The Exploding Spaceship Reviews Some Recent Good Urban Fantasy Reads: The Cormorant, Black Arts and Ghost Train to New Orleans

Posted on 2014-03-16 at 03:31 by angelablackwell

The Cormorant by Chuck Wendig (Angry Robot, January 2014)

This urban fantasy/hard-boiled thriller stars Miriam Black, a woman with the paranormal talent of precisely predicting the date, time, and circumstances of anyone's death. She does some illegal things to survive, usually conning or stealing from the unfortunate who wants to know about his or her demise.

Miriam and the people she encounters all get gleefully skewered, folded, spindled, stapled, and mutilated by Wendig; there is kidnapping, torture, and a paranormally-sensitive cormorant (yes, the bird.) in this story, as well as an appearance by Miriam's mother, who is supposedly one of the reasons that Miriam left home. Miriam has one ally who genuinely likes her and helps her out, and since he manages to survive the story we may see him and his run-down Florida hotel again.

Miriam Black is a bad-girl heroine who has some serious issues because of all the morbid and gruesome imagery she has seen in her head. Her primary goal is survival, so she tends to follow the money, which always seems quite elusive. And when the con is on the other foot, Miriam does not react well at all, because people she likes are getting hurt, not just her.

Wendig has set his tale in a world of thrift-store shopping, seedy motels, fast food, public or stolen transportation, petty theft, and repeatedly experiencing messy and painful death; this is a far cry from the usual middle-class apartment, nice car, nice wardrobe and steady paychecks usually seen in urban fantasy. It's action-packed, has a heroine who is best described as bat-shit crazy, and an engaging, twisty plot, but it isn't for the faint of heart: Wendig pulls no punches, and some of the vile imagery he describes may have you reaching for the brain bleach more than once.

The Cormorant is Wendig's third Miriam Black novel, and Your Humble Reviewers are sure that he will be gleefully torturing his protagonist in another volume. Wendig's urban fantasy is much like his blog posts: well-written, profane, irreverent and hilarious, and never fails to keep you coming back for more.

Black Arts by Faith Hunter (Roc, January 2014)

Posted in The Exploding Spaceship | Tagged chuck wendig, faith hunter, mur lafferty

Friday Quick Updates: Baen audio drama casting; H.G. Wells panel rescheduled; NC Lit Fest schedule; and upcoming events including Jenna Black and Kristen Simmons

Posted on 2014-03-14 at 17:48 by montsamu

Friday, March 14, 2014: Happy Friday everyone! There are some fun activities for teens and kids this weekend (a Divergent fan party on Saturday, Richard Peck’s The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail on Sunday), ahead of a three-author YA event at Flyleaf Books on Monday with Kristen Simmons, Mindee Arnett, and Durham’s Jenna Black, whose latest novel Resistance was just published Tuesday by Tor Teen, a follow-on to last year’s Replica.

Also this weekend (Saturday March 15 and Monday March 17), Wake Forest, NC-based sf publisher Baen is holding auditions for a radio play based on Eric Flint’s novella “Islands”, set in a Byzantine Roman Empire time period. Recording in early April, Baen is looking for various voice actors, with versatility and ability to double on parts appreciated. Payment will be $125 for principals and $20 for extras. Characters include: Male, 20s; Female, 20s; rich-voiced male; males 20-40; female 20-40; older man; older woman. Email [email protected] for scheduling, or call (919) 421-4148. Recording will be in Wake Forest, north of Raleigh, and should require approximately a day and a half commitment from principals. Futher: “We encourage those interested to send voice samples and links to voiceover reels prior to audition. These can be sent to [email protected]. If the file is very large, we can work via Dropbox transfer.”

The H.G. Wells panel at the Orange County Library that was originally scheduled for last month, but was then postponed due to one of the ice storms, has been rescheduled for Monday, April 7. “Join speculative authors James Maxey, Nathan Kotecki, and Clay Griffith, who will lead a group discussion on the pioneering contribution of HG Wells to speculative fiction, and his enduring influence on the genre. ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’ will be the primary focus, but the discussion is expected to encompass other Wells works, too!”

