The eponymous hero of The Red Knight by Miles Cameron is the leader of a mercenary army that’s just returning to Alba after fighting a campaign abroad. His identity and even his real name are a mystery to most: there are hints throughout the novel, and eventually you’ll have a good idea of who he is, but for the most part he simply goes by “Red Knight” or “Captain” and deflects any questions about his origins.

He and his company are now on their way to Lissen Carak, the site of an ancient and heavily fortified convent whose surrounding farms have recently been subjected to attacks by a creature from the Wild. The Abbess, unable to secure protection from the distant King’s court, hires the Red Knight’s company to root out the source of the attacks. Little do either the Abbess or the Red Knight know that this engagement will turn out to be much longer, bloodier, and more important than they originally bargained for—not only to the convent but to the entire realm...

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Imager’s Battalion is the sixth novel in L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s Imager Portfolio series, and the third one focusing on the life and times of Quaeryt, after Scholar and Princeps. The initial three novels (Imager, Imager’s Challenge and Imager’s Intrigue) had a different protagonist and were also set hundreds of years after Quaeryt’s time, which is, for this author, a typical shift in chronology.

All this to say that this is a review about the sixth book in an ongoing series. If you haven’t read at least the first two Quaeryt novels (and ideally all five preceding novels), you may want to stop reading this review at the end of this paragraph and instead check out my review of Scholar, because it’s hard not to include plot spoilers for earlier books when you’re reviewing a novel like this one. In summary: for readers who are new to the series: it’s excellent, you should absolutely read it, but stop reading here if you want to avoid spoilers.

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Sister Maryam lives on Onewēre, a small island in the Pacific chosen by the Apostles of the Lamb after the Tribulation destroyed life on Earth as we know it. The people of Onewēre lead their lives according to the religion of the Apostles and unquestioningly follow their Rules. Part of this means that indigenous girls entering womanhood are sometimes chosen to live in the Star of the Sea, the Holy City that’s located on a huge ship stranded nearby, where they are allowed to serve the Apostles directly. When young Sister Maryam finally makes the crossing, she quickly learns that life in the Holy City is very different from what she expected, and the beliefs she has held all her life are shaken to the core.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s already almost been three years since Kage Baker’s untimely death. She was an immensely talented storyteller and one of my favorite authors of the last few decades. In the short time between her first published story (1997’s “Noble Mold”) and her death in 2010, Kage produced a truly impressive amount of fiction: over a dozen novels across several genres (including the Company series, still my favorite time travel epic in the history of SF) and an amazing number of short stories, novelettes and novellas.

Most of Kage’s wonderful and wonderfully prolific output has by now been published in one form or another, but it turns out that some of her works-in-progress were left unfinished. Kage’s sister Kathleen Bartholomew has completed one of these, and thanks to Subterranean Press it’s now available: Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea.

[What becomes of illusions?]

Who better to interview a living legend than another living legend? “Talking with Tom” is the first installment of a new Tor.com series in which Tor publisher Tom Doherty chats with one of the many authors whose careers he helped launch and shape.

Tom Doherty has been a central figure in genre publishing for decades. He is the founder, President and Publisher of Tom Doherty Associates, which publishes books under the Tor, Forge, Orb, Tor Teen and Starscape imprints. Tor Books, which he founded more than three decades ago, has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher every single year since 1988.

L.E. Modesitt Jr. is one of science fiction and fantasy’s bestselling and most prolific authors. He is best known for his long-running Recluce series, but has also written a large number of other series and standalone novels. Tor just published Mr. Modesitt’s sixtieth (!) novel, Princeps, earlier this year, and Imager’s Battalion, the next novel in his current Imager Portfolio series, is due out in January.

Please enjoy this fascinating conversation between Tom and Lee, two of the biggest names in science fiction and fantasy, each with multiple decades of experience in the field. Or, as Tom says at one point: “Boy, we go back a ways, don’t we?”

