Coming Attractions | This Census-Taker by China Miéville

We all have our bad habits. Happily, I have far fewer as we approach the close of 2015 than I did in years previous, but there's at least one I haven't been able to give the boot to: my tendency to hoard books I have every reason to believe will be brilliant.

I'm still sitting, for instance, on a number of new-to-me novels by Guy Gavriel Kay and Catherynne M. Valente—a pair of my foremost favourite authors. But the knowledge that I'm entirely likely to love the likes of Palimpsest and The Lions of Al-Rassan has led to me saving them for a rainy day; a long-delayed rainy day during which I'll be able to luxuriate in these reading experiences rather than have to rush headlong towards their respective ends.

I can now add to that list Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville, another of the writers I'm not afraid to place on a pedestal. Admittedly I've already read a fair few of the short stories said collection brings together, but I'm hoarding the assemblage itself—not least because I wasn't sure when to expect Miéville to put out anything else.

I'm sure enough now, needless to say. A new novella, name of This Census-Taker, is coming out in January in the United States, and in the UK a full frustrating month later. I'll be buying the limited edition Subterranean Press are in the process of putting together, however, in large part because of Vincent Chong's typically terrific cover art:

Here's a bit about the book, too:

A boy ran down a hill path screaming. 

This running, screaming boy has witnessed something terrible, something so awful that he cannot even properly articulate it. All he can do is run. His story is investigated, but no evidence is found to support it, and so in the end, he is sent back. Back up that hill path to the site of his terror, to live with the parent who caused it.  

The boy tries to escape. He flees to a gang of local children but they can't help him. The town refuses to see his danger. He is alone.  

Then a stranger arrives. A stranger who claims his job is to ask questions, seek truth. Who can, perhaps, offer safety. Or whose offer may be something altogether different, something safety is no part of.  

In This Census-Taker, multiple award-winning writer China Miéville offers a story made of secrets and subtle reveals, of tragedy and bravery, of mysteries that shift when they appear to be known. It is a stunning work, full of strangeness and power.

Since I seem to have squirreled away plenty of Miéville already, I'll be reading This Census-Taker just as soon as humanly. You should too, to be sure.

Coming Attractions | Speak Easy by Catherynne M. Valente

As fine as the four Fairyland books have been, I've been keen for a period of years for Catherynne M. Valente to get back to the sumptuous standalone stuff that led me to love her work in the first. Happily, it looks like she's doing exactly that in her "fanciful" new novella. Readers, meet Speak Easy:

If you go looking for it, just about halfway uptown and halfway downtown, there's this hotel stuck like a pin all the way through the world. Down inside the Artemisia it's this mortal coil all over. Earthly delights on every floor. 

The hotel Artemisia sits on a fantastical 72nd Street, in a decade that never was. It is home to a cast of characters, creatures, and creations unlike any other, including especially Zelda Fair, who is perfect at being Zelda, but who longs for something more. 

The world of this extraordinary novella—a bootlegger's brew of fairy tales, Jazz Age opulence, and organised crime—is ruled over by the diminutive, eternal, sinister Al. Zelda holds her own against the boss, or so it seems. But when she faces off against him and his besotted employee Frankie in a deadly game that just might change everything, she must bet it all and hope not to lose...

Multiple-award-winning, New York Times' bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente once again reinvents a classic in Speak Easy, which interprets "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" if Zelda Fitzgerald waltzed in and stole the show. This Prohibition-Era tale will make heads spin and hearts pound. It's a story as old as time, as effervescent as champagne, and as dark as the devil's basement on a starless night in the city.

The cover art is an ornate affair, which is fitting, in that "ornate" is as apt an adjective as any to describe Valente's ridiculously pretty prose. It's what's inside that counts, of course, but it's nice, nevertheless, when what's outside also factors into the mathematics.

Now I have a confession to make before I say good day. When I saw Speak Easy mentioned in the Subterranean Press newsletter, my first thoughts were: What? Haven't I read this already?

I haven't. I have, however, read—and reviewed—a very similar story in recent years. Like Speak Easy, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is a prohibition-era reimagining of The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

To maker matters worse, this is far from the first time I've mixed Catherynne M. Valente up with the author of The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Genevieve Valentine. Why? My best guess is because their surnames make them shelf-friends in my lovely library, leading to a little confusion that Speak Easy's existence only exacerbates.

I won't hold that against it, though. Roll on Speak Easy's publication in the States this August!

Coming Attractions | Savages by K. J. Parker

Good news, everyone: fully three years since Sharps, Savages—the long-awaited new novel by K. J. Parker—is actually happening!

A tour through this afternoon's inbox brought the first blurb:

An unnamed man wakes to find himself facing the loss of everything that matters most to him. Against all odds, he escapes with his life and heads out into the turbulence of the wider world, recreating himself, step by step, as he goes along. 

