Nothing tears two women apart like the men who want and take indiscriminately. In this retelling of “The Crane Wife”, a makeup artist and her actress lover struggle to stay together as the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood transforms into a cruel and manipulative beast that threatens to pluck them apart.
Content warning: This story contains fictional depictions of domestic violence.
An acclaimed musician and her apprentice travel to the newly freed country of Skinnere to play a complex and culturally fraught song that will lay bare the wounds of empire, occupation, and sacrifice of its players and listeners.
We are overjoyed to be reprinting “The Angel of Khan el-Khalili” by P. Djèlí Clark, set in the same world as Master of Djinn, out on May 11!
The story first appeared in the anthology Clockwork Cairo: Steampunk Tales of Egypt, edited by Matthew Bright and published by Twopenny Press.
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory was originally given free to readers who pre-ordered Martha’s Murderbot novel, Network Effect. The story is set just after the 4th novella, Exit Strategy.
The latest Murderbot book, Fugitive Telemetry, is published next week (4/27/21). Pre-order it here.
An act of indiscretion from her immortal trickster companion sends Annie and her league of ladies-in-waiting on a time-defying adventure that becomes the inspiration for William Shakespeare.
We are thrilled to reprint the Spanish translation of Naomi Kritzer’s Tor.com original story “Little Free Library”, first published in SuperSonic‘s February 2021 issue. Many thanks to Naomi, Cristina Jurado, Marcheto, and the SuperSonic team!
The Provost’s Dog trilogy by Tamora Pierce tackles the difficult relationship between the police force and civilians in a fantasy medieval society. Sixteen-year-old Rebekah Cooper is a police officer in a community where the police are still forming their own moral code; therefore, the road between law and lawlessness is full of twists and turns. Criminals are common in the poor neighborhood Beka patrols, and her job is made more difficult by criminals assuming they deserve something from the upper classes.
Beka Cooper’s stories are part of Pierce’s young adult fantasy Tortall universe, named after the fictional country where much of the action takes place. Pierce’s first (and arguably most famous) series, Song of the Lioness, features Alanna of Trebond, a noble girl, as she fights to train as a knight in a time when only men are allowed to do so. Lioness focuses on the nobility, while Provost’s Dog skirts around it, dealing mostly with commoners in the poorest section of the capital, the Lower City of Corus.
There are a fair number of SF novels that focus not on individual characters but on the society of which they are a part. Often the novels do so by focusing on the development of those cultures over time. Societies evolve; individuals come and go like mayflies. There’s a narrative, but not the sort of narrative we usually expect to enjoy.
You might think that it would be hard to make such books interesting. (I don’t think that anyone has ever described The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a cracking thrill ride: “Could not put it down!”) The following five novels show that it is possible to write interesting works that take the long view.
New York Times bestselling author Steven Erikson continues the beloved Malazan Book of the Fallen with The God Is Not Willing, first in the thrilling new Witness sequel trilogy—publishing November 9, 2021 with Tor Books. We’re thrilled to share an excerpt below!
Happy Thursday, Cosmere Chickens! This week’s installment of the Stormlight Archive reread deals with a whole lot of betrayal. Shallan and company arrive at Lasting Integrity, and things… well, go exactly as well as was predicted, with the additional roadblock of Shallan having to deal with a truly nasty revelation about who’s been talking to the Ghostbloods behind her back.
[They’re not going to listen to you, Brightlord. They’re going to arrest you.]
Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we cover Wendy N. Wagner’s “The Black Azalea,” first published in the Mike Davis’s 2016 Autumn Cthulhu anthology. Spoilers ahead. Content warning for cancer and animal death.
[“Perhaps waking up to apocalyptic sci-fi had put her in a dispirited mood…”]
There’s been some rumblings in the last year that MGM has been working on a way to revive its Stargate franchise with a new series. More recently, there were hints that said series might include some of Stargate SG-1‘s original crew, like Daniel Jackson. And now, it sounds as though the creators have plans to bring back another: Samantha Carter, the genius astrophysicist played by Amanda Tapping.
A young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman, a debut novel inspired by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology—publishing June 8th with Harper Voyager.
We have an excellent batch of young adult science fiction and fantasy coming at you in May and June. Pissed off witches, mischievous gods, spaceships, rebellious soldiers, and everything in between. What are you most excited for?
Realm—the fiction and podcast outlet formerly known as Serial Box—has just announced a slate of projects that includes new stories from horror icon John Carpenter, and a second season for the network’s Orphan Black continuation (with star Tatiana Maslany set to return), and a new iteration of Jules Verne’s famous oceanic captain.
Are you a writer? Do you like learning about the creative process, either for your own projects, or just cause you think it’s interesting? This post is about to make your day. As I’m sure you know, there is a booming industry of books on the art and craft of writing, from all sort of different authors, who cover all sorts of different angles. A new addition to the genre is soon to hit shelves, Charlie Jane Anders’ Never Say You Can’t Survive, originally a Tor.com column. By way of celebration of Anders’ book, I’ve rounded up 18 of my favorite craft books.
The First Rule is the most important: “Always run, never fight.”
We’re thrilled to reveal the cover of Until the Last of Me, a Take Them to the Stars novel by Sylvain Neuvel. Set a generation after the events of A History of What Comes Next, Until the Last of Me arrives March 2022 with Tordotcom Publishing.
C.S. Lewis failed. He failed to clearly say what he was trying to say. He failed his readers. He failed Susan.
When I read The Last Battle as a kid, and got to the moment when Susan was “no longer a friend of Narnia” I was shocked. Well, I thought, there are still some pages left to go. I’m sure she’ll be back before the end. But she wasn’t. And all of her siblings and friends, her cousin, even her parents, were romping along through New Narnia without ever mentioning her again.
It felt strange, and dismissive, and horrible. Much of the end of the book is about catching up with old friends, with cameos and reunions with beloved companions from previous books, even those who were dead—Reepicheep and Fledge and Puddleglum and Caspian—and yet somehow Susan never gets a moment. We don’t even peek in on her back on Earth, and no one thinks to ask, “Is Sue alright?”
Sometimes you get a book that reminds you how to live. Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi can be interpreted in many ways, but so far, in the trudge through the Dead Marshes that is 2021, I’ve found it most helpful to think of it as an instruction manual.
The main character (who is called Piranesi even though he’s pretty sure his name is not Piranesi) is a perfect metaphor for our time. He lives in near-total isolation, in a House that is, as far as he knows, the entire World. Twice a week he spends a single hour with “The Other”, a man about twenty years his senior. Piranesi’s understanding is that he’s assisting the Other with an ongoing experiment, but his understanding is also that he has always lived in the House, and that he is somehow about 30 years old, but he also only seems to remember about five years of his life.
His understanding might be a little off.
We’re thrilled to reveal the cover of The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, a collection of Chinese science fiction and fantasy in translation, edited by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang