It seems like there’s been an uptick in parallel world tales of late. Perhaps outer space holds less appeal as a new frontier for science fiction; alternate earths, instead, are where the greener fields lie—sometimes literally. Neal Stephenson has produced his own riff on the many-worlds theory in Anathem, and Iain M. Banks’s Transition features a secret organization of “transitionaries,” who slip from one world to the next by temporarily taking over the bodies of inhabitants of each world. Matt Fraction’s comic Casanova is about an assassin yanked out of his own timeline to replace his own alternate self in another as part of a complex, worlds-spanning espionage scheme. Even Doctor Who has played extensively with parallel worlds and alternate timelines. The latest addition to the genre: The Long Earth, a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

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Most stories of alien-human first contact are founded on the underlying assumption that aliens will actually find the human race interesting enough to engage with. In the worst case (very popular in the largely moribund, overblown genre that is American SF “blockbuster” action film these days), that engagement is military in nature — the aliens in these scenarios having apparently decided that blowing us up is worth expending materiel on before they get on with the rest of their nefarious plans for Earth. In the best case, the aliens are friendly and free communication results in good for everyone, thanks to “courageous and dedicated spacemen,” as Ursula K. Le Guin says in her introduction to the new edition of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic.

This assumption is automatically paired with another: that the aliens can communicate at all with humans in a mutually comprehensible fashion. But what if, as Stanislaw Lem imagines in his masterpiece Solaris, the alien beings (or being) is so far removed from human experience as to render any attempts at communication meaningless? Or what if the aliens simply come and go, without even so much as noticing us?

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Back in 2009, I learned about Jack Vance by way of Carlo Rotella’s wonderful New York Times Magazine tribute “The Genre Artist”; intrigued and also somewhat guilty about arriving very late to this particular party, I immediately located and consumed Tales Of the Dying Earth (and accidentally left it on a plane; I hope whoever found it got as much enjoyment out of it as I did). Rotella’s piece appears in Humayoun Ibrahim’s comic book adaptation of “The Moon Moth” as a kind of foreword. If you’re new to Jack Vance, Rotella’s interview combined with Ibrahim’s adaptation should interest you enough to seek out more of his work, and longtime fans will find much to enjoy as well.

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For the last year I’ve been telling everyone who will stand still long enough to listen that if they’ve got any interest in Tudor-era historical fiction, they need to read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. A thoroughly deserving winner of the Booker Prize, Wolf Hall follows the rise of Thomas Cromwell: blacksmith’s son, secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, and after Wolsey’s fall, secretary to King Henry VIII himself. I couldn’t get enough of this beautifully written book, and I’ve been looking forward to the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, out this week, with considerable anticipation.

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The world of The Mongoliad—the Foreworld, as its creators call it—is very much like our own; specifically, in this case, our own as it was in the 13^th century, when the Mongols had invaded much of Eastern Europe and were moving steadily westward. Originally, the story had its genesis in Neal Stephenson wanting to know more about swordfighting, which in turn led to modern practitioners of Western martial arts, the traditions of fighting that predated the Renaissance and the rise of firearms. From these roots The Mongoliad took shape in the hands of Stephenson, Greg Bear, Mark Teppo, E.D. DeBirmingham, Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, and Cooper Mao, and the resulting epic was published in serialized format at mongoliad.com, starting in 2009.

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The epigraph to Stephen Wallenfels’s POD is a famous quote from Ronald Reagan’s September 1987 address to the UN General Assembly — the one that includes the sentence, “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.” It’s fitting; in many ways, POD reminds me of nothing so much as the morbid fantasies of post-nuclear holocaust that my tween friends and I dwelt on too much in the mid-1980s.

The disaster in POD comes in the form of massive black spheres that appear in the skies over the small town of Prosser in Washington State, Los Angeles, and presumably the entire world — spheres that annihilate in a flash of blue light anyone foolish enough to leave the shelter of their homes and buildings. In Prosser, sixteen-year-old Josh is stuck in the house with his father and his dog — who, interestingly, is able to venture outside at will without harm, and who doesn’t seem to hear the terrible shrieking noises that the spheres occasionally make. Meanwhile in LA, twelve-year-old Megs is hiding in the back of her mother’s old Chevy Nova in a hotel parking garage, left there by her mother who was last seen going to a “job interview” in a tight, low-cut dress.