That wider world is dominated by an empire that has existed for decades in a state of near perpetual war. A host of colorful characters will help to shape the destiny of the empire, and its constantly shifting array of allies and adversaries; among them, a master military strategist, a former pacifist who inherits his father's moribund arms business, a beautiful forger and a very lucky counterfeiter. Each of them, together with corrupt bureaucrats and the nomadic 'savages' of the title, plays a part in a gradually unfolding drama of conflict and conquest played for the highest of stakes. 

A story of war, politics, intrigue, deception, and survival, Savages is a hugely ambitious, convincingly detailed novel that is impossible to set aside. Filled with schemes, counter-schemes, sudden reversals of fortune, and brilliantly described accounts of complex military encounters, it is, by any measure, an extraordinary entertainment, the work of a writer whose ambition, range, and sheer narrative power have never been more thoroughly on display.

And if that weren't enough to whet your appetite, feast your eyes on the cover art by Bram Sels:

The limited edition of Savages is coming from Subterranean Press in the States this summer. A little birdie tells me a more affordable edition will be released in the UK in the same timeframe. That's this July, guys.

Time to get excited, right?

Coming Attractions | Scale-Bright by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Lavie Tidhar has it that Benjanun Sriduangkaew is amongst "the most exciting new voices in speculative fiction today," and readers? I don't disagree. I've only read a few of her short stories—'Fade to Gold' in End of the Road and 'Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade' in Clarkesworld Magazine—but both have been (excuse the hyperbole here) mindblowing.

To wit, I met the news of her new novella—her first, unless I'm very much mistaken—with more than a mite of excitement. Due out sometime this month from the fine folks at Immersion Press, Scale-Bright is "a contemporary fantasy" narrative blending "Chinese myth, interstitial cities, and the difficulties of being mortal and ordinary when everyone around you has stepped out of legends."

Here's the wonderful Richard Wagner cover, in all its high resolution loveliness:

I've got a blurb for the book, to boot. Behold!

Julienne’s aunts are the archer who shot down the suns and the woman who lives on the moon. They teach her that there’s more to the city of her birth than meets the eye—that beneath the modern chrome and glass of Hong Kong there are demons, gods, and the seethe of ancient feuds. As a mortal Julienne is to give them wide berth, for unlike her divine aunts she is painfully vulnerable, and choice prey for any demon.

Until one day, she comes across a wounded, bleeding woman no one else can see, and is drawn into an old, old story of love, snake women, and the deathless monk who hunts them.

If, like me, you can't contain your anticipation, check out these three free short stories—'Chang'e Dashes from the Moon', 'Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon' and 'The Crows Her Dragon's Gate'—all of which "provide further background to the mythological grounding of Scale-Bright." And then get your orders in, alright?

Quoth the Scotsman | Nick Harkaway on The Imagery of Britishness

This year promises to be a pivotal period for the population of Scotland. In September, in case you weren't aware, the people will participate in a referendum on independence, the results of which will determine whether or not our country remains in the UK.

Now this is not, nor will it ever be, a political blog, but what it is to be British—what it means, really—has been a question asked frequently recently, and I found the following diatribe from Nick Harkaway's new book, which I'm currently reading for review, illuminating in that light:

Dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying—which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you—while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. 

[...] 

Originally—when he had believe it was some sort of snobbish post-colonial joke—this all had made Kershaw dislike the Brits, but now apparently he sort of admired it. His brother Gabe was a literature professor at Brown, and when Kershaw brought this up with him Gabe had nodded and said, yeah, absolutely, but you had to read T. S. Eliot to understand. So Jed Kershaw had bought The Waste Land from Amazon dot come and read it here in Mancreu. The Waste Land was a fucking terrifying document of gasping psychological trauma, and it was plenty relevant to the island, but the important point about it was that Eliot was trying to make use of something called an 'objective correlative,' which was an external reference point everyone would understand in the same way without fear of misapprehension. Kershaw found this revealing, he said, because it was very British. [...] Only a Brit would imagine that adding a huge raft of literary imagery to the sea of human emotion and history which was English would clarify the situation in any fucking way at all. All the same, there was something glorious in that complexity, in the fact that Brit communication took place in the gaps between words and in the various different ways of agreeing which meant 'no.' (pp.95-96)

Tigerman is out in the UK in late May, and I'll say today that it's great... if not necessarily what I expected next from the author of Angelmaker.

Quoth the Scotsman | Claire North on The Theory of Everything

You'll have heard about Harry August: the title character of a nearly-here novel by someone calling herself Claire North. Furthermore, you may be aware that the first book to feature the fellow documents the highlights of his first fifteen lives—he's an immortal, after all, both blessed and cursed to live his life again and again until who knows when.

What you might not know is whether The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is truly any good, or just the latest in a long line of debuts perpetually pitched as the next next big thing. Well. Consider this confirmation: The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August is an extraordinary novel, as the publicity has promised. I'll be reviewing it in full at a later date, but for today, a quick quote.