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There are many possible reasons I pick books to read and review. I always like giving debuts a try. Conversely, I have a long list of favorite authors I’ll read almost anything by. A plot summary that promises some depth and/or innovation usually works. Sometimes a good cover illustration will even pull me in. But my favorite reason of all to pick an unfamiliar book from the stack is a plot summary that’s so, well, so plain weird that I couldn’t possibly turn it down.

A perfect example of this is Mark Hodder’s newest novel A Red Sun Also Rises, which, in addition to the grin-inducing Hemingway-by-way-of-Chtulhu title, also features a synopsis that adds a whole new level of weird with every new paragraph.

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At the start of Brandon Sanderson’s latest novella The Emperor’s Soul, Emperor Ashravan has just barely survived an assassination attempt. He’s alive thanks to his healers’ skills, but his mind has been wiped completely. The ruling Arbiters have managed to keep the fact that their Emperor has become a vegetable secret, thanks to the hundred day solitary mourning period he is expected to maintain for the death of his wife, the Empress, who died in the same attack. However, once that period runs out, it will become clear that the Emperor is no longer able to rule, and the power in the Empire will inevitably change hands....

It’s therefore an incredibly happy coincidence that the Empire has recently captured Shai, a master Forger with the magical ability to re-create and change objects and even people. Even though Forging is considered an abomination by the Empire, the Arbiters are left with little choice and set a bold plan in motion: they will force their prisoner to attempt the impossible and Forge a new soul for the Emperor, before the rest of the world finds out what happened...

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Where do they keep coming from? Over the last handful of weeks I’ve read and reviewed Near + Far by Cat Rambo, At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson and Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand—three new collections of short stories, all from small presses, all by female authors, and all superb. And then, just when I think it can’t get any better, along comes Karin Tidbeck’s debut collection Jagannath, which may just be the best one of the bunch. If you take into account that this is Tidbeck’s debut collection in English and that it was translated from Swedish to English by the author herself, it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer level of talent on display here.

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There’s a lovely scene in “Errantry,” the title story of Elizabeth Hand’s newest collection of short fiction, in which a character finds a print of a painting she loved as a child and describes what she used to imagine about the world it depicts: “A sense of immanence and urgency, of simple things [...] charged with an expectant, slightly sinister meaning I couldn’t grasp but still felt, even as a kid.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that the same painting graces the cover of the book, because that quote is a perfect way to encapsulate the atmosphere of many of the “Strange Stories” in Errantry. The magic in Elizabeth Hand’s short fiction can usually be found at its edges, just slightly out of reach. It’s there for a moment, but it’s hard to see without squinting. If you blink, it might be gone—but you’d never lose the sense that it’s still there, pushing in on reality from the outside.

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Jamey Barlowe was born on the Moon, but moved back to Earth as an infant following his mother’s tragic death. Because his fragile bones can’t handle Earth’s gravity, Jamey needs a wheelchair to get around, but he has learned to live with his disability and lead a normal teenage life. Then, on his sixteenth birthday, Jamey’s father wakes him up in the middle of the night and sends him back to the Moon to escape a military coup in the United States.

Jamey arrives in the lunar mining colony Apollo with five other refugees, including his kid sister and a young woman who seems to be more than she appears. At first it’s a challenge to start a new life in an unfamiliar environment, but thanks to the lower lunar gravity, Jamey can now walk independently for the first time in his life, so despite everything he flourishes and finds himself taking on new challenges. Meanwhile, tensions on Earth continue to rise, and the lunar colony soon becomes the world’s focus as the new U.S. President sets her sights on the Moon’s crucial He3 reserves...

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Three years after the dramatic events portrayed in Daniel Polansky’s excellent noir fantasy debut Low Town (known as The Straight Razor Cure outside of the U.S.), the Warden is back to doing what he does best: running his slum town territory with equal parts cunning and violence, selling drugs, and frequently dipping into his own stash. He’s still the same grim, cynical man: once a hero of the Great War, then a member of the Black House secret police... and now just an aging minor crime lord with a growing addiction to the drugs he peddles for a living.