Meanwhile, the NC Literary Festival (April 3-6 at NC State) has posted its schedule of events, which includes featured evening readings with Lev Grossman (Thursday, April 3) and Junot Diaz (Friday, April 4) among fantastic programming all weekend long. Karen Joy Fowler and Therese Anne Fowler (Saturday 11:30 AM); Peter Straub and John Kessel (3:30 PM); Sunday’s 2 PM Literary Fantastic Panel with John Kessel, Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Butner, and Dale Bailey; a robust children’s programming track including Paperhand Puppet Intervention (Saturday 10 AM), R.L. Stine, John Claude Bemis, … it’s going to be a fantastic few days.

-Sam

UPCOMING EVENTS, MARCH 2014

NEW-NEW: 15 (Saturday) 4:30 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts a “Divergent” fan party to celebrate the film adaptation of the popular YA dystopian novel.

16 (Sunday) 3 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Richard Peck – ‘The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail’. (Kids.)

17 (Monday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts the “Three Nightmares You Can’t Resist” tour with authors Kristen Simmons, Mindee Arnett, and Jenna Black. More info:http://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/three-nightmares-you-can%E2%80%99t-resist-tour-featuring-kristen-simmons-mindee-arnett-jenna-black

NEW: 21-23 (Friday to Sunday) – Mad Monster Party Charlotte with William Shatner, Hulk Hogan, and more: http://madmonster.ticketleap.com/mmp14/

[As always check the latest newsletter for more event listings!]

Posted in Friday Quick Updates

Coming to Town: Kim Harrison for The Undead Pool

Posted on 2014-03-07 at 14:42 by montsamu

In 2004, HarperTorch published Dead Witch Walking, and Kim Harrison's urban fantasy "Hollows" series has since grown into a best-selling mainstay. In late February, HarperVoyager published book 12, The Undead Pool, in the continuing adventures of witch and day-walking demon Rachel Morgan, and Harrison was back on tour. As did last year's tour for Ever After, this year's tour brings her back to Quail Ridge Books tonight (Friday, March 7) at 7:30 pm. Harrison was kind enough to take some time in the middle of her tour to answer a few questions about her tour, urban fantasy, the Hollows, and what's next.

Interview by Sharon Stogner

Posted in Coming to Town | Tagged kim harrison, sharon stogner

The Exploding Spaceship Release Day Edition (a day late in US and a day early in the UK): Reviews of Emilie and the Sky World and the 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare

Posted on 2014-03-05 at 06:20 by angelablackwell

Emilie and the Sky World by Martha Wells (Strange Chemistry, US release March 4, 2014; UK release March 6, 2014)

This is a sequel to Emilie and the Hollow World. Emilie has family problems and runs away from her aunt and uncle, and then finds employment and adventure with the Marlendes as they travel the aether in an airship, exploring the currents and the ways they could lead to alternate realities.

In this volume they end up in another world, a jagged, mishmash landscape that looks like it was formed from pieces of other places. They encounter a couple of different types of beings, one friendly and helpful and the other one not. The magicians in the crew get taken over by the bad aliens, who invade their bodies. This results in some adventures to keep everyone safe and to return everyone to their own universe, and members of a previously lost airship crew are discovered. Emilie discovers that a family member is a stowaway on the Marlendes’ airship, and with the help of Emilie’s plant-person ally Hyacinth, some ladder and rope stunts and harrowing mid-air transfers, almost everyone gets back eventually.

At first the story appears to be a “run-away-and-join-the-airship-crew” story, but due to the complex universe and multiple alien species found, it becomes more of a space adventure.

Emilie and the female scientists who employ her are not your typical females for this genre; they are self-reliant women who can and do defend themselves, and Emilie shows herself to be mature and quite a capable airship crew member.