It takes the form of a discussion between our protagonist and his friend and fellow academic, and it touches on two topics I've been dealing with whilst teaching recently: the inadequacy of studying any one subject without others to temper our learning, as well as the question of academic success versus actual education. Here, Harry's helping Vincent figure out his final year thesis:

The turning of the stars in the heavens, the breaking of the atoms of existence, the bending of light in our sky, the rolling of electromagnetic waves through our very bodies...

"Yes yes yes." He flapped his hands. "That's all important! But ten thousand words of thesis is... well, it's nothing. And then there's this assumption that I should focus on one thing along, as if it's possible to comprehend the structure of the sun without truly understanding the nature of atomic behaviour!"

Here it was again, the familiar rant.

"We talk about a theory of everything," he spat, "as if it were a thing which will just be discovered overnight. As if a second Einstein will one day sit up in his bed and exclaim, "Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!" and that's it, the universe comprehended. I find it offensive, genuinely offensive, to think that the solution is going to be found in numbers, or in atoms, or in great galactic forces—as if our petty academia could truly comprehend on a single side of A4 the structure of the universe. X = Y. we seem to say; one day there will be a theory of everything and then we can stop. We'll have won—all things will be known. Codswallop." 

"Codswallop?" 

"Codswallop and barney," he agreed firmly, "to paraphrase Dr Johnson." 

Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours? 

He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. "That," he exclaimed, "is precisely what's wrong with academics." (p.190)

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August will be published by Orbit on April 8th, and you really need to read it: it's as good as guaranteed to be of the best books of the year.

Coming Attractions | Speculative Fiction 2013

Indulge me a moment, dear readers.

Seeing my work alongside articles by the awesome authors and brilliant bloggers showcased in Speculative Fiction 2012 was a point of proper pride for me last year. Leafing through the contributor's copy I got—or maybe it was one of the ones I bought—I'm no less proud now.

More importantly for me, at least, the anthology legitimised, in others' eyes, what I spend my days and nights doing. No matter how many times I told my Mum what I was up to, it wasn't till she saw my name on a printed page that she realised I might not be the good-for-nothing lump she had imagined. I admit I may be overstating her former fears about me, but it's true, to be sure, that she's crowed about the book pretty much continuously since. Whenever I visit, she calls me her "writer in residence." 

An endlessly embarrassing business. But also... well. A little lovely.

It dawned on me this morning that there'll be no stopping her now. After all, the most estimable editors of the next iteration of the anthology recently revealed the cover of Speculative Fiction 2013, designed—as was the last one—by Sarah Anne Langton.

Our friendly neighborhood Book Smugglers, Ana Grilo and Thea James, who took the baton from last year's terrific team, also unveiled a list of contributors. The lineup this time around includes, but is not limited to:

Abigail Nussbaum, Aidan Moher, Alasdair Czyrnyj, Aliette de Bodard, Alyssa Franke, Amal El-Mohtar, Ana Silva, Ann Leckie, Annalee Newitz, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Carrie Sessarego, Chaila, Cheryl Morgan, Chiusse, Chris Gerwel, Diane Dooley, E.M. Kokie, Emily Asher-Perrin, Erin Hoffman, Foz Meadows, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Jared Shurin, Jemmy, Jenny Kristine, Jim C. Hines, Joe Abercrombie, Jonathan McCalmont, Justin Landon, Kameron Hurley, Karyn Silverman, Kate Elliott, Leow Hui Min Annabeth, Liz Bourke, Mahvesh Murad, Matt Hilliard, Miguel Rodriguez, N.K. Jemisin, Natalie Luhrs, Niall Alexander, Nina Allan, Orem Chiel, Paul (Sparky), Phoebe North, Renay, Robert Berg, Sam Keeper, Sayantani DasGupta, Shaun Duke, Sophia McDougall, Stefan Raets and Tansy Rayner Roberts.

I was totally going to tell you which article Ana and Thea picked to represent my writing through 2013... before I realised how much more fun it'd be to let you guess.

I'll say that it's a review—which will surprise no-one, of course; by and large, for good or for ill, that's what I do these days—but also that it's a piece I'm particularly proud of. I'm doubly pleased to see a pair of my peers agree.

Time to post this puppy, but before I go, know that Speculative Fiction 2013 will be released in April. The listings aren't live on Amazon as yet, but as and when you're able to place your orders, remember that all the profits will be donated, as they were last year, to Room to Read: an awesome cause on top of the progressive premise this annual anthology evidences in any event.

Coming Attractions | The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine

Over the holidays, Genevieve Valentine blogged about her long-awaited next novel: it's called The Girls at the Kingfisher Club and I'm really very keen to read it, though it looks and sounds very different from Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti.

