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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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.

If we consider the last couple of columns the calm, this edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus heralds something of a storm. Not of news, necessarily—though I do have a few interesting items for you—but rather regarding this week’s new releases, which include a fascinating new novel from Pax Britannia’s Al Ewing, historical horror from Sarah Pinborough’s pen, a ghost story by psychological crime writer Sophie Hannah, The Radley’s Matt Haig on humans, Alison Littlewood’s investigation of fairy tales and what I’m going to call a lycanpocalypse care of Benjamin Percy.

[The aftermath of the Clarke Award and more]

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

This week, we’ll be reading through two of the seven Nebula-nominated novelettes, namely “Fade to White” by Catherynne M. Valente and “Portrait of Lisane de Patagnia” by Rachel Swirsky. I figured it’d be a bit much for me to review “The Finite Canvas” by my aforementioned collaborator, but let it be said that her story is deservedly in contention for the iconic award as well, alongside shorts by Catherine Asaro, Ken Liu, Andy Duncan and Megan McCarron.

So why these two tales above the others? Well, because a single thread connects them: both explore the idea of the image, and the terrible power of the picture of perfection.

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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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When they came, everything changed.

But the Arrival did not happen in the blink of an eye. It took weeks for the ship first glimpsed at the outer reaches of our solar system—as yet a speck among faraway stars—to glide its way to its intended destination: Earth.

Humanity spent this time speculating. Watching endlessly looped footage of an alien eye in the sky until we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were not alone in the universe.

What had brought these unexpected guests to our corner of the cosmos? No one knew. But they would, all too soon. In the intervening period, a lot of pointless posturing, a surplus of purposeless panic. In truth, nobody had a clue what to do.

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As oddly modern as Audrey Niffenegger’s third novel-in-pictures is in many respects, the story at its core is as old as the 17th century aquatint technique she uses to illustrate it. Older, even. In the beginning, boy meets girl. They become friends... their relationship strengthens... and in due course, a strange babe is made. 

I say strange because it so happens that the girl the boy falls for is a bird: a fledgling raven who has fallen out of the nest. Seeing her, a caring mailman worries that she’s broken, so he takes her home, cares for her as best he can. What develops between them then seems straight out of a wonderfully weird take on Aesop’s Fables. 

[A review of Raven Girl by Audrey Niffenegger]

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.

A bunch of stuff has happened since we last put our heads together, including updates to several stories we’ve touched on before. To begin with, Iain Banks has responded to the “outpouring of love, affection and respect” which met the sad news that he didn’t—and he doesn’t—have long left.

Meanwhile, the two Tors recently celebrated a year of DRM-free new releases, and at the very least they’ve earned a bullet point in today’s column by blazing said trail. This past week also saw the publication of the first annual Speculative Fiction anthology, and the opening of the floodgates to submissions for the next edition. Prime your favourite blog posts, folks!

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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.

I’m going to come right out and say it today: some weeks are more equal than others. This week... wasn’t.

Long story short, not a whole lot has happened in the seven days since the last time we talked about the state of genre fiction in Britain—but if you thought that would lead to a less lengthy column, you’d be wrong!

We begin this week with a few words about this year’s World Book Night, before turning our attention towards a speculative fiction imprint which is clearly thinking about what we’ll be reading in 2014. After that, some characteristically fantastic cover art from Joey Hi-Fi, and to top it all off, a dash of Terry Pratchett.

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Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a weekly column on Tor.com co-curated by myself and the splendid 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.

In early April, the Editor in Chief of Night Shade Books announced that his struggling company was in the process of being bought out. We won’t dig into the reasons it began hemorrhaging here, nor the well-documented deals offered to its stable of authors since, except to say that however successful Skyhorse and Start’s emergency surgery is—or isn’t—it’s been a bleak few weeks for readers and writers alike. However badly mismanaged said small press was, the books themselves were almost always good.

One of the less visible casualties of Night Shade’s continuing collapse was Eclipse Online, the continuation of the esteemed anthology series pioneered by in print by Jonathan Strahan before the sad realities of purveying short fiction for profit made a fifth volume essentially untenable.

It was with happiness in my heart, then, that I heard Eclipse would live on as a venue along the lines of Subterranean Magazine and Strange Horizons. Unfortunately, it did so under the auspices of an enterprise evidently on its last legs, and just six months on from its launch, in the wake of the aforementioned Night Shade news, Strahan stated that Eclipse Online would “cease publication effective immediately.”

To wit, in tribute to Eclipse, we’ll be reading the first story it published during its brief second lease of life, and saying goodbye with a review of what looks to be its last.

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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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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.

With the death of Margaret Thatcher dominating every discussion, you’d be forgiven for thinking there was no other news in the UK this week. But you’d be wrong. Life goes on. The literary life, at least.

Amongst the stories we’ll touch on today: Gollancz has signed Joanne Harris for a novel inspired by Norse mythology, Joe Abercrombie recently revealed that The First Law comic book we talked about last time will be released gratis, the winners of a prize for Young Writers have been announced, and I wonder what they say about speculative fiction’s future, and we’ll also learn about Read Petite, an innovative short fiction initiative.