This is an exciting, fast-paced adventure story with original characters and interesting steampunk technology. The tech is a tool for exploring, but the plot revolves around the characters, as it should. This is a good read for any age and either sex, and hopefully we will soon see further volumes of Emilie’s adventures.

The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare by M.G. Buehrlen (Strange Chemistry, US release March 4, 2014; UK release March 6, 2014)

This is the story of a teenage girl from Annapolis, Maryland, Alex Wayfare, who has had strange visions periodically thoughout her 17 years. She has two little sisters, one of whom has leukemia. Her parents are researchers at an institute for medical research.

Alex is a techie who likes to fix everything she can get her hands on, including her Dad’s old Mustang. This makes her a very odd girl and her school days consist of getting bullied and teased plus an occasional disagreement with her teachers, particularly the history teacher.

After a bad experience at school she runs off and hides in an abandoned auto repair shop to wait until the school day ends. She finds a message to her on a flyer on the wall which directs her to meet Porter at a restaurant in the historic district. Porter gives her an explanation of why she has accurate visions of historical events, but his explanation at this and at subsequent meetings just makes her more confused. Eventually Porter takes her to Limbo, what she knows as the black place before visions, and she is finally able to understand where her visions come from.

She asks Porter about some people mentioned in one of her visions, but he won’t explain. She gets upset and triggers a vision to the past right before she was born, and she resolves several mysteries while in the vision but she still doesn’t know where her soul-mate Blue is in her current time. They set up a meeting time during winter break, but this volume leaves her arriving in Chicago with Porter and seeing the fountain where she is to meet Blue, but we don’t know if he is there because that’s the end.

Alex is an interesting character and her visions give some quite shocking views of historical periods. The history seems well researched and her supporting characters add a great deal to the vision sequences. Obviously, there will be more adventures since we have been left on a cliffhanger. It will be interesting to see how long Alex can continue her adventures without the bad guys discovering her name. Having her soul-mate in the present day would help too, because they both have memory issues when in a vision.

Having a character with multiple lives is not a new concept, but the way this is set up is different, with bad scientists behind it and a unique explanation given about limbo. Also, other multiple-life characters don’t have as many lives as Alex, because hers go back into the B.C. era. This is an interesting adventure story which is fast-moving and entertaining, so it should grab the attention of teen readers. Although the main character is female, since she is a tomboy her main peer issues have to do with her geekiness and not her sex, so boys should be able to relate too. There are also plenty of male supporting characters including Blue who show up in many scenes.  Because much of the book does not take place in a high school, there are still plenty of things to interest adult readers. The mystery of what is going on, how Alex got the way she is, and who is really the bad guy will interest everyone, even those adults who aren’t interested in a tale of modern high school.

Posted in The Exploding Spaceship

March Newsletter: Margaret Killjoy, Mur Lafferty, Kim Harrison, The Manly Wade Wellman Award opens for nominations, and (in April) the NC Literary Festival

Posted on 2014-03-04 at 20:05 by montsamu

Vol 4. No 3. March 4, 2014:

Welcome, a bit belatedly, to March! The most recent Friday "Quick" Update has so much info that I don't want to swamp this newsletter in repeating all of it, but in short it covers some new content at bullspec.com (new The Hardest Part essays, Coming to Town interviews, Paul Kincaid's From the Other Side column on British sf, and the latest The Exploding Spaceship reviews column) as well as some new books (Allen L. Wold just published a new collection A Closet for a Dragon: and Other Early Tales, and Scott Nicholson just released The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller) and comics (Vandroid #1 by Tommy Lee Edwards and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #2 by Jeremy Whitley).