The novel formerly known as Gladrags is a "stunning reimagining of the fairytale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses as flappers during the Roaring Twenties in Manhattan," and there doesn't appear to be a steam machine in sight:

Jo, the first born, “The General” to her eleven sisters, is the only thing the Hamilton girls have in place of a mother. She is the one who taught them how to dance, the one who gives the signal each night, as they slip out of the confines of their father’s townhouse to await the cabs that will take them to the speakeasy. Together they elude their distant and controlling father, until the day he decides to marry them all off. 

The girls, meanwhile, continue to dance, from Salon Renaud to the Swan to the Funeral Parlor Supper Club and, finally, the Kingfisher, the club they come to call home. They dance until one night when they are caught in a raid, separated, and Jo is thrust face-to-face with someone from her past: a bootlegger named Tom whom she hasn’t seen in almost ten years. Suddenly Jo must weigh in the balance not only the demands of her father and eleven sisters, but those she must make of herself. 

With The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, award-winning writer Genevieve Valentine takes her superb storytelling gifts to new heights, penning a dazzling tale about sisterhood, freedom, and love in Jazz Age Manhattan.

I can't say I'm sorry Valentine seems to be done with steampunk—for the time being, at least: it's not a form I've ever been awfully fond of, and though she incorporated its central tenets marvellously in Mechanique, these same ideas seemed to me nearly meaningless in her terse but tender novella Terrain, which I just read for the Short Fiction Spotlight over on Tor.com.

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is due out—in the US, I should stress—from Atria Books in June.

The Scotsman Abroad | Smugglivus and the Future of Speculative Fiction

Today, it's my pleasure to point you all in the direction of a post I wrote recently that, in a turn up for the textbooks, wasn't for either The Speculative Scotsman or Tor.com.

We'll talk more about my plans for Top of the Scots 2013 in time, but rest assured that I have been devoting a lot of thought to the prospect of the blog going forward, not least how to handle our annual accounting of the best books and movies and video games of the previous year. 

Indeed, I've been thinking so seriously about these things that when I received an email from Ana and Thea about contributing for the third time in three years to their festive feature, I decided to do something a little different.

To wit, this morning on The Book Smugglers, an overview of the most exciting science fiction and fantasy forthcoming in 2014... according to me, at least:

Fantasy fans have Fall of Light to look forward to, the second volume of The Kharkanas Trilogy by Steven Erikson. The mighty mind behind Malazan also has another new novel on the cards — a spacefaring farce with the working title Willful Child — which brings us neatly to our next category: the science fiction of the future! 

The Echo by James Smythe will be the first such specimen to arrive. I’d had the pleasure of reading this one already, so I can say with certainty that it’s a fully realised sequel which takes what was great about The Explorer and makes it bigger, better, and still more momentous. Meanwhile a second Smythe is poised to be published in the UK in late May: No Harm Can Come to a Good Man is about something called ClearVista, a revolutionary new technology which purports to predict probabilities.

Please do pop on over to The Book Smugglers' blog to read the rest of the post, and if you like, let us know what you and yours are looking forward to reading next year.

And hey: hang around! Not just because Smugglivus is always a bunch of fun — though, you know, it is — but because this week alone there will be guest posts by some of the very finest of my fellow bloggers, including Jared of Pornokitsch, Stefan Raets of Far Beyond Reality, and Justin Landon of Staffer's Book Review. 

Good reading: guaranteed.

Coming Attractions | The Echo by James Smythe

In a relatively recent edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus over on Tor.com, inspired as I was by the surprise arrival of Lavie Tidhar's new novel, I discussed how fantastic it can feel — as a blogger whose responsibility it is to be (almost) always on the ball — to be caught off-guard by a book from time to time. By something I just didn't see coming.

Well, I must have been off my game lately, because it happened again last week: I received a review copy of a book I hadn't heard a bit about, but which, now I know it exists, I can hardly restrain myself from reading. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you The Echo: volume two of The Anomaly Quartet, which I'm given to understand began back in January with The Explorer, "an introspective time travel novel from which you won't be able to look away [that] plays out like Moon meets Groundhog Day."

I bloody loved it, though I wasn't aware it marked the start of something grander.

If the truth be told, the idea of a sequel, even to a favoured fiction, doesn't usually move me, but the mere premise of The Echo excited me immediately:

Twenty years after the disappearance of the infamous Ishiguro — the first manned spacecraft to travel deeper into space than ever before — humanity are setting their sights on the heavens once more. 

Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – that of identical twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen — this space craft has a bold mission: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ — a vast blackness of space into which the Ishiguro disappeared. Between them Tomas (on the ground, guiding the mission from the command centre) and Mira (on the ship, with the rest of the hand-picked crew) are leaving nothing to chance. 

But soon these two scientists are to learn that there are some things in space beyond our understanding. As the anomaly begins to test the limits of Mira’s comprehension — and his sanity — will Tomas be able to save his brother from being lost in space too?

I've got the a copy of the image adorning the front cover of the proof, too. Here is is next to the stark cover art of The Explorer:

The Echo will be published as a hardback by HarperVoyager on January 16th, whilst the ebook will be made available — for a limited time, I imagine — at the tiny price of £5.99. You can bet your last penny I'll have read and reviewed it well before then.

