At the outset of Red Moon, Patrick Gamble, the teenage son of a single soldier, is having one of those mornings. You know:

A what the hell morning. His father is leaving his son, is leaving his job at Anchor Steam, is leaving to fight a war, his unit activated. And Patrick is leaving his father, is leaving California, his friends, his high school, leaving behind everything that defined his life, that made him him.

It’s enough to inspire violent fantasies in the mind’s eye of our protagonist, already unbalanced on the flight towards his new life in Portland, but though Patrick might feel “like punching through windows, torching a building, crashing a car into a brick wall, he has to stay relatively cool. He has to say what the hell. Because his father asked him to.” So he sucks it up. Lets his worries wash over him while he waits, as patiently as he’s able, for his turn in the toilet a few aisles back.

But the man who went into the bathroom a few moments ago doesn’t come out. Or rather, he doesn’t emerge a man, but a monster.

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If the excerpt for Jenna Black's Replica wasn't enough for you (and it shouldn't be—we were really bummed that it cut off right where it did), then get a copy into your hands now! We have ten of them, and they're ready to travel!

Check below for the rules:

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Tor.com is stoked to reveal the cover for The Emperor’s Blades, the first novel in The Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, a new fantasy series by Brian Staveley beginning in January 2014 and published by Tor Books.

The Emperor’s Blades follows siblings Valyn, Kaden, and Adare, who are in different parts of the world when they learn about the assassination of their father, the Emperor. All of them are in danger of being the next targets, and all of them are caught in the maelstrom of conspiracy, intrigue, treachery, and magic that sweeps through Staveley’s auspicious debut novel.

See the full cover by artist Richard Anderson below and read Staveley’s thoughts on seeing it for the first time.

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Part of what makes Good Omens such a fantastic read is the plethora of referential material that the book offers up in categories ranging from history to art to literature. Here’s a list (though it’s a titan’s feat trying to be comprehensive in this case) of shout-outs this book manages to pack into every crevice, be they sneaky or hammer-worthy on the Obvious Scale.

[Real-life witches to goofy-looking aliens]

Andrew Garfield recently took a break from filming Amazing Spider-Man 2 in Chinatown to shoot some hoops with local kids... while dressed as Spider-Man. While Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) looks on. We love this town!

This is one of those moments where you have to both love the internet and everything about new Spider-Man movies.

Watch the fan video below. (Via New York Daily News)

[Watch video]

Welcome to the Malazan Re-read of the Fallen! Every post will start off with a summary of events, followed by reaction and commentary by your hosts Bill and Amanda (with Amanda, new to the series, going first), and finally comments from Tor.com readers. In this article, we’ll cover Chapter Ten of Toll the Hounds (TtH).

A fair warning before we get started: We’ll be discussing both novel and whole-series themes, narrative arcs that run across the entire series, and foreshadowing. Note: The summary of events will be free of major spoilers and we’re going to try keeping the reader comments the same. A spoiler thread has been set up for outright Malazan spoiler discussion.

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A special five story preview of Shawn Speakman’s epic fantasy anthology Unfettered will be released at Phoenix Comicon this Memorial Day weekend. This week, we’re taking a look at all five stories, many featuring new glimpses of our favorite fantasy worlds.

“The Sound of Broken Absolutes,” Peter Orullian’s contribution to Shawn Speakman’s fantasy anthology Unfettered, is a story inspired and informed by the loss of a loved one. This loss is not specifically Peter’s and it’s not specifically yours, but the unique—and eternally frustrating—hallmarks of mourning and grief are what propel it to its conclusion.

It’s a story that has been told many times before, but before you let that color your impression of “Broken Absolutes,” ask yourself: What would you write if you thought your friend was going to die?

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Warner Bros. has released a new (possibly final) trailer for Man of Steel that essentially serves as a message from Zod to Kal-El and the people of the Earth. If we don’t surrender our greatest hero, he will destroy us. It’s... a little intense.

Watch the new trailer below! And check out our rundown of the new prequel comic, which reveals some of the backstory behind Krypton and how Clark discovers the legacy of his people.

[New Man of Steel trailer]

There’s a lot that has been written and said about the inspirational power of Star Trek. From astronauts to social workers, engineers and beyond, do-gooders galore have been borne out of Trek. Good for them! Surely, aspects of Star Trek may have taught me how to be a better person, but that’s not the most profound impact on my adult life. Instead, Star Trek is partially responsible in inspiring me to read great books and become a writer.

And it did this by sneaking classic literature into my silly sci-fi any chance it got. So, it is with a heavy heart I complain about the biggest oversight that I saw in Star Trek Into Darkness: it’s not literary!    

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The desert space pants worn by Mark Hamill in Star Wars: Episode IV are up for sale if you want them. The opening bid seems to be $100,000 dollars. You wanna wear Luke’s hipster pants for $100,000 bucks? We wonder if you really care about anyone. (We care.)

Your daily collection of offsite links cares. A lot. Also, pizza is for some reason referenced in three different ways. We don’t plan these days, they just happen. 

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Welcome back to the British Genre Fiction Focus, Tor.com’s weekly column dedicated to news and new releases from the United Kingdom’s thriving speculative fiction industry.