Among other news from last month, some highlights:

• Mur Lafferty was featured in USA Today for her podcasting; look for more there about her forthcoming book, Ghost Train to New Orleans, soon. Speaking of Ghost Train to New Orleans, it was named a Best Bet for March speculative fiction in Kirkus Reviews. You can read an excerpt of the book already, ahead of the print, ebook, and audiobook release TODAY, and the local launch party at Chapel Hill’s Flyleaf Books on Thursday night. (And! I talkied with Mur on Carolina Book Beat on Monday morning at 10 am on WCOM-FM; look for the podcast of that broadcast soon.)
• The NC Literary Festival announced lineup additions to their April 3-6 roster, which already included (among many others) Junot Diaz, Karen Joy Fowler, Peter Straub, R.L. Stine, John Kessel, William Barnhardt, Daniel Wallace, Therese Anne Fowler, and many, many more including Bill Ferris, John Claude Bemis, and Zelda Lockhart. The additions? No less spectacular, including (again, among others) Lev Grossman, Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Butner, Richard Case, and Allan Gurganus. Yeah, wow.
• Eryk Pruitt's forthcoming debut novel, the “Southern Fried crime noir” Dirtbags, has a new trailer.
• The Duke Chronicle’s Annie Piotrowski wrote an absolutely fantastic article on three Triangle-area small press magazines, one of which was Bull Spec, for which she took the time to have a phone conversation with me. I really, really love how it turned out.

• The North Carolina Speculative Fiction Foundation announced that nominations are now open (through Friday, May 2) for the  2014 Manly Wade Wellman Award for North Carolina Science Fiction and Fantasy, along with an updated final nomination list which includes 69 novels.
• Natania Narron's "live reading" of her novel Pilgrim of the Sky stands at nine episodes so far: http://www.youtube.com/user/pilgrimofthesky
• Gabriel Dunston has started shipping out Kickstarter reward copies of Purgatory Pub! Yeah!
• Stephanie Ricker is one of five winners of Rooglewood Press' "Cinderella" writing competition, with a space-set short story "A Cinder's Tale" set to appear in the forthcoming anthology Five Glass Slippers.
• Richard Dansky's Tumblr of "People Doing Terrible Things to My Book" now features a video of me chainsawing his novel Vaporware in half, filmed by Geek Field Guide's Warren Schultz. Yes, it does.

Lastly, I want to (again) highlight the 2014 North Carolina Literary Festival, or "NC Lit Fest", which this year is held at NC State on April 3-6. It's a smorgasbord of awesome, from visiting authors (Junot Diaz, Peter Straub, Karen Joy Fowler, Lev Grossman, on and on) to North Carolina's own (John Kessel, Daniel Wallace, Nathan Ballingrud, Richard Butner, on and on). Do keep an eye out for the schedule later this month and see if anything strikes your fancy. I'm sure it will strike mine,

-Sam

MARCH 2014

4 — Local book release day for Ghost Train to New Orleans (The Shambling Guides) by Durham’s Mur Lafferty (Mar 4, 2014).

NEW: 4 (Tuesday) 7 pm — Internationalist Books and Community Center hosts author Margaret Killjoy to talk about his forthcoming utopian anarchist sf novel A Country of Ghosts, praised by Kim Stanley Robinson as “An exciting and mysterious novel, a story of war and love.” More info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1411094312476615/

5 (Wednesday) 7:30 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Ishmael Beah – ‘Radiance of Tomorrow’. (Fiction.)

6 (Thursday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts Mur Lafferty discusses her fantasy novel Ghost Train to New Orleans.

7 (Friday) 7:30 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Kim Harrison for The Undead Pool. More info:http://www.quailridgebooks.com/event/theundeadpool

11 — Local book release day for Resistance by Jenna Black.

NEW-NEW: 13 (Thursday) 7 pm -- The Regulator Bookshop hosts Kenneth Calhoun for Black Moon, his novel imagining an insomnia epidemic. More info: http://regulatorbookshop.com/event/kenneth-calhoun [how did I miss seeing this in my almost-weekly perusal of local bookstore calendars?!]

NEW-NEW: 15 (Saturday) 4:30 pm -- Quail Ridge Books hosts a "Divergent" fan party to celebrate the film adaptation of the popular YA dystopian novel.

16 (Sunday) 3 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Richard Peck – ‘The Mouse with the Question Mark Tail’. (Kids.)