Coming Attractions | The Unquiet House by Alison Littlewood

In early 2012, in the midst of a cold season of my own, I took a deep breath and immersed myself in Alison Littlewood's darkly fantastic first novel. In the review I wrote at the time, I concluded that it was "a powerful story about motherhood... about family, and the ties that bind us. Excepting a few missteps that it bears saying plague all and sundry authors in this genre [...] A Cold Season is a terrifically chilling tale. A sterling debut which bodes unspeakably well for its author and beyond."

By which I meant Jo Fletcher Books too: a brand new genre fiction-focussed imprint at the time. Now, nearly two years later, I'm pleased as can be to report that their forthcoming slate still looks great.

This week I was lucky enough to secure an early look at what's to come from JFB in 2014, and alongside The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord and Empress of the Sun by Ian McDonald, The Unquiet House — Alison Littlewood's next novel — was one of the highlights of a packed catalogue.

Here's the cover art:

And a brief blurb about the book to boot:

Mire House is dreary, dark, cold and infested with midges. But when Emma Dean inherits it from a distant relation, she immediately feels a sense of belonging. 

It isn’t long before Charlie Mitchell, grandson of the original owner, appears claiming that he wants to seek out his family. But Emma suspects he’s more interested in the house than his long-lost relations. 

And when she starts seeing ghostly figures, Emma begins to wonder: is Charlie trying to scare her away, or are there darker secrets lurking in the corners of Mire House?

That I never got around to reviewing Littlewood's second novel is a real regret, but I did indeed read it, and Path of Needles did nothing to diminish my appreciation of an abominably promising new horror author. Safe to say I won't make the same mistake when The Unquiet House is released in the UK next March.

Status Update | Sayonara, Summer

By gum, it's been a busy week or three! Not here, clearly. But with the summer well and truly behind us — sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it's true — the classes I teach in the evenings are in session again, and I dare say I may have overcommitted elsewhere in an attempt to fill some of all the free time that I hardly remember happening.

I suppose I have had a few hours to relax. I certainly played the hell out of Saints Row 4 — just the kind of mindless madness I needed, really — and the other half and I both stole a moment to learn all about Sam and the family from Gone Home. I never thought I'd be nostalgic about the mid-90s, but The Fullbright Company showed me just wrong I was. Yet Gone Home is a game as much about the future as the past: it's a glimpse into an age — fast-approaching, I hope — of more mature gaming.

Now that I think on it, I've seen a few movies, too: Star Trek Into Darkness, which wasn't half as awful as many made out, and Zero Dark Thirty, which impressed the hell out of me — and made me want to rewatch Kathryn Bigelow's vampire masterpiece Near Dark. I'm hoping to sit down with World War Z before the weekend, as well.

What? I said movies, not new movies. What do you expect? I haven't been to the cinema in nearly a year...

But by and large I've been filling my every minute with fiction. You'll start seeing the fruits of all that on The Speculative Scotsman shortly, but for the moment, recent highlights have included More Than This by Patrick Ness and Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of my favourite book of 2012. Still to come, there's some good-looking new Lavie Tidhar, Parasite by Mira Grant, Proxima by Stephen Baxter, and — of course — Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, which I've been reading this week... alas, I can't say much more about it than that.

For the foreseeable here, I have two more great guest posts in the can, not a few related reviews, a temperature to take and an announcement to make. The blog'll be back in business in a bit, basically, but no less than ten imminent deadlines mean I'll be occupied with other obligations a little longer.

Meantime, I hope you've been keeping up with the British Genre Fiction Focus over on Tor.com. This week's column went up earlier this afternoon, in fact: there's some Adam Nevill news and a bit about Ireland's bid to host Worldcon in 2019, but the starring attraction is a whole lot of talk about The Time Traveller's Almanac, complete with a mini-interview with Ann VanderMeer about the process of putting together what is an incredibly ambitious anthology. Read all about right here.

Coming Attractions | A Thousand Perfect Things by Kay Kenyon

So I was scrolling through the coming soon section of Fantastic Fiction, looking for new releases to feature in Sunday's edition of the British Genre Fiction Hitlist, when I saw, to my surprise, that Kay Kenyon has a new book coming out. Who knew?

Well, I didn't. And I do care. In the course of keeping up with community in years previous, I heard all sorts of good things about The Entire and the Rose saga, so I set aside some time and read book one, Bright of the Sky. I didn't love it... but I quite liked it. Enough that I made room for volume two in my bedside cabinet, where I keep everything I mean to read, and bought copies of the next two novels. But when, a little later, I read A World Too Near, my response to the novel was once more mild.

Looking back, I gather that book three is where the series really gets good, but at this stage, a period of years later, I very much doubt I'll be going back to find out what happens.