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Las Vegas, sometime in the 1960s. A mysterious casino boss is wagering people’s destinies, possibly even the fate of the universe itself—threatening the very fabric of space and time. The only thing that stands between him and universal destruction is a time-traveling adventurer and his human sidekick…

No, this isn’t a spoiler for the upcoming series of Doctor Who. Nor is it an Inspector Spacetime segment. This was the plot of a recent performance of The Professor—a long-form improv show that’s the brainchild of improvisor and director Justin Davis, currently presented by Gnap! Theatre Projects at Austin’s Salvage Vanguard Theatre and running through April 21. And as you might guess, it’s inspired by the popular, long-running adventures of a certain mad man in a blue box.

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Romance heroes have always had a touch of danger—the rakes with a bad reputation in Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances, for example. Dig further back and you’ll end up at Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, where the heroine triumphs over her kidnapper and would-be rapist by the power of her innocence, virtue, and intelligence. And of course there’s also the classic fairytale of Beauty and the Beast—which, coincidentally, first saw print around the same time as Pamela: another tale in which the goodness of the heroine literally transforms her savage paramour into a handsome prince.

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Is there anything Michael Moorcock hasn’t done? Creator of some of our greatest literary anti-heroes — Elric of Melniboné, Jerry Cornelius, Colonel Pyat. Editor of the seminal New Worlds magazine. Musician. Counter-culture hero. Cosmopolitan resident of London, Paris, and Texas. Friend and correspondent of talents as lasting and varied as Arthur C. Clarke, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin, Mervyn Peake and Maeve Gilmore, Tom Disch, Iain Sinclair, Leigh Brackett, and Brian Aldiss. He’s even written a Doctor Who tie-in novel. Somehow, amidst all this activity, he has sustained a prolific journalistic career as an essayist and reviewer.

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If you google “Hunger Games Japan” as I did, you’ll find an endless parade of articles and blogposts directly and indirectly suggesting that Suzanne Collins borrowed from (or less generously, ripped off) Koushun Takami’s novel Battle Royale, often with a list of point-by-point comparisons between the two.

Ultimately, though, that kind of discussion isn’t very productive, leading nowhere but a kind of literary he-said-she-said; and in any case literature and myth are laden with stories of sacrificing youths and maidens to a higher authority. It’s more interesting that each clearly struck a chord in their native countries when they appeared, each becoming a sensation that was quickly adapted to film.

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When a fantasy novel comes along and isn’t set in a pseudo-medieval, Caucasian-populated knockoff of Northern Europe, it’s cause for celebration. When it’s as engaging as Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, it’s even better. Ahmed, whose short stories have been nominated for Nebula and Campbell awards, delivers an excellent debut set in a richly detailed fantasy world that owes more to The One Thousand and One Nights than to Tolkien, and is very much the better for it.

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Do you remember a guy that’s been
In such an early song…

So asks David Bowie at the beginning of “Ashes to Ashes.” That guy, of course, is Major Tom, the lost astronaut hero of “Space Oddity,” and when Scary Monsters was released in 1980, much had changed in the 11 years since the major had originally gone floating ‘round his tin can. 

1980: the beginning of the Me Decade. Bowie might have been announcing its arrival in his song “Up the Hill Backwards”: “the vacuum created by the arrival of freedom.” Ronald Reagan was elected that year, and Margaret Thatcher had been Prime Minister of Great Britain for a year. Ridley Scott had just released Alien the year before, and he was two years away from Blade Runner. AIDS had not yet entered public consciousness; its emergence was a year away. Look back at 1980 with the clarity of hindsight and you’ll find dark currents under bright colors: a tangle of ideological warfare, Cold War anxiety, dystopian murmurings, hints of looming doom behind photogenic smiles.

Enter Scary Monsters.

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My first encounter with William Gibson was neatly printed on the flap of an envelope, a letter from my friend Colin. We had a habit of inscribing epigraphs on our letters to each other—this was 1990, three years before I had my first real email address—and on one letter he copied out the famous opening sentence of Neuromancer, a vivid piece of imagery that digital cable has rendered nearly as quaint as the paper letter it adorned: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

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“We should warn you that over the next 6 minutes we’ll hear Terry Pratchett talk of this dark subject the way he writes: with gallows humor and the occasional profanity.”

Thus did NPR’s Steve Inskeep introduce his August 11 interview with Sir Terry Pratchett on the subject of legalized assisted suicide, an issue in which Pratchett has become heavily invested following the “embuggerance,” as his 2007 Alzheimer’s diagnosis shall forever be known. I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever heard a warning for “gallows humor” used as an introduction to anything on Morning Edition, or anywhere else for that matter. To Pratchett’s admirers, that humor is one of the man’s great qualities, along with his beautifully transparent prose and usefully cynical, yet surprisingly optimistic worldview.