17 (Monday) 7 pm — Flyleaf Books hosts the “Three Nightmares You Can’t Resist” tour with authors Kristen Simmons, Mindee Arnett, and Jenna Black. More info:http://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/three-nightmares-you-can%E2%80%99t-resist-tour-featuring-kristen-simmons-mindee-arnett-jenna-black

NEW-NEW: 21-23 (Friday to Sunday) --  Atomic Empire hosts a 3-day "Magic the Gathering" tournament, Magic: Eternal Weekend V: The Atomic Empire Strikes Back.

NEW: 21-23 (Friday to Sunday) – Mad Monster Party Charlotte with William Shatner, Hulk Hogan, and more: http://madmonster.ticketleap.com/mmp14/

NEW-NEW: 23 (Sunday) 7:30 pm -- Carrboro's All Day Records hosts INVERSIONS 2 with readings and spoken word performances by V. Manuscipt, E. Viszk, Brian Howe, and Mildew Ethers.

25 — Local book release day for Daughter of Chaos by Jen McConnel.

NEW-NEW: 28-29 (Friday and Saturday) -- Statesville, NC's Mitchell Community College will host the 2014 Doris Betts Spring Writers Festival on Mar. 28 and 29. One of the guests is N.K. Jemisin, "an author of speculative fiction short stories and novels. Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel and the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award, her work has been nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award and has been shortlisted for the Crawford, the Gemmell Morningstar, and the Tiptree. Her short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Postscripts, Strange Horizons, Baen’s Universe, Ideomancer, Abyss & Apex, and print anthologies." More info including free registration for the Saturday morning writers workshop: http://www.mitchellcc.edu/news.cfm?Action=Det&ID=361

28 (Friday) 7:30 pm — Quail Ridge Books hosts Meg Wolitzer – ‘The Interestings’. (Fiction.)

APRIL 2014

Posted in newsletter

Coming to Town: Margaret Killjoy for A Country of Ghosts

Posted on 2014-03-04 at 13:47 by montsamu

I have only myself to blame, but I only heard about Margaret Killjoy's forthcoming anarchist utopian novel A Country of Ghosts late last week and only over the weekend about his event tonight. Still, Killjoy, the founder of SteamPunk Magazine, co-editor of  the essay anthology We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, and the author of the choose-your-own-adventure  What Lies Beneath the Clock Tower, found some last-minute time to answer a few questions about his book. (And he does so with considerably more insight than I was able to provide in asking my questions, not having read the book yet, I dare say.) I'm very much looking forward to the book and to his talk tonight (Tuesday, March 4) at Internationalist Bookstore and Community Center on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill at 7 pm on "the usefulness of fiction--with a focus on utopian fiction--in anarchist struggle."

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="449"] Margaret Killjoy, author of the forthcoming anarchist utopian novel A Country of Ghosts, Combustion Books, March 2014.[/caption]

Interview by Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

Why utopian fiction? You've edited non-fiction books, written a Steampunk choose-your-own-adventure, but utopian fiction is notoriously hard: where lies the challenges that drive a story when society's problems are "solved"?

Writing utopian fiction definitely presents some unique difficulties, and yeah, coming up with good conflict to move the plot forward and keep readers engaged is probably the biggest one. One of the dangers of utopian fiction is avoiding pedantry... my goal isn't to just describe a great society, it's to tell a good story. In A Country of Ghosts, the utopian country is being invaded, so there's obviously conflict there, and the protagonist is a foreigner, trying to figure out his own loyalties. But I also wanted to include internal conflict within the country, where some of their principles are challenged. I don't know how to get into that part too much without spoiling anything, however.

In trying to compare the book with its literary antecedents, I come up with Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Kim Stanley Robinson's The Lucky Strike, and Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean, but these all involve a much more advanced state of technology than the coal and iron of A Country of Ghosts, though some environmental themes seem to cross over. Perhaps a better antecedent there might be China Mieville's Iron Council? And does technology help or hurt anarchism?