As Tomorrow, the Killing gets started, the Warden is summoned by Edwin Montgomery, the celebrated general he once served under. Not too long ago, General Montgomery lost his only son Roland, who briefly became a famous advocate for the countless forgotten veterans of the Great War. Now the general’s only daughter has gone missing in Low Town, looking for clues about her brother’s death. Panicked, the general calls on the one man who knows the dangerous streets of Low Town like the back of his hand....

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Has it really been 25 years since Consider Phlebas, the first novel in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, came out? My goodness. Does this make anyone else feel old at all? Not to worry though: a new novel in this stunning series is always cause for celebration, and in this case doubly so, given that this book is the tenth in the series according to Orbit (including the short story collection The State of the Art, which contains some Culture-related pieces) and marks a quarter century of Culture novels.

Fans have probably already ordered or pre-ordered The Hydrogen Sonata, and for them this review will just be preaching to the choir. Newcomers may be busy trying to decide if this is the time to jump in—and then get to navigate the various theories on What’s the Best Place to Start, given that the internal chronology of the series doesn’t match the publication order and the only aspect most of these novels overtly share is their setting: the benevolent post-scarcity interstellar empire known as the Culture, in which the human inhabitants live in utopian, semi-anarchic bliss managed by immensely powerful artificial intelligences known as Minds. (Number one on my personal list of fictional universes I’d like to live in, by the way.) 

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Trent McCauley is a talented teenager: his main hobby, more an obsession really, is creating movie clips by downloading, remixing and reassembling footage of his favorite actor. Problem is, those movies tend to be copyrighted, which means Trent’s innocuous pasttime involves breaking the law on an ongoing basis. All of this goes well, until it suddenly doesn’t: there’s a knock on the door, and a policeman informs the McCauley family that, because of repeated copyright infringements, their internet access is being terminated for a year, effective immediately.

Now, because of Trent’s harmless hobby, his father can’t do his telecommuting job anymore, his sister can’t do research for her school work, and his mother can’t sign on to get her health benefits. Inadvertently, he’s ruined his family’s lives. Unable to deal with the shame (and the lack of internet access), Trent packs up and leaves his home town of Bradford for London, where he learns to live on the street and gets involved with various artists, anarchists, and activists. Meanwhile, Parliament is busy trying to impose even more far-reaching copyright laws.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s taken until 2012 to get an actual, printed volume of Kij Johnson’s short stories. After all, Kij has been publishing stories for a quarter of a century now, and several of them have won the genre’s highest awards. Yes, there’s a ten year old collection up on Fictionwise, but still, you’d think that someone since then would have managed to collect her best works in print, right? Thank goodness Small Beer Press is here to make things right with At the Mouth of the River of the Bees, a stunning collection of short fiction by one of fantasy’s most talented authors.

Regular Tor.com readers will probably be familiar with Kij Johnson’s name thanks to the unforgettable story “Ponies,” which was originally published here and went on to win the author her second Nebula in 2011. It’s a simple, gut-wrenchingly direct story that’s impossible to erase from your memory once it’s set its claws in you. (Go ahead, read it right now. We’ll wait. It’s probably the single best way to convince you that this is a book you need to read.)

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Cat Rambo has published over a hundred science fiction and fantasy short stories to date, in places like Asimov’s, Weird Tales, and right here on Tor.com. The field of short genre fiction is quite crowded nowadays—which is wonderful, don’t get me wrong—but Cat Rambo’s name always jumps out at me whenever I see it in a Table of Contents. Sure, that’s partly because it’s just such a cool name, but much more because, after reading a few of her stories over the years, I was and still am captivated by her unique voice and imagination.