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The planet of Umayma, introduced by Kameron Hurley in her novel God’s War and revisited now in Infidel, is a pretty terrible place — blighted by pollution, roasted by a sun so intense that failing to cover up properly for a few hours all but guarantees skin cancer, and ravaged by a generations-long war between the two major powers of Nasheen and Chenja, a war that continues to decimate the male population of both nations. Nasheenian society is run by women, but no gentler for that — the queen is ruthless, and the bel dames, female government-funded assassins, are even more so. Despite the rigors, it’s a world of strange wonders as well. Light, power, and medicine are provided through the pheremone-based manipulation of insects by men and women known as magicians. Some people have the power to change their physical shape — into dogs or birds, or, it’s claimed, even stranger things. Organs are bought and sold like any other commodity — God’s War begins by offhandedly informing the reader that “Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert.” And the powers of some magicians are strange indeed, and may even extend to the raising of the dead.

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The twenty-second-century world of Neal Asher’s The Departure (currently available in the U.K. only) is a totalitarian hellhole. Earth’s population has exploded to an unmanageable 18 billion, a heaving mass of humanity overseen by a nominally socialist government which naturally restricts much of the wealth and power to its own upper echelons. Human life is cheap, offensive weaponry is positively diabolical, and dark plans involving concentration camps and laser satellites are in the works to trim off a surplus 12 billion from the population — especially the ZAs, or Zero Assets, which basically includes anyone too poor or too troublesome to be worth saving. A Mars colony exists, but it’s hanging by a thread, and is about to be effectively abandoned by the Earth government.

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Back in August 2008 (aeons in internet time), Jo Walton linked to “Fresh SF Futures I” on Rudy Rucker’s blog. If you read that, you got a sneak preview of some of the ideas at work in his new novel Jim and the Flims. Magic doors, subdimensional worlds smaller than the Planck length, and the afterworld are all here, and lots more besides.

On the other side of death and within every electron in existence lies the Flimsy, the afterworld not just of humanity, but of every sentient species. There are a septillion souls in the Flimsy; some are just passing through, while others are there to stay, alongside the native creatures of the place. Some of the natives are sentient souls born there to the ghosts who have stayed, but there are also strange beings native to the Flimsy: colorful, beet-shaped jivas and blue, baboon-like yuels.

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Welcome to Astronaut Academy! There are classes in dinosaur driving, speaking in run-on sentences, and advanced heart studies (in Legend of Zelda fashion, you start off with one or two, but can acquire up to eight). The faculty includes an elf, a panda (still not extinct!), and a principal who carries a gigantic Final Fantasy-style sword as a “symbol of instructional excellence.” There are anti-gravity drills and games of Fireball—and there are also parent-teacher nights, best frenemies, adolescent crushes, and some kids who just don’t quite fit in.

Pretty typical middle-school, wouldn’t you say?

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Whether they realize it or not, old university friends Hutch, Luke, Dom, and Phil have broken all the rules—the rules of horror movies, that is. Despite the fact that Dom and Phil are blatantly physically unfit, they’ve set off on an ambitious hike through the Swedish wilderness. They didn’t call ahead to the forest rangers to let them know where they were. They’re all trying to ignore the fact that single, aimless, temperamental Luke really only gets on with the ever-affable Hutch and is now completely alienated from the married-with-children Dom and Phil. After Phil’s feet end up blistered into mincemeat and Dom hurts his knee, they decide the best way back to civilization is to take a shortcut off the trail and through the forest. And when they come across the grotesquely disemboweled corpse of an animal that's been very deliberately strung up in the trees, they still don’t turn around and go back the way they came in, despite the fact that the forest is getting thicker and more impassable by the yard. No, they keep going into the forest all the same.

Given all this, which goes down in the first dozen pages, it hardly counts as a spoiler to state that things go horribly, dreadfully wrong for this hapless foursome.

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Over the past year or so, the presence of Doctor Who in the Tor.com offices has grown massively. New writers have come in with a pre-existing love for the show and others have discovered just what it was they were missing. The end result being an office that will talk at length about anything Who-related.

When the news came on Tuesday of Elisabeth Sladen’s passing, we stopped cold. This was Sarah Jane Smith, vibrant and indomitable, how could she be gone?

To say Sladen was adored is an understatement, and we simply couldn’t stay silent in this regard. Below the cut, you’ll find tributes to Elisabeth Sladen gathered from the staff and contributors here at Tor.com, here to share their own memories and thoughts on the lovely Ms. Sladen.

Forever our Sarah Jane.

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