, and “The Star Surgeon’s Apprentice”. Spanning more than fifteen years, the book also collects more recent stories like environmental SF tale “The Water Thief”, powerful and moving YA “The Old Man and the Martian Sea” and the brilliant “In Babelsberg”.

Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds has something for every reader of science fiction, and easily meets the challenge of delivering stories that are the hardest of hard science fiction and great entertainment.

Why We Want It: Alastair Reynolds is one of the modern masters of science fiction and space opera, and Beyond the Aquila Rift is a massive collection of his excellent and sometimes underrated short fiction. This is a must read, especially if you only know Reynolds from his novel length fiction.



POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Writer / Editor at Adventures in Reading since 2004, Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2015. Minnesotan.