Be that as it may, I still find myself interested in A Thousand Perfect Things. It's full-on fantasy as opposed to sci-fi, and even better, I see it's standalone. The blurb sounds beautiful, too:

It is 1857. After millennia of seafaring, and harried by the kraken of the deep, in a monumental feat of engineering Anglica has built a stupendous bridge to Bharata. Bharata's magical powers are despised as superstition, but its diamonds and cotton are eagerly exploited by Anglic colonials. Seething with unrest over its subjugation, Bharata strikes back with bloody acts of magical terrorism.  

Despite these savage attacks, young Tori Harding yearns to know if Bharata's magics may also be a path to scientific discovery. Tori's parents hold little hope for her future because she has a club foot. Therefore they indulge her wish to have instruction in science from her famous botanist grandfather, even though, as a woman she will be denied a career in science by the male-dominated scientific societies. Though courted by a friend of the family, Captain Edmond Muir-Smith, Tori has taken to heart her grandfather's warning not to exchange science for "married slavery."  

Emboldened by her grandfather's final whispered secret of a magical lotus, Tori crosses the great bridge with her father's regiment and Captain Muir-Smith. In Bharata she encounters her grandfather's old ally, the Rana of Kathore, his rival sons, and the ancient museum of Gangadhar, fallen to ruin and patrolled by ghosts.  

In pursuit of the golden lotus, Tori finds herself in a magic-infused world of silver tigers, demon birds and the enduring gods of Bharata. As a great native mutiny sweeps up the Rana's household, her father's regiment and the entire continent of Bharata--Tori will find the thing she most desires, less perfect than she had hoped, and stranger than she could have dreamed.

By the by, here's Keyon talking about the collision of ideas that inspired A Thousand Perfect Things in an article for Blackgate.

At 292 pages, A Thousand Perfect Things doesn't look like the longest of novels. On the other hand, the Kindle edition is cheap as chips at the time of this writing. It's coming from Premier Digital Publishing on August 27th, though the trade paperback is already available.

Anyone out there ready to recommend it?

Coming Attractions | An Invitation to the Afterparty

I'll make no bones about it, nor any rotten appendages: I loved Raising Stony Mayhall. Alongside The Reapers are the Angels, it was easily one of the best zombie novels in recent years. It demonstrated, as I wrote in my review for Starburst Magazine, that "whatever people may say, there's plenty life left in the undead yet."

Ever since the publication of Raising Stony Mayhall in late 2011, I've been wondering what Daryl Gregory would do next. Now, thanks to the new catalogue Tor put out recently... now I know.

I thought you should, too.

Afterparty promises to be "powerful, violent science fiction in the tradition of William Gibson and Peter Watts." I've grabbed a cap of the cover art from the catalogue — see above — and the blurb below:

It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen­-year-­old street girl finds God through a new brain-­altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide. 

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-­government agent and an imaginary, drug­-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right. 

A mind­bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Afterparty is a marvelous mix of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, and perhaps a bit of Peter Watts’s Starfish: a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.

There's been no word of a UK release date as yet, but Afterparty is slated for publication in the United States next April. I'll be there... how about you?

Before I say good day, let me flag up a few other notable new books brought to light by way of Tor's new catalogue, which you can read in its entirety here: there's The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell — the sequel to London Falling—a particularly promising new weird novel, namely Unwrapped Sky by Rjurik Davidson, and last but not least, The Revolutions, a "glorious planetary romance" by Felix Gilman.

Is it wrong of me to be wishing the days between now and next April away?

Coming Attractions | A Taste of Trillium

I may have taken my sweet time reading it, but at this late stage, I'm happy to come out and say that Sweet Tooth is without a doubt one of the very best Vertigo series there's ever been. If the imprint is indeed on the way out, as recent rumours suggest — though more recent statements have refuted these rumours — then Sweet Tooth is perfectly positioned to do double-duty as a swan song.

And what a song it sung.

But it's finished, now. The final trade paperback, namely Wild Game, was published last month. And much as I approve of actual endings, and I do — especially in the comics form, where stories either take lifetimes to tell, or are cruelly cancelled — I very much miss my monthly Jeff Lemire fix.

Luckily, there's more to look forward to from the award-winning singer/songwriter. Beginning with Trillium: an eight-issue limited series which "combines rich historical adventure and mind-bending science fiction into a sprawling, unconventional love story."

Courtesy Comic Book Resources, I give you the plot, and two pages from the comic proper. If there ever was a time to click to embiggen, incidentally, this is it!

It’s the year 3797, and botanist Nika Temsmith is researching a strange species on a remote science station near the outermost rim of colonized space. It’s the year 1921, and renowned English explorer William Pike leads an expedition into the dense jungles of Peru in search of the fabled “Lost Temple of the Incas,” an elusive sanctuary said to have strange healing properties. Two disparate souls separated by thousands of years and hundreds of millions of miles. Yet they will fall in love and, as a result, bring about the end of the universe. Even though reality is unraveling all around them, nothing can pull them apart. This isn’t just a love story; It’s the LAST love story ever told.

