As an ex-smuggler and two-time reluctant revolutionary, Alyssa is used to staring into the razor-sharp jaws of death. But now she’s embarking on the most terrifying adventure of her life—journeying into the darkness to become a new type of being, one who can help humanity to survive. And deep at the heart of the city in the middle of the night, the price of transformation could be higher, and more terrible, than Alyssa ever expected.
All magical requests come with a price. A girl with witchcraft, no friends, and only her mother’s bees to confide in will pay whatever’s necessary to keep the girl she loves safe.
Sir Magnus Holmes, cousin to the more famous Sherlock, is asked to investigate the appearance of an otherworldly knight carrying a legendary sword in the cellar of a Victorian London pub.
Gods won’t save you. Gods will break you. Nevertheless, you will persist, and become anew.
A dark, fast-moving novelette about a high-tech heist in future Spain, planned by a professional thief interested in revenge more than money. The object in question is in the hands of a dangerous crime lord.
We are delighted to start off a brand-new year of Tor.com short fiction with three original stories written by Harry Turtledove featuring everyone’s favorite sasquatch governor of the Pacific Northwest state of Jefferson, Bill Williamson.
In Oathbringer—the third book in Brandon Sanderson’s epic Stormlight Archive series—some of our favorite characters spend a couple hundred pages traveling through Shadesmar (AKA the Cognitive Realm), an alternate plane of existence that’s the inverse of the Physical Realm where humans reside.
One could argue that Shallan, Kaladin, Adolin, and Azure’s journey through Shadesmar was a detour from the meat of the Oathbringer story. Those familiar with Sanderson’s work, however, know that their experience in the Cognitive Realm will likely have repercussions not only in the fourth book, but also in future Stormlight Archive novels and the larger Cosmere universe.
Some hundred years ago, visionary hydroelectric pioneer Adam Beck proposed a grand scheme for electrically powered trains that would service the city of Berlin, now Kitchener, Ontario’s transit needs, as well as those of outlying communities. Such is the blinding speed at which modern society moves that scarcely a century later, something akin to a much-reduced version of Beck’s proposal became reality in the form of Waterloo Region’s Ion Light Rail System. For the most part the Ion is perfectly functional, some curiously patron-hostile stops aside, but an unexpected emergent property of the system very quickly became apparent: Kitchener-Waterloo drivers are terrible at noticing train-sized objects. You’d think a massive, whale-sized object bearing down on your car would draw attention … but apparently not. (As I type, the system celebrates its first two–collision day, within hours of each other and only blocks apart. Happily, no one involved in these car-vs-Ion accidents was seriously injured.)
Anyone who has read A. J. Deutsch’s 1950 short, “A Subway Named Möbius” could have predicted that something unexpected would happen.
[This is doubly true for teleportation-based transit systems.]
I woke up last night in a cold sweat. I had a dream.
I dreamed that someone read the list below and said, “Wow, these films sound great! I’m gonna binge this stuff this weekend!”
It…didn’t end well.
Do me a favor: DO NOT binge this list. You may think you’re strong, but take it from the man who sat in his doctor’s waiting room, staring at his tablet while straining, fruitlessly, to suppress the tears: The list is stronger.
Marian Womack’s fiction finds the middle ground between haunting landscapes and the surreal. She’s edited an anthology in collaboration with Gary Budden, whose work occupies a subgenre known as “landscape punk.” And a review of her 2018 collection Lost Objects in Weird Fiction Review cited the story “Kingfisher,” and highlighted “a blurred boundary between an initially recognizable world and a later turn toward something much weirder.”
While much of Womack’s work to date has been set around the present or in a possible future, her new novel The Golden Key opts for a very different locale: England in 1901.
2020 is a difficult year for reading novels about the American Civil War. The old comfortable myths, the familiar interpretations of history, have developed serious fractures. The romance of the Confederacy has given way to the dismantling of Confederate war memorials. The election of an African-American President represented both the power of cultural change and the vehement, even violent opposition to it.
Andre Norton published Ride Proud, Rebel! in 1961, in the midst of the Civil Rights era. Her science fiction novels took care to depict a future that was not all or even mostly white, and she tried hard to write Black and Native American characters with respect and understanding. And yet she chose this material for a foray into historical fiction.
“Emanations”
Written by Brannon Braga
Directed by David Livingston
Season 1, Episode 8
Production episode 109
Original air date: March 13, 1995
Stardate: 48623.5
Captain’s log. Voyager has detected a heretofore undiscovered element in the asteroids of a ring around a planet. They investigate, as it could be useful, not just to catalogue, but to mine and use. Chakotay, Kim, and Torres beam down to discover that the element is in a weird coating that’s on a bunch of dead bodies that seem to be haphazardly stored in the asteroid. (The asteroid is also Class M; the notion that an asteroid would have oxygen-nitrogen air and the same gravity as Earth is patently absurd, but doing space suits and filming in a gravity-less environment aren’t really in a 1990s TV show’s budget.)
[In essence, Commander, you were strolling through dead bodies.]