Gollancz also dominates the week in new releases, bringing standalone science fiction from Gavin Smith, a collection of stories to supplement Tom Lloyd’s epic quintet, plus Poison by Sarah Pinborough: the first in a series of three feisty fairy tales reimagined for a modern audience. In addition, we anticipate the debut of Deadlands by Lily Herne and a little thing called the Book of Sith.

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It’s easy to say violence is everywhere today. Easy to assert that its effects can be felt in the real world and those we lose ourselves in alike. That its prevalence is evidenced in the video games we play as much as the news we watch, by way of the books we read no more or less than the things each of us experience.

We could also talk, for a time, about the climate of fear and the war economy it contributes to. We might additionally consider the stigma attached to sex versus our acceptance of violence in every sphere of society. But let’s leave all that for someone smarter than I. I’m here to review a book, in any event... albeit a book which addresses, in a sense, many of the aforementioned questions.

The Serene Invasion’s premise is simple yet suggestive, plain yet potentially progressive. In 2025, aliens invade. But strangely, they don’t wage war on the world. Instead, the Serene park their ships in the skies and unilaterally impose peace. By manipulating the strings of existence or some such thing, they make it impossible on the quantum level for any human being to hurt another. Every sort of violence imaginable simply ceases.

Lucky for some.

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Last week, the shortlist for this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced, and the internet promptly exploded.

Maybe I’m overstating the case. Maybe I should say, instead, that our little corner of it did. But ours is a corner I’m awfully fond of, whatever its faults, so from where I was sitting—from where you were too, presumably—the response to the all-male array appeared immediate, and incredibly widespread.

I can’t hope to collate all the opinions offered, but in Marking the Clarkes, we’re going to work our way through a few of the most representative reactions. Expect equal measures of vitriol, outrage and intrigue. After that, perhaps we can come to some sort of a conclusion courtesy your comments.

But before we get into this whole rigmarole, let’s remind ourselves of the shortlist which inspired such a wide range of reactions.

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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.

And what a week it’s been.

Having hummed and hahed for far too long about the appropriateness of an exclamation point in the previous paragraph—given the tenor of today’s titular news—the thing to do, I thought, would be to get started already... which we’ll do with a selection of heartfelt tributes to Iain Banks, who this week told the world that he has terminal cancer.

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Truly, few milieus stand the test of time in the way the wonderful, whimsical world of the Dying Earth has. It can be condensed to a simple premise—a planet about to expire—but exemplary execution, imagination and iteration made these stories something so much more; something elegant and indelible; something very, very special.

The many and various tales about this breathtaking place and its uniquely appealing people—and creatures—have enthralled generations, and inspired, in the erstwhile, innumerable imitations. Jack Vance basically remade the face of fantasy fiction in one fell swoop with these books, and as The Guiding Nose of Ulfänt Banderōz shows, there’s a proliferation of life left in the Dying Earth yet.

Then again, the world is still ending. And this time, those who use magic are being blamed... quite rightly, as it transpires!

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

So, did you know March 22nd was designated World Water Day? Till this year, I didn’t.

Were you aware that 2013 marked the 21st time nations have united to celebrate freshwater in all its forms? Before I sat down to work on this column, I wasn’t.

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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.

In the spirit of the silly season, this edition begins with a not-news item that appears to have provoked a wide array of reactions. Space bunnies, anyone?

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Legends are not born, but made. Not fated, but carefully—or carelessly—shaped.

A lesson for the ages, there, but not one that every scholar takes to heart.

“Is it possible... can a man be born into the world to be something, for something?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “But even if he is, it doesn’t always happen. Too much can intervene. The world does what it does, under heaven. Our dreams, our certainties, crash into each other.”

“Like swords?” Daiyan said.

The old man shrugged. “Like swords, like ambitions at court.”

A silence.

Despite this oft-voiced thought, Ren Daiyan has felt possessed by something resembling destiny from an early age. As a boy of fifteen scant summers at the outset of Guy Gavriel Kay’s sublime new novel River of Stars, he is asked to help protect the sub-prefect on a gift-giving mission through treacherous territory. Thrilled by the prospect of “keeping order for the emperor” in some small way, he accepts the request.

Bandits fall upon the caravan in short order. Surprising everyone except himself, Daiyan single-handedly slaughters them all.

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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 a week of high and lows, I suppose. One the one hand, thousands of science fiction fans are gearing up for Eastercon 2013, AKA Eight Squared, which promises to provide a long weekend of genre-oriented excitement, including panels, music, art and hilarity. On the other, there was some very sad news last Wednesday: James Herbert, author of Ash and The Rats, has died.

We’ll touch on both of these stories in this week’s edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, in addition to taking in the launch of a line of lavish speculative classics from HarperCollins Voyager, the unveiling of Hodder & Stoughton’s cover art for Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep—how can it possibly compete with the North American cover, I wonder?—and, last but not least, a flood of short fiction by Neil Gaiman and a number of other authors.

Meanwhile, the week in new releases includes a tremendous trio from PS Publishing, the latest from former rocket scientist Simon Morden, Will Hill’s third Department 19 novel and the conclusion of Greg Bear’s trilogy of Halo prequels. That isn’t even the half of it, either!

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