This week, image is everything—or so says John Dugdale, who in the aftermath of Inferno considered the significance of Robert Langdon’s Harris Tweed jacket vis-à-vis the visibility of Dan Brown’s protagonist. I want to know which figures from genre fiction have apparel even half as iconic.

Later on, in Cover Art Corner, we’ll look ahead to “a gothic fable for all ages” from Carlos Ruiz Zafon, alongside news of two new books Solaris plan to publish next spring, including the author of The Ultimate Dragon Saga’s long-awaited return to genre fiction.

Last but not least, Gollancz have announced that they’re currently undergoing a significant restructure, and I can’t decide whether to offer congratulations or commiserations, because I’m afraid I’ve heard this story before. Someone put my mind at ease, please!

I’ve got a few new releases up my sleeves for you this week as well, not least some previously unpublished poetry by J. R. R. Tolkien, Mur Lafferty’s first novel, and a promising chronicle of Life on the Preservation.

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If, like me, you were introduced to the wonderful and somewhat insane world of Chuck Wendig via Blackbirds, eagerly lapped up its sequel Mockingbird, and then found yourself desperately looking for more, well, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news—I’m just going to go ahead and say it—is that The Blue Blazes is not the new Miriam Black novel. That would be Cormorant, due out at the end of this year from Angry Robot.

The good news is that, if you liked the Miriam Black novels (which I reviewed here and here), The Blue Blazes should be right up your alley: a dark contemporary fantasy that somehow manages to be fun and unnerving at the same time. (Bonus good news: another gorgeous cover by Joey Hi-Fi!)

[Below the mine shaft roads, it will all unfold]

And reviewed by yours truly.

The Gist, a novelette by Michael Marshall Smith, is the latest offering from Subterranean Press’s limited but honourable catalogue. To say it is by Marshall Smith—or at least, by Marshall Smith alone—is, however, something of a misnomer. Between The Gist’s covers are three novelettes and one novelette: Marshall Smith’s original, translated once into the French by Benoît Domis, translated again (without access to the original text) back into the English by Nicholas Royle. Two further recensions of the first text: three recensions of a single work.

Yes, I’m of the school that holds every translation to be a fresh recension. Every translation contains the translator’s idea of the text as well as the original author’s. If you’ve ever read translations of, say, the Greek classics from the 19th century and then compared them to a modern translation, the otherwise-invisible person of the translator becomes visible.

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“The Passenger”
Written by Morgan Gendel and Robert Hewitt Wolfe & Michael Piller
Directed by Paul Lynch
Season 1, Episode 8
Production episode 40511-409
Original air date: February 21, 1993
Stardate: unknown

Station log: Kira and Bashir are returning from a medical mission in a runabout. Kira makes the mistake of complimenting Bashir on his work, which leads to Bashir saying he can’t hear Kira over the sound of how awesome he is. Kira’s snotty reply is cut off by a distress call. They respond to it and find a woman unconscious. Bashir revives her; she says that the pilot’s dead. She’s transporting a prisoner, who sabotaged the ship. Bashir tries to treat him, but he dies—after grabbing Bashir’s throat and saying, “Make me live.”

They return to Deep Space 9, where Bashir treats the woman, who identifies herself as Ty Kajada from Kobliad security, and the dead prisoner as Rao Vantika. She insists on checking the corpse, as Vantika has faked his own death more than once. Even after examining the body herself, she then stabs it in the heart, just to be sure. She’s been chasing him for twenty years, and she is cynical to say the least.

[Tricorders...very accurate with living people, not so accurate with dead ones.]

Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column co-curated by myself and the inestimable Brit Mandelo, and dedicated to doing exactly what it says in the header: shining a light on the some of the best and most relevant fiction of the aforementioned form.

Last time I directed the Short Fiction Spotlight, we discussed two terrific novelettes in which image was everything. Both were nominated for a Nebula. By now, the winners of that award—and all the others on the roster, obviously—will have been announced, and much as I might have liked to look at those this week, these columns aren’t researched, written, submitted, formatted and edited all on the morning of.

So what I thought I’d do, in the spirit of keeping the Nebula news alive a little longer, was turn to a pair of tales whose authors were honoured in 2012 instead. To wit, we’ll touch on “What We Found” by Geoff Ryman in short order, but let’s begin this edition of the Short Fiction Spotlight with a review of “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu.

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“Read My Lips”
Story by Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves
Teleplay by Joe R. Lansdale
Directed by Boyd Kirkland
Episode #064
Music Composed by Shirley Walker
Animation by Tokyo Movie Shinsha Co.
Original Airdate—May 10^th, 1992

Plot: Batman discovers the mastermind behind a string of perfectly planned heists is a ventriloquism dummy, Scarface

[Evil doll and evil dolls]

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: promises are made to be broken. In truth, trust exists to be tested.

We’re often called upon to give our word, for what it’s worth, but keeping it is never so simple. Of course it can be done, and indeed, we should endeavour to honour as many of the bonds we form as possible. But sometimes, circumstances arise; unavoidable, inescapable circumstances that require us to behave badly in service of the greater good. To do something we have sworn not to, or say what someone else would rather we wouldn’t.

I’m sure I sound like someone with a guilty conscience, and perhaps I am. I’d argue that we all are, to a greater or lesser extent. Thankfully, the consequences of betraying a vow in our world are in nothing compared to what we’d face if we came from Kharein, the capital city of Darhan.

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