In the animal kingdom, order is everything.

Absent order, chaos would surely consume the many and various creatures who live in and around Murder’s Field, for instance. Imagine the madness of the grain harvest without someone to make sure the quails wait their turn! Consider those small souls who would go hungry because of the gluttony of others!

Luckily, that’s where the crow king comes in. For generations—ever since the war of the wolves—he and his black-feathered forefathers have upheld a system of sharing and, to a certain extent, caring. Under his watchful eye, an order of sorts is imposed. Rabbits, badgers, rats and mice alike are all subject to his commands from on high, in an ornate nest in a great tree at the centre of this field.

But now, the crow king is dead.

And at the outset of Lupus Rex, there is a very real reckoning ahead...

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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.

Already a familiar refrain, right?

Alas, this is the last time you’ll read it, because beginning this week, things are going to be different. Only a little, admittedly: news and new releases from the United Kingdom’s thriving speculative fiction industry will still be the focus of the Focus, of course, but going forward, we’re going to be splitting the two components of the column in its current form into posts of their own.

The news will still be a weekly treat each Wednesday. The new releases, however, will be a fortnightly proposition from this point on. It’s not yet set in stone, but let’s say every second Sunday. This means that the British Genre Fiction Focus will be rather more manageable for all involved. Plus, new books will have their own spotlight to shine in; their own space for discussion and such.

Got that?

Good. Then let’s get to the new and improved news. This week, it’s YA all the way! The last Waterstones Children’s Laureate has criticised the mainstream media for turning a blind eye to new releases for younger readers, whilst the latest Laureate outlines her plans for the future of literature for littles. In Cover Art Corner, we consider Katya’s War, and finally, an article from the Guardian examines gender segregation by way of the colours of the covers of the books our wee ones are taught to want.

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According to his former (and self-described) widow-in-waiting, Iain Banks passed away “without pain” yesterday, just two months after publically announcing his own impending death in early April. At that time, he admitted it was extremely unlikely he’d live beyond a year, but we all hoped he’d have that long at least.

The bad news broke about 24 hours ago, and I still can’t get my head around how sudden it seemed. We knew what was coming, of course, but as I write, I’m realising that hasn’t made his passing any easier to deal with.

What has softened the blow, if only a little, is knowing that I’m not alone in feeling sick to my stomach with sorrow. Touching tributes have been rolling in ever since Adele’s message. They’ve come from a truly huge range of folks, all of whom profess to have been affected by the irreplaceable author and his thirty-odd awesome novels.

So today, rather than documenting the details of his untimely death, I want to take this opportunity to highlight a few of these outpourings of emotion. Who knows... maybe, just maybe, they’ll help you feel a bit better too.

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Sitting down to review Theatre of the Gods this morning, I tried four or five introductions on for size before settling on this artless admission. In one, I wondered about the worth of first impressions; in another, I took to task the formula so much contemporary science fiction follows. I attempted academia; I had a stab at something snappy.

Nothing seemed quite right.

Hours had passed before I realised my mistake, which is to say there is no right way to start discussing M. Sudain’s debut; no single question I could ask, or statement make, which would somehow inform all that follows... because Theatre of the Gods is like nothing else I have ever read.

Large parts of it are certainly reminiscent of novels by an array of other genre authors: I’d name Nick Harkaway, but also Adam Roberts, Ned Beauman, Felix J. Palma and K. J. Parker. At points, Suddain put me in mind of Mark Z. Danielewski, even. So no, it’s not entirely original. Call it a composite, or literary patchwork, perhaps. Yet it’s stitched together with such vision and ambition that it feels completely unique.

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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.

Last week, Jack Vance died.

He wasn’t British, so I won’t spend a long time talking about him in this specific space, but wherever he was born, he was from early on one of genre fiction’s single most significant figures. Speaking personally, his novels moved me more often and in more ways than the entire oeuvre of the vast majority of other authors, and I simply couldn’t bring myself to start this morning’s column without at least raising a glass to the magnificent man.

He will be missed.

His presence, however, will be felt for many years yet.

But the show must go on. And so it shall, with news of the Black Crown Project, the inaugural Geek Fest convention, a revised version of Arthur C. Clarke Award-winner Chris Beckett’s debut, and the winner of the second Terry Pratchett Prize.

There are a fair few new releases to look forward to, too, including Brian Aldiss’ final science fiction novel and the beginning of an exciting new series from Chuck Wendig, alongside short stories by the marvellous Margo Lanagan and a who’s-who of fantasy’s finest.

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After a lamentably uneventful 2012, Stephen King kicks off what looks to be an unusually huge year for fans of the master of modern pop horror with a small but perfectly formed mystery novel. Joyland is the second story King has written for Hard Case Crime, and like The Colorado Kid— which SyFy has since adapted into a reasonably successful TV series that deals with the weird and the wonderful on a weekly basis—it comes complete with throwback cover art and a fantastic, nostalgic narrative.