When someone at work asks how I felt about Sonic the Hedgehog, I will say “It was great!” because they know me as “the guy who really likes Sonic” and not necessarily “the guy who has spent 50+ podcast hours talking about Sonic’s cultural impact and meaning” so they don’t need the full, complicated answer. But you clicked on this review, so you need the details. And the truth is: Sonic the Hedgehog is a fun movie, but it sacrifices Sonic’s messy and rebellious history to make Marvel-style comfort food.
Read two of the most exciting sci-fi releases this year! We want to send you a copy of Ken Liu’s latest collection The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, along with Katie M. Flynn’s near-future novel The Companions!
Ken Liu is one of the most lauded short story writers of our time. The Hidden Girl and Other Stories includes a selection of his science fiction and fantasy stories from the last five years—sixteen of his best—plus a new novelette.
Station Eleven meets Never Let Me Go in The Companions by Katie M. Flynn, a debut novel set in an unsettling near future where the dead can be uploaded to machines and kept in service by the living.
Set in the world of the Winner’s Trilogy, Marie Rutkoski’s The Midnight Lie is an epic LGBTQ romantic fantasy about learning to free ourselves from the lies others tell us—and the lies we tell ourselves. The novel is available March 3rd from Farrar, Straus and Giroux—we’re excited to share the first three chapters below!
The Last Emperox is the thrilling conclusion to the award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling Interdependency series, an epic space opera adventure from Hugo Award-winning author John Scalzi. This Spring, the author will hit the road, visiting bookstores and festivals to meet readers and fans like you!
The Last Emperox publishes April 14th with Tor Books. Head below for the full tour schedule!
Hello Tor.com! Journey with me through these last few chapters of RROK, won’tcha?
This blog series will be covering The Ruin of Kings, the first novel of a five-book series by Jenn Lyons. Previous entries can be found here in the series index.
Today’s post will be covering Chapter 87, “The Breaking of Oaths”, and Chapter 88, “Miya’s Gift”. Please note that from this point forward, these posts will likely contain spoilers for the entire novel, so it’s recommended that you read the whole thing first before continuing on.
Got that? Great! Click on for the rest!
[That “gift” better have a Return receipt attached to, if you know what I mean]
We’re all familiar with the certain kind of dull, hellish malaise that hangs over suburban life, with its pedantic grass-height requirements and condiment-colored conformity, but Vivarium takes it to a whole new level. The official UK trailer for the sci-fi thriller dropped today, and whew, is it claustrophobic.
Science fiction authors tend to get salty when people accuse us of trying to predict the future. Especially when people are like, “Hey, in your book you said that there would be giant flesh-eating killer moths in 2015, and instead they arrived in 2018, and I want my money back.” Most science fiction authors will insist that even if a book is set in the future, it’s really about the present—and there’s a lot of truth to that.
But lately, I’ve been feeling like a lot of my science-fiction writing about the future is actually about the past. The past and the future are reflections of each other, after all. And what kind of future we build depends on what we learn from our past.
There’s a sense of heightened reality that occurs when you see Marlon James (author of the rich fantasy Black Leopard, Red Wolf) and Tochi Onyebuchi (author of the not-actually-dystopic superhero tale Riot Baby) sitting on a public stage, before a rapt crowd, speaking with each other. Either of them alone exhibits superhuman charm, but put the two of them together and they become a Super Saiyan of wit. A veritable Voltron of expertly-deployed shade. A drift compatible charisma Jaeger, if you will—except one half of the Jaeger’s wearing a shirt that says “Slipthot” on it, and the other half is super into Can.
And lucky us, they got together for an event at the Strand! The two authors discussed writing, anime, and life in a violently white society, the X-Men, Sarah McLachlan?, and American Dirt, amongst a mosaic of topics. We’ve provided a transcript below.
Now this is the story all about how Gideon’s life got flip-turned upside down…
Welcome back, boneheads! It’s time for another close read of Gideon the Ninth by Tamysn Muir! I’m your host, Goriddle Gorilla, and today I’ll be recapping chapters nine and ten. These two chapters cover Gideon’s first venture out into the First House after she and Harrow arrive.
Castlevania is back! Netflix has released the trailer for season 3 of its hit anime series by Adi Shankar and Warren Ellis.
Spoilers ahead, obviously, for Castlevania seasons 1 and 2.
By Force Alone is a retelling of Arthurian myth for the age of Brexit and Trump, from World Fantasy Award-winner Lavie Tidhar — and we want to send you a copy!
Everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.
The fact is they don’t know sh*t.
It’s hard to argue that the fantasy genre doesn’t have a tendency to support the idea that the further a creature strays from the human ideal of beauty, the more likely said creature is to bite off your finger to steal your magic ring.
But there are those fantasy novels that flip the script, putting traditionally monstrous races in the role of the protagonist. In these books, the trolls and goblins and dragons get to be, er, people—and even if they sometimes still wind up working the teensiest bit on the side of the baddies, at least we can sympathize with their motivations.
Here are six books that explore the inner lives of members of the genre’s rogues gallery.