The first issue of Trillium will be released in early August.

If you have a heart, you'll buy it.

Coming Attractions | New Sun Stories and More

I'm pressed for time again today—well what's new, Blue?—so rather than subjecting you to a last-minute ramble, I thought we could look to tomorrow, by way of a pair of exciting anthologies I heard about for the first time yesterday.

End of the Road appears to follow in the footsteps of Jonathan Oliver's earlier anthology, The End of the Line, which I adored upon its release a few years ago.

An incredible anthology of original short stories by an exciting list of writers from all around the world, including the best-selling author Philip Reeve and the World Fantasy Award-winning Lavie Tidhar. 

Each step will lead you closer to your destination, but who, or what, can you expect to meet at journey's end? Here are stories of misfits, spectral hitch-hikers, nightmare travel tales and the rogues, freaks and monsters to be found on the road. The critically acclaimed editor of Magic, The End of The Line and House of Fear has brought together the contemporary masters and mistresses of the weird from around the globe in an anthology of travel tales like no other. Strap on your seatbelt, shoulder your backpack, or wait for the next ride... into darkness.

End of the Road is due out in November from our pals at Solaris, and I'm pretty sure it'll be super.

If anything I'm more certain that I'll be enraptured by Shadows of the New Sun, an August anthology very much in the mode of Songs of the Dying Earth, but in honour of Gene Wolfe's work rather than Jack Vance's classic saga.

Perhaps no living author of imaginative fiction has earned the awards, accolades, respect, and literary reputation of Gene Wolfe. His prose has been called subtle and brilliant, inspiring not just lovers of fantasy and science fiction, but readers of every stripe, transcending genre and defying preconceptions. 

In this volume, a select group of Wolfe’s fellow authors pay tribute to the award-winning creator of The Book of the New Sun, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Soldier of the Mist, The Wizard Knight and many others, with entirely new stories written specifically to honor the writer hailed by The Washington Post as “one of America’s finest.”

Alongside the complete Table of Contents—which includes original fiction from luminaries like Neil Gaiman, Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, David Brin and Michael Swanwick—Tor.com just posted an exclusive first look at the foreword of Shadows of the New Sun.

More than enough, in other words, to engender my interest. I haven't often had call to talk about my feelings for this author, but I am a massive fan of the man. Which makes Shadows of the New Sun at least twice as exciting, because Wolfe's contributing a few new stories too.

Wootable news, no?

Coming Attractions | Give Me More Than This

You can probably tell that I quite liked The Crane Wife.

There's no sense in repeating myself so soon after the review I published on Monday, but I'll admit, additionally, to keeping a provisional list of the year's finest fiction, and Patrick Ness' gorgeous new novel is up there right alongside Life After Life and The Best of All Possible Worlds.

To wit, I was surprised and indeed quite delighted to hear via Publisher's Weekly that the author will have another book on shelves shortly:

From two-time Carnegie Medal winner Patrick Ness comes an enthralling and provocative new novel chronicling the life — or perhaps afterlife — of a teen trapped in a crumbling, abandoned world. 

A boy named Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he here? And where is this place? 

It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighbourhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust, and completely abandoned. What’s going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? 

Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this.

We only have the North American cover art thus far, but More Than This will be published there and in the UK simultaneously in September.

Obviously, this is awesome. By Crom, bring it on!

Coming Attractions | Arkham's Disappointing Origins

Rocksteady's Arkham games were great, weren't they?

Moody, gorgeous, elaborate and impactful. Innovative, even; you see Arkham Asylum's combat mechanics everywhere these days, and I ain't complaining. Rocksteady did justice to the Batman franchise where endless other developers had tried and failed, then doubled down on their commitment to the character with a superb sequel.

What with these guys making Batman games, Chris Nolan making Batman movies, and Scott Snyder writing the comics, the last few years have chronicled rather a renaissance for the caped crusader. By and large, I've loved it.

Alas, all good things must come to an end. The Dark Knight Rises capped off the cinematic trilogy; sequentially speaking, Scott Snyder must be closer to the end of his tenure than the beginning; and now, it looks like Rocksteady have also moved on. For the time being, at least.

Which isn't to say there won't be more Batman games. Far from it, in fact.

This October, it was recently revealed, will see the release of Batman: Arkham Origins for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. What we're looking at here is a prequel to Rocksteady's series, being made by an untested developer: Warner Bros. Montreal. 

And it gets worse. Apparently Eric Holmes—lead designer of Prototype and Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, amongst other rubbish—is the game's creative director.

I have minimal willpower when it comes to this character, so I'll probably play Arkham Origins anyway. But I don't expect it will be a patch on the games Rocksteady made.