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There are no gods in This River Awakens, only monsters—and the monsters of this novel are real as its readers. They are fathers, brothers and sons; they are sisters, mothers and lovers; and their lives, like ours, have little meaning. Their destinies are not manifest. Their actions, be they right or wrong, calculated or careless, kind or cruel, won’t change the world. And the river around which Steven Erikson’s indescribably dark debut revolves will run on regardless.

First published in 1998 under a cover bearing Erikson’s given name, Steve Lundin, This River Awakens is far from the sort of narrative you might be inclined to expect from the Byzantine mind behind the ten volumes of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. That said, this novel could have been written by no other author. It bears many of the same traits that made Gardens of the Moon and its many successors such an immense and intense pleasure: the prose is painstaking; the characters incredibly complex; and though its themes lean towards the obscene, there’s a real sweetness to them, equally.

What This River Awakens doesn’t have is a whole lot of plot. Still, we’ve got to give it a shot.

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True fact: words have impact.

As readers, I doubt either you or I would dispute that, yet in the lexicon of Lexicon, the power of applied language is rather more dramatic than we might be inclined to imagine. Indeed, the right word could change the world. How, then, does one determine which phrases will prove most persuasive?

Furthermore, if there are right words, must there not also be wrong ones?

Unravelling these riddles seems simple to begin with. All we need is a meme. A few friendly questions followed by a couple that catch you off guard. For example, are you a cat person or a dog person? What’s your favourite colour? Do you love your family? Why did you do it?

Answer honestly, or not. In any event you reveal a great deal about your particular personality, which is all the knowledge a so-called “poet” needs to build a profile of your psychographic segment.

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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.

We begin this edition with another update from Iain Banks, in the course of discussing which I get distracted—as did the Scottish author—by the idea that The Culture novels he has published with an additional initial were in any way the moneymakers that supported his more mainstream endeavours.

After that, the long overdue release of The Republic of Thieves suddenly seems real, in large part because Scott Lynch has written an exciting blurb for the book. Later on, the year of Sarah Pinborough steps up another gear with a look at the cover art of The Language of Dying—the fifth new novel she’ll release in 2013—and finally, Britain’s biggest bookseller undergoes yet another restructure.

In addition, we look ahead to a neat week in new releases, in which a classic car tells a terrifying tale, the Expanse is embiggened, car-crash survivor Gregory Merrick can’t remember anything, and to top it all off, Walter Bishop takes a trip.

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Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column co-curated by myself and the venerable 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.

Today, we’ve all been invited to the science fiction disco by the inaugural volume of Adventure Rocketship, a moreish new magazine masterminded by prolific critic Jonathan Wright to celebrate genre-oriented essays and short stories both.

We’ll look at two of the latter tales today, namely “Starmen” by Liz Williams and “Between the Notes” by World Fantasy Award winner Lavie Tidhar, but you can find out more about the fascinating first issue here, and place your orders accordingly.

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Having plumbed the depths of the known solar system, explored the various ramifications of the existence of aliens, and exploded a whole bunch of stuff in the interim, James S. A. Corey—a collective pseudonym for co-authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham—shows no sign of slowing down in Abaddon’s Gate, the third volume of the fantastic Expanse saga.

If anything, this is the best book in the series so far, and it’s been a superb series: an accessible, spectacle-heavy space opera with an expanding cast of characters and a massively ambitious narrative. And this time, the depths are even deeper. The ramifications are far grander. And the explosions? There are oh so many more of those.

Abaddon’s Gate picks up a couple of months after the events of Caliban’s War, with the human race in disarray after the recent crisis on Ganymede.

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Here in the UK, there’s no more prestigious prize for literature than the Man Booker, and to no-one’s surprise, British genre fiction fans have made an annual habit of bashing this very visible award for its seemingly superficial dismissal of the innumerable novels we believe to be deserving of such recognition.

I’d like to say rightly so, but if the truth be told... I don’t know. Having only read one of the last batch of shortlisted novels, I don’t feel particularly qualified to pitch in with my personal opinion. I mean, speculative fiction should certainly get a look in, and sometimes it does—Communion Town and The Teleportation Accident were both longlisted in 2012—but is it tenable to suggest a genre novel need be nominated every year? I honestly don’t think so, no.

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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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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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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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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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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.

It’s been another weird year, weather-wise. But with the sun in the skies, and temperatures on the rise, it might just be that summer... is coming.

To celebrate—because any old excuse will do, in truth—a special heated edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, featuring an inferno, a literary sweatshop of sorts, the back of a very angry man, and an account of the passionate (to put it politely) reaction to Charlaine Harris’ last Sookie Stackhouse book.

This week’s new releases are rather less fiery, I’m afraid, with publishers everywhere making way for Dan Brown’s new novel. But nothing stops the Elves, evidently! And as an antidote to Inferno, why not try the third volume of The Dagger and the Coin by genre giant Daniel Abraham?

Let’s get this roast on the road!

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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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