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]

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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Space.

The final frontier?

For now, that searching question stands an unfortunate fact. We want to know more, of course, but there is no clear need for the revelations we may or may not gain from our desired endeavours, or none that we can easily see.

And so we wait, painfully aware that—even if the Powers That Be see reason—we are lamentably unlikely to see a man on Mars in our lifetimes.

Maybe our children will. I want that for them.

But neither you nor I nor they, in their day, will find out what awaits on the other side of the interstellar space NASA’s lonely Voyager probe is on track to chart; the odds are simply not in our favour, I’m afraid. But we can wonder, can’t we? We can imagine. We can read and write and damn it, we can dream.

So for the foreseeable future, space may indeed be the final frontier in fact, but fiction, by its very definition, need not be held back by what is. Instead, its pioneers ask: what if? And occasionally, incredibly, what if is what is.

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My standard spoiler warning for this series: Antiagon Fire is the seventh novel in L.E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Imager Portfolio series, and the fourth one following the adventures of Quaeryt Rytersyn. The first three novels in the series had a different protagonist and were set in the same fictional world but several centuries after the events portrayed in the Quaeryt novels.

In other words, you may want to stop reading this review if you haven’t at least read the first three Quaeryt novels: Scholar, Princeps and Imager’s Battalion. If you’d like a refresher, you can find my reviews of those novels here, here and here. (You can also find my look at the initial Imager trilogy here.)

So, in summary: if you’re not familiar with this series yet, please check it out because it’s excellent—but stop reading this review here to avoid spoilers.

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Before we start I want to say this about Star Trek Into Darkness: I’ve seen it in both 3D and 2D, and I urge you not to waste your money on a 3D ticket. Seriously, there is nothing in this movie that requires 3D, and it does bupkuss to enhance the experience.

Mind you, this movie is a visual feast, but 3D doesn’t really add anything to the feast except for maybe that piece of parsley that is used as a garnish that you throw away and never eat.

Enough of the tortured food metaphor. I went into STID with very low expectations. As I’ve said in the past, Star Trek is not at its best in movie format, especially in our post-Star Wars world where science fiction movie must equal BIG-ASS ’SPLOSIONS! in order make its box office requirements. At its best, Trek is about the exploration of the human condition, something not remotely on display in either of J.J. Abrams’s films. I figured we’d get what we got four years ago: a visual feast (as long as you don’t mind lens flares), excellent acting, and a script that doesn’t hold together upon scrutiny. My expectations were, sadly, met.

If you want a spoiler-free review, Tor.com’s own Chris Lough wrote an excellent one here. For this review THERE BE SPOILERS HERE!!!! LOTS OF ’EM!

[I was only gone for one day!]

The third and final installment of Chris Moriarty’s Spin Trilogy, Ghost Spin, releases at the end of May—nearly seven years after the initial release of Spin Control, itself the brilliant follow-up to her debut novel, Spin State. In much the same way that the second book differed significantly from the first in tone, focus, and structure, Ghost Spin is an ambitious attempt to once again provide a fresh angle on this universe and its problems—this time with space pirates, fractured AIs, and a desperate two-pronged search for answers to questions that are at first personal, but are ultimately the force that will shift the direction of the future.

The story revolves primarily around Catherine Li and Cohen, with the addition of other narrators, including ex-Navy captain, now-pirate William Llewellyn. In the opening chapter, Cohen is trapped on a backwater planet recently taken over by the UN—and, as a security team closes in on him, he commits suicide. His component parts are auctioned off almost instantly, as is the usual procedure for decoherent AIs; however, he’s left a trail of clues for Li, and the only hope for what he was trying to do, to save, is that she’ll find and pursue them. Li herself, without Cohen’s protection, is also in plenty of danger—from Nguyen, from the Syndicates demanding her extradition, and elsewhere. The question of what Cohen was up to, as well as how she can finish the job and put him back together, drives Li to make a series of dangerous and significant decisions that might alter the course of humanity’s future.

[A review.]

Regardless of whether you’re a casual summer blockbuster moviegoer or a long-time Star Trek fan, you’ll find that Star Trek Into Darkness pitches straight down the middle. You can jump into it not knowing anything about Trek and still fully enjoy the characters, environments, and story, although there are elements within that story that will resonate deeply with Trek fans.

But just because the gang’s all here doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s Star Trek.

[A spoiler-free review of Star Trek Into Darkness]

This is a novel about a time-travelling serial killer from the 1930s, his victims, the girl who survived him, and a burned-out murder-beat journalist. It’s competently, even excellently, written, makes brilliant use of a non-linear narrative to create and build tension, wears its American Literature influences proudly on its sleeve—

And for me, despite its technical competence, The Shining Girls is ultimately a frustrating mess of a novel, one whose climax falls apart under the weight of nested paradoxes.

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For a long time now I have been afraid of Sofia Samatar's fiction. Knowing the effect her poetry has had on me—in Goblin Fruit, in Stone Telling, in Strange Horizons—I have trembled at the thought of allowing her words any deeper purchase on my psyche. Given her ability to incapacitate me with a few well-turned stanzas, what havoc might she wreak with a whole novel?

Through some terrible and wonderful magic, A Stranger in Olondria has anticipated these fears and commented on them. With characteristic wit, poise, and eloquence, Samatar delivers a story about our vulnerability to language and literature, and the simultaneous experience of power and surrender inherent in the acts of writing and reading.

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The Doctor had a full house for this episode: the Cybermen came back, and Warwick Davis was one of the special guest stars, so... did “Nightmare in Silver” do as promised? Did Neil Gaiman make the Cybermen scary again? Did the Cybermen need to be scary again?

And why do those things on everyone’s faces look like Borg implants?

[I can beat you in three moves.]

Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee is a terrifying collection of short stories to review. The stories themselves are rarely scary in the traditional sense, but their individual complexity and astonishing level of variety make this an impossible book to encompass in just a few paragraphs.

It’s not that there aren’t any hooks or approaches; it’s more that there is such a bewildering number of them that, as a reader or reviewer, you feel somewhat like you’ve wandered onto a hitherto undiscovered island full of skittery, unfamiliar species that keep turning out to be something else than what you initially expected. More than a review, Conservation of Shadows needs its own monograph. Towards a Taxonomy of Yoon Ha Lee’s Short Fiction, maybe.

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You ask me, we spend an inordinate amount of our lives wondering what the meaning of life might be.

Yes, it’s a crucial question, and I’m as ready as the next person to find the answer at last. But I do wonder if we aren’t wasting our time thinking along these lines, because the meaning of life must be different for every living thing. Better to ask, instead, what it means to be human; to consider what makes us different from the primates we were, and everything else on Earth in turn.

Being human is all we know, of course, so it’s hard to tell... to guess what sets us apart from (if not necessarily above) all creatures great and small. Love is a lovely answer, but other animals clearly have that capacity. Our ability to appreciate beauty is another easy idea, but who can say with anything resembling certainty that sheep aren’t also in awe of this wonderful world?

I may be in no position to unpack these mysteries, yet I’d suggest that a large part what makes us us is our unending quest to discover thus. That wondering what it means to be human, as Matt Haig does in his first narrative since The Radleys, may indeed be what makes the human experience unique.

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I’ve often heard Climbers described as the least fantastical of M. John Harrison’s novels, and so it is, looked at in a particularly literal light—I espied no spaceships, I’m afraid, and there isn’t a single sentient bomb in sight—yet this reading is as wrong as it is right.

Climbers is certainly less overtly otherworldly than the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, and it has none of The Centauri Device’s spare spacefaring. Indeed, it takes place almost entirely in the north of England in the eighties, but do not be so easily deceived: Climbers is far from absent alien environs.

The Andean landscapes [...] had a curious central equivocality: black ignimbrite plains above Ollague like spill from some vast recently abandoned mine: the refurbished pre-Inca irrigation canals near Machu Picchu, indistinguishable from mountain streams. Half-seen outlines, half-glimpsed possibilities; and to set against them, a desperate clarity of the air.