Luckily, some good news broke alongside the reveal of this prequel. Allow me to quote from the originating Game Informer article:

Releasing on 3DS and Vita the same day as the home console version, Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate is a completely separate experience that takes place after the events of Arkham Origins. Armature Studio is developing the 2.5-D Metroid-style exploration action game. Industry followers will recognize Armature Studio as the company founded by several of the leads from the Metroid Prime trilogy.

Doesn't that sound like a match made in heaven?

And guess who just bought himself a 3DS XL?

Me! :)

Status Update | A River of Reviews

I'm back again, guys! 

For serious this time, because the most pressing of the deadlines I returned to has been defeated. I don't want to jinx the thing by naming it now, but you'll see what I was working so hard on shortly, I'm sure.

So what is there to look forward to on The Speculative Scotsman now that I'm back in the saddle? Well, any number of things. I've read a bunch of great books lately, including Life After Life, the new Patrick Ness and another awesome novel from the author of The Explorer. Reviews of all of those and more are forthcoming, of course.

Plus, I just got an email telling me that my copy of Bioshock Infinite will be with me tomorrow morning. You can bet your last penny that I'll blog about the sequel to my single favourite video game in some way, shape or form... just as soon as I've gotten my grubby paws on it.

There are guest posts and giveaways on the calendar also. Speaking of which, I have the winners of the Among Others competition to announce...

I'm hoping to write up a few comics this week as well. I finally finished Northlanders, then in quick succession read The New Deadwardians, Scott Snyder's Court of the Owls arc in Batman, and last but not least, Grant Morrison's latest miniseries, Happy, made me happy.

If I had all the time in the world you'd hear about all of these. But what do you know? I don't! So I'm going to throw this one open: which comic book would you folks be most interested in hearing more about? If there can be only one, which one?

In other news, have you heard about Speculative Fiction 2012 yet? It's to be an annual anthology collecting, and I quote, "The Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary," and it features, of all people, me! Alongside fifty-odd other, better bloggers, obviously. No-one's been mad enough to give me my own book just yet. 

I'll certainly discuss Speculative Fiction 2012 in more detail at a later date, but for the moment, check out the list of contributors on Staffer's Book Review.

What incredible company to be keeping!

But I must be off. Tomorrow, I'm going to run my review of Gideon's Angel, a swashbuckling historical novel by Clifford Beal... then on Wednesday, it gives me immense pleasure to announce that the author will be stopping by to talk about fact, fiction and a third way to tell the world about what once was.

After that? Well, we'll see how the wind blows, won't we?

Coming Attractions | The Abominable Mr. Simmons

Yesterday, Deadline reported that one of my favourite books of recent years is being turned into a TV series by AMC. The Terror is the incredible tale of two ships which were lost in the late 1840s whilst searching for a once-impassable route through the Arctic: the legendary Northwest Passage.

In Dan Simmons' awesome novel, the crew become frozen into the ice for a period of years: The Terror is the story of their survival in these extreme conditions, with limited supplies, fraying tempers, and—here's where it gets particularly interesting—an impossible monster with an appetite for people.

I've always had a soft spot for survival narratives. Also the Arctic. And boy, I do like me my monsters! Indeed, reading The Terror ticked all these boxes before I even realised they existed. So the news that AMC mean to make a TV series out of Simmons' alt-historical story leaves me with... mixed feelings. I'm sure it could be good. Hell, it could be really, really good. On the other hand, the way AMC have "dealt" with The Walking Dead, despite its surprising success, is dismaying.

(Side note: io9's most constructive comment about the announcement was that The Terror isn't The Thing. Well said, sirs! Or... wait. No. I take it back.)

Anyway, though Simmons has had the odd hit since The Terror—Drood was pretty good—by and large he's fallen out of favour again, so I wanted to draw your attention to his next novel, which I only discovered today. It's called The Abominable, and it sounds enticingly like a return to the territory of The Terror: 

In June 1924, famous British climber George Mallory and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine disappeared on the North East Ridge of Mount Everest. Most of the subsequent publicity did not mention that two other climbers were missing: the future Lord Wessex and an unnamed German support climber. 

A year later, climber, poet and war hero Richard David Deacon sees a way he and his friends can reach the heights of Mount Everest. He tells Lady Wessex that they will look for her son if she bankrolls the operation. Now the danger Deacon and his group face is not only from the treacherous conditions; they are also warned of the mythical 'man bear' demons of the mountain - which they dismiss until they hear roars so loud they drown out the 100 mile-per-hour wind that is tearing their canvas tent to shreds around them...

Amazon, however, seem to be doing their very best to garble the facts about the book. They're saying The Abominable will be out this April in the UK, weighing in at 432 pages, yet a quick trawl of the forums Simmons himself visits suggests we should be expecting another behemoth, at approximately 800 pages—and in October rather than a mere six weeks from Sunday.

Let me make no bones about it: whenever it's released, and however long it is, I can't wait to read The Abominable.

But after the ghastly Flashback, is anyone else willing to give Dan Simmons another chance?