May 15, 2013
The Button Man and the Murder Tree
An all-new Wild Cards story
May 14, 2013
Shall We Gather
When one world brushes another, asking the right question can be magic…
May 8, 2013
Fire Above, Fire Below
The dragon below our city has died. What is to be done?
May 7, 2013
We Have Always Lived On Mars
They've never seen the sky. Or the sun. Or the stars. Or the moons.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for May.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for April.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for March.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for February.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for October 2012.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for September.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for August.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for July.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for June.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for May.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for April.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
Here’s the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for March.
For over a decade, Barnes & Noble buyer Jim Killen has been a driving force behind Barnes & Noble’s science fiction and fantasy sections. Each month on Tor.com, Mr. Killen curates a list of science fiction & fantasy titles, sometimes focused on upcoming titles and sometimes focused on a theme.
We just finished exploring Military Science Fiction in January. Now check out the Barnes & Noble science fiction and fantasy picks for February.
Military Science Fiction hasn’t always been my go-to Speculative Fiction subgenre. I liked it, sure, but I was more often drawn to Epic Fantasy with toe-dips into Urban Fantasy, New Weird, Space Opera to name a few. Over the past year or so, I’ve been gravitating to Military SF for reasons I can’t quite explain, maybe the space battles, perhaps a yearning for something to fill the post-Battlestar Galactica hole, but for whatever reason, I’ve read quite a few of them in the past year. One series I’ve seen discussed over the past year, in my internet circles, is Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series. Maybe because the first six-book series recently completed and is receiving release in the UK through Titan books this year, or maybe because a new ‘sequel’ series was launched this year with Dreadnaught – including a “promotion” from Mass Market Paperback to Hardcover. These things tell me Jack Campbell has been doing good things with the series. Reading Dreadnaught earlier in the year gave me an inkling those things were right. What finally convinced me was reading Dauntless, the first Lost Fleet novel.
Today’s Barnes & Noble Bookseller’s Pick is The Complete Hammer’s Slammers, Volume 1 by David Drake. In appreciation, enjoy this introduction to the second volume of The Complete Hammer’s Slammers by Tor Books editor David Hartwell (this originally appeared on the Baen Book website):
Any fiction that portrays war in SF, since the 1960s, has generally been eliminated from the leading ranks unless it is entirely dedicated to the proposition that war is, in Isaac Asimov’s phrase, the last refuge of the incompetent. All military SF became suspect in the 1970s, and most of it was rejected by major portions of the serious readers of literate SF, as advocating war. This was evident at Robert A. Heinlein’s famous guest of honor speech at MidAmericon in Kansas City in 1976, at which he was publicly booed for stating that war was a constant in world history, and that there was every indication that there would continue to be war in the future. At least since that time, much of the literary SF community has unfortunately failed to distinguish portrayal of war from advocacy of war, or to be interested in examining military SF. The literary community even tends to avoid the authors at convention parties. The only leading writer to overcome this has been Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War, and a majority of his fiction since has not been military SF. And so those authors hang out with their own crew, usually the Baen crew, mostly at conventions in the midwestern and southeastern US, where they are not so easily marginalized.
Today’s Barnes & Noble Bookseller’s Pick is Legion of the Damned by William C. Dietz. We hope you enjoy this excerpt from the novel, but first, here’s a note from the editor:
Many a year ago (1991, approximately), an Ace author named William Dietz who had been writing some pretty neat mid-list science fiction adventure novels (with protagonists graduated from the Han Solo School of Charming Rogues), wanted to step up his game. A military vet and a student of military history, he pitched the idea of a series detailing the exploits of the French Foreign Legion of the far-future, one in which some of the Legionnaires were no longer completely human—and some were not human at all. The setting was an intricately-realized universe, with as much attention paid to the politics “back home” as the fighting at the “front”. There were multiple viewpoints, shifting settings, and characters who were all shades of grey. And he proposed basing some of the stories on famous Legion campaigns of the past. It was one of the most detailed, well-thought out, lengthiest proposals that I had ever seen. I was suitably impressed. We did a deal, moved him from the mid-list to Feature Release status, then eventually into hardcover, and in 2011 (twenty years later) published A Fighting Chance, the novel that completed the story arc begun in Legion of the Damned. A terrific run for a terrific series! (Bill, however, just can’t quit universe—this year, Ace will publish the first of a trilogy of Legion prequel novels. Look for Andromeda’s Fall, in December!)
In the early ‘70’s, Ginjer Buchanan moved from Pittsburgh, PA. to New York City where she made her living as a social worker, while doing free-lance editorial work. In 1984, she took a job as an editor at Ace Books. She has been promoted several times. Her current title is Editor-in-Chief, Ace/Roc Books. In her spare time, she watches far too much television, evidenced by the fact that she wrote a Highlander tie-in novel titled White Silence, and has also had “pop culture” essays included in the third Buffy, The Vampire Slayer episode guide, in Finding Serenity (a collection about Firefly) and in A Taste of True Blood.
War is a tough thing to tell a story about. Like all extreme scenarios, it tends towards polarization. It’s either a glorious affair of flashing sabers and burnished medals a la Alexander Nevsky or it’s a meat grinder that chews up promising young men and turns them into shrieking red mist long before they can realize their potential (Platoon, All’s Quiet on the Western Front). Warfighters are either steel-eyed heroes (The Illiad) or adolescent killers (Generation Kill).
The tough truth? Wars are both glorious and horrible. The men and women who fight them are both heroes and villains, frequently at the same time. Military science fiction struggles just as mightily as literary fiction to wrap its arms around the complexity of what motivates people to step into what is arguably the most harrowing crucible a human can experience.
After a mysterious explosion annihilates the University of Central Florida, the world is in an uproar. After believing it was a terrorist attack, the U.S. government soon discovers that it was actually a scientific experiment gone horribly wrong. Now there’s a crater where the high energy physics building once stood, and a whole lot of unanswered questions. It gets even weirder when the black globe hanging in the middle of the crater starts spitting out alien bugs. And that’s before they discover the other portals popping up all over the place, each opening to…somewhere else. Now the Earth is being invaded by aliens, and they’re not at all friendly.
Who do you call? William Weaver, the world’s most awesome physicist, that’s who. With a poker hand’s worth of Ph.D.s and the athletic build of a young god, he’ll outthink and quite possibly outfight the problem. If that fails…well, he’ll think of something.
Sometimes, you want to read pure fluff. The Kris Longknife books stand in the same relation to the military SF subgenre as a whole as candyfloss does to steak and potatoes, or as — to take a recent example in a different subgenre — Dante Valentine does to War for the Oaks.
You might think I’m going out of my way to make inflammatory statements. I promise you, that’s far from my intention. I love fluff. I devour the stuff. I have, as one might say, a sweet tooth. And Kris Longknife provides a very appealing style of fluff.
[In which your faithful correspondent inflames some more...]
Any series whose hook starts with “Napoleonic wars…IN SPACE” has potential, but when the rest is “fought by a kickass woman with a telempathic cat” I knew I was in for a rollicking good time. On Basilisk Station, and indeed the entire Honor Harrington series by David Weber, never fails to make me thrill with wonder and delight as I tear through the books – and then, later, as I digest it, to think of all the sociological philosophy he snuck in while I wasn’t looking! I certainly absorbed it as I read, but it didn’t hit me immediately. I was much more concerned with whether Honor’s spaceship would actually fall apart mid-battle, or her crew would betray her, or the Empire that I was beginning to love would be torn apart. Afterwards, when I caught my breath, I had time to look back and marvel at the depth and breadth of the issues Weber started to tackle.