Posted in Coming to Town | Tagged a country of ghosts, combustion books, internationalist books, margaret killjoy

Friday Quick Updates: Allen Wold's new collection, H.G. Wells panel, Mur Lafferty, NC Literary Festival adds Lev Grossman and Nathan Ballingrud, and (tons) more

Posted on 2014-02-28 at 21:31 by montsamu

Friday, February 28, 2014: Wow. There's a lot to tell you guys about since my last news roundup 11 days ago. So much I hardly know where to begin! Let's start with what's new at bullspec.com:

• Coming to Town: Megan Shepherd for Her Dark Curiosity and “The Lovestruck Tour”
• The Hardest Part: Jeremy Whitley on My Little Pony: Friends Forever
• Paul Kincaid’s From the Other Side, February 2014: Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn, and The Kitschies
• The Exploding Spaceship Finally Returns, with Reviews of 2013 Anthologies!

More new and awesome things? Allen L. Wold just published A Closet for a Dragon: and Other Early Tales, a huge collection of mostly unpublished short stories, across his decades of writing, from his "first real stories" and even before those to his pre-stories, all with story notes and introductions by the author. And there's two new local comic books out in the world, both fantastic, in about as different a way as there can be. Tommy Lee Edwards' VANDROID is a pulpy, dirty, violent riff on 1980s action sf, and Jeremy Whitley's My Little Pony: Friends Forever #2 is a fun-for-all-ages whimsical romp with the Cutie Mark Crusaders and the chaotic "Discord", with much fun being had through some references I honestly don't know how he got past the editors, but he did, and it's printed, so it's TOO LATE. I don't want to give too much away, but: he does make use of the fact that John de Lancie is both the voice of "Discord" on the television series, as well as (of course) the voice of "Q" on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yes, he does.

There's also a regional book release, The Narrow Gate: A Supernatural Thriller (Solom) by Scott Nicholson. Nicholson is a prolific author writing near (or in?) Boone. This is book 2 in his "Solom" series: "After the violent death of Katy Logan’s psychopathic husband, she inherits a farm in the Appalachian Mountain town of Solom. Determined to protect her teen daughter Jett and not surrender to fear, she builds a new life in the wake of the tragedy. However, the dark forces that drove her husband to madness still lurk in Solom, and a horseback preacher has returned from the grave with a sinister mission. Solom’s slumbering spirits are stirring, the herds of goats are restless, and the townspeople are banding together to ward off the sinister force that threatens to destroy them. Katy and Jett discover an unexpected ally as they are drawn into the supernatural showdown, but is anyone--or anything--powerful enough to walk away from Solom’s final battleground?"

OK, announcements time, rapid-fire edition:

Posted in Friday Quick Updates

The Exploding Spaceship Finally Returns, with Reviews of 2013 Anthologies!

Posted on 2014-02-28 at 08:40 by angelablackwell

After a four month hiatus, we return to reviewing!

So sorry for the downtime, but we had a parental heart surgery, several trips, and a house move in the last quarter of 2013 and the first couple of months of 2014. We should now return to our regular appearances on the pages of the magazine.

The last quarter of 2013 was a busy time for good anthologies. Having not read many all year, there were suddenly five which looked like good winter reads. Hank Davis of Baen edited both Halloween and Christmas anthologies. For those who like a good scary science fiction story, In Space No One Can Hear You SCREAM (of course it was released in October, 2013) contains a variety of old but not seen recently stories and some stories in a classic style from modern authors. All the stories have a spooky element to them, but none of them are gory. This volume contains stories by George R.R. Martin, Arthur C. Clarke, Neal Asher, Theodore Sturgeon, and several Baen regulars.   One of the best things about Hank’s anthologies is his choice of content. Some science fiction magazines contain some stories which bear no resemblance to Your Humble Reviewers' definition of science fiction (or that of anyone else who likes classic adventure stuff). Hank likes the classic stuff and writes some of it, too, so we rarely find a story we don’t like in his anthologies. So while we primarily read novels, a few anthologies get in which are either Hank’s, contain stories by people whose novels we read, or are edited by people we know.

Posted in The Exploding Spaceship

Whispersync Deal Roundup: Night Shade Books, the Baen Free Library, and The Shambling Guide to New York City

Posted on 2014-02-27 at 19:28 by montsamu

There’s actually a significantly large number of local and regional authors in this roundup of ebook/audiobook deals:

Posted in Uncategorized

Paul Kincaid’s From the Other Side, February 2014: Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Dave Hutchinson's Europe in Autumn, and The Kitschies

Posted on 2014-02-27 at 03:09 by montsamu

From the Other Side: February 2014

By Paul Kincaid

So the torrential rain and apocalyptic flooding we’ve experienced in much of Britain over the last couple of months meant that I wasn’t able to get to the Kitschies Award Ceremony, though on the up side this at least spared me the sight of whatever garish outfit Nick Harkaway had chosen to wear. The Red Tentacle for best novel went to Ruth Ozeki for A Tale for the Time Being, and for a novel that has generally had more mainstream recognition, including being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, her acceptance speech suggests a very finely judged recognition of genre status. In addition the Golden Tentacle, for the best debut, went to Ann Leckie for Ancillary Justice; the Inky Tentacle for best cover went to Will Staehle for The Age Atomic by Adam Christopher; and the discretionary Black Tentacle went to Malorie Blackman.

With Awards Season now in full swing, the British Science Fiction Association has also announced the shortlists for the BSFA Awards. They are interesting lists, if perhaps unsurprising. Certainly I’m expecting a number of these titles to show up on other award shortlists this year. The Arthur C. Clarke Award, for instance, has revealed the full list of submissions received this year. 121 books in total (for the record, that’s getting on for three times the average number of books submitted while I was running the award), and a very interesting list it is too. I’m not going to go out on a limb and predict what is likely to make the shortlist (that’s not due to be announced until next month), but I am quite confident that we are going to see more women on the shortlist than last year. One last thing while I’m on the subject of awards, I note that Hugo nominations are now open for this year’s Loncon 3, so if you’re entitled to vote it’s time to start making that decision.

Away from awards (at least for the time being), it’s been a month for breakthrough novels. The biggest book of the month is Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer from Fourth Estate, the first volume in a trilogy. The other two volumes are both due out this year as well, Authority in May and Acceptance in September, an unusual publishing schedule to say the least. But it certainly seems to be paying off, given the amount of critical attention that the first volume is already receiving, and in places that don’t always devote much space to the genre. It’s a novel that seems to owe a debt to both Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tarkovsky’s Stalker, as team of four women explore a strange zone that seems to do curious things to their perceptions, and it seems clear that it is going to reach a much bigger audience than VanderMeer has done before.

The other breakthrough novel this month is Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson, published by Solaris. Hutchinson had four books published while he was still in his teens, but then he stopped writing for far too many years. He’s lately started writing again, producing work that has been well appreciated (appearances in Year’s Best collections) without actually threatening the bestseller lists. Hopefully, Europe in Autumn should change that. On the surface, it’s an engaging and effective spy thriller (Hutchinson always has been a very good storyteller), but under the surface there’s something much more interesting going on. He imagines a near-future Europe Balkanized into a myriad of independent statelets, some as small as a city district or as elongated as a trans-European railway line. The reasons why the continent has disintegrated this way, and the effects of all these countless borders, make this one of the most politically astute novels I’ve read for a long time.

Other new books attracting attention this month Joanna M. Harris’s reimagining of Norse myth told by the trickster god in The Gospel of Loki from Gollancz, while the UK edition of Unfettered edited by Shawn Speakman includes an additional story by Speakman himself. British publishing seems to be getting into gear for the year, so there should be even more to talk about next month.

Paul Kincaid is the author of What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction. He has won both the Thomas D. Clareson Award and the BSFA Non-Fiction Award. A new collection of reviews, Call And Response, is due to be published early in 2014.

Posted in From the Other Side | Tagged annihilation, dave hutchinson, europe in autumn, jeff vandermeer, paul kincaid, the kitschies