This is the work of a bona fide stylist, reminiscent of recent Christopher Priest, or China Mieville at his most memorable, and even here in his most mainstream text to date Harrison imbues his landscapes—though they are real rather than imagined—with such bizarre and startling qualities that you’d be forgiven for thinking Climbers is science fiction.

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At the end of The Avengers, we watched Tony Stark prove Captain America wrong—after getting torn down for being unwilling to make sacrifices for others, Iron Man sped through a black hole to save the Earth from certain destruction. Unfortunately, what Stark told Captain Rogers during the course of the film was true, at least from his perspective; he’s not a soldier.

So how does someone who is not a soldier recover from having a soldier’s experience, which is essentially what Tony has been doing since he got hit by wayward shrapnel in Afghanistan? That is what Iron Man 3 attempts to answer—and what it finds is what precisely separates Tony Stark from all other superheroes of his ilk.

[Making demons...]

Being the sort of fan who has been dying for an episode set on the TARDIS for years now, the latest offering from Camp Who was something of a treat. We’re no closer to unraveling Clara’s mystery, but now we have officially seen the swimming pool (and it is thankfully no longer in the library). On the other hand, if big shiny reset buttons upset you, this episode was likely not your cuppa.

[“So we’re not doing hugging, I get that now!”]

It’s 1976, and the rule of the Roman Catholic Church is absolute. A stable theocracy prevails across Europe. The Reformation never happened. A papal crusade prevented Henry VIII from taking the throne. Martin Luther became Pope Germanian I. The Church is in charge of all aspects of life, from government and culture all the way down to personal relationships.

Ten year old Hubert Anvil is an incredibly gifted soprano, but as puberty approaches, his voice will break, inevitably destroying his ability to sing in the higher registers. Hubert’s superiors are considering an “alteration”: removing the offending parts of his anatomy before hormones ravage his angelical voice….

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Faith Erin Hicks (of Tor.com fame) and Prudence Shen’s new graphic novel, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, has a bit of everything: nerds, jocks, robots, friendship, drama, and, of course, wanton destruction. It is essentially everything you could want out of a high school story, and perhaps a little bit that you didn’t realize you wanted.

The story begins with a scenario we have, at this point, all encountered in some way or another: a text message break-up. Charlie—the protagonist and gentle, well-meaning basketball star—is in shock. After all, by the natural order of things, he is supposed to be dating the head of the cheerleading squad, but instead, he is being whisked away by his next-door neighbor and childhood best friend, Nate, and harangued for something he has no control over. In fact, Charlie doesn’t have control over much in his life; his parents are divorced and emotionally distant, his closest friend is a lunatic, and now—well, now he’s single.

[Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong… right?]

Lucius Shepard’s new collection Five Autobiographies and a Fiction is required reading for fans of the author. People who have never read anything by Shepard may love it too, but because of the specific nature of this set of stories, it’ll definitely have more impact on readers who are familiar with the author. If that's you, I’d go as far as saying that this is nothing less than a must-read, because it will dramatically change and enrich your understanding of the author and his works.

As the title of this new collection indicates, Shepard approaches aspects of his own life and personality from five different directions.  Calling these stories “autobiographies” is as meaningful as it is deceptive. “Pseudo-autobiographies” or even “meta-autobiographies” would be more appropriate, but it’s understandable why Shepard and Subterranean Press avoided those horrible mouthfuls.

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Generations hence, it’s entirely possible that people will revere 2013 as the year of Sarah Pinborough. She’s been absolutely everywhere of late—the first of her modern-day fairytales, Poison, was published just this month, merely a few weeks after North America’s introduction to The Forgotten Gods in A Matter of Blood—and that trend looks to continue for the foreseeable future: Ace Books plan to release the remainder of said supernatural noir trilogy before Christmas. Meanwhile, Poison will promptly be joined by Charm and Beauty too.

And then there’s Mayhem. Mayhem, which I enjoyed more than any of the Sarah Pinborough I’ve had the pleasure of reading previously. It’s a moody whodunit with an horrific twist, set in London during Jack the Ripper’s red reign. But this is essentially atmospheric set dressing: Mayhem revolves around another real life serial killer, namely the Thames Torso Murderer, and the factual figures who set out to apprehend him, or her... or it, as the case may be.

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