Because of this, I was thrilled to find out about Near + Far, a brand new collection of Cat Rambo’s short fiction. It’s being released on September 19th by Hydra House, and if you have any interest in SF short stories, this is definitely a book to look out for—not only because the stories contained in it are great, but also because of its gorgeous design.

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Adam was a successful and talented member of the Telepaths’ Guild until his drug habit got him kicked out. Now he works for the Atlanta police department as a consultant and interrogator: after all, a Level Eight Telepath like Adam, who can quite literally get inside a criminal’s head, helps immensely when it comes to extracting confessions. Despite being one of the most successful interrogators on the force, his ongoing struggles with his addiction as well as the mutual distrust between “normals” and telepaths create an uncomfortable work situation for Adam. He’s kept on a tight leash, regularly meeting with his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor and relying on the police department for food and clothing because he can’t be trusted to handle his own paycheck.

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Be My Enemy is the sequel to last year’s Planesrunner, the book that launched Ian McDonald’s first ever YA series in spectacular fashion. I dearly love both of these novels and don’t want to ruin your enjoyment of them in any way, so if you haven’t read Planesrunner yet, stop reading this now and instead check out my review of that first novel, because there will be some spoilers for the first book below the cut. In other words: if you’re new to the Everness series, stop reading here until you’ve had the chance to devour Planesrunner. Gentle reader, you have been warned.

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Earlier this year, Chuck Wendig’s Blackbirds took me completely by surprise. Initially attracted by Joey Hi-Fi’s gorgeous cover illustration, I was quickly sucked into the story of Miriam Black, an opportunistic young drifter whose unique curse/gift allows her to see the exact time and circumstances of the deaths of the people she touches. She mainly uses this mysterious skill to loot the occasional bit of cash from the soon-to-be-deceased, allowing her to stay in motels and keep enough booze on hand to numb her many personal demons... until one day she sees one particularly gruesome future death scene in which the victim’s last words are her own name.

As much as I hate to see or use the phrase “compulsively readable” in reviews, in the case of Blackbirds it’s applicable as it’s ever going to be: a unique, tightly written novel you just can’t put down until you’ve read every last dark, gory detail. If you haven’t read it yet, now’s the time to rectify the situation because this month, mercifully quick on the heels of Blackbirds, Chuck Wendig already delivers its sequel, Mockingbird. The further adventures of Miriam Black, wrapped in yet another stunning Joey Hi-Fi cover? Well, “must-buy” is another one of those phrases I really don’t like much, but in this case...

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Marius dos Hellespont is a scoundrel of the worst sort: he’s an opportunistic liar, an occasional con-man, but maybe worst of all, he often makes a living as a “corpse-rat,” stealing valuables from soldiers’ dead bodies after recent battles. It’s grim (and highly illegal) work, but it’s been making Marius enough money to feed himself and even take on an apprentice. Everything changes when, one day after a major battle, he comes upon the corpse of an actual king and tries to steal the crown.

When a dead soldier mistakes Marius for a real king, the corpse-rat finds himself transported to the realm of the dead, because just like living people, the dead need a king too, and the position happens to be vacant. It quickly becomes clear that Marius is about as far removed from actual royalty as possible, so the dead make him an offer he can’t refuse: he must go back to the land of the living to find an actual, real king for the dead. If not, his life will be forfeit.

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I read my first Jonathan Carroll novel shortly after discovering Graham Joyce. I’d read everything Joyce had written up to that point and was desperate for more. The top recommendation I kept hearing at that time was Jonathan Carroll, probably because there’s a certain similarity between the two writers: they both write fiction set in our contemporary reality with relatively small added fantasy elements. You can call this magical realism, but Joyce disagrees with this classification—he prefers the wonderful term “Old Peculiar” to describe his fiction—and I’m not sure if Jonathan Carroll is completely happy with it either. Still, it does seem to fit the bill somewhat and provides a good point of reference for people who are unfamiliar with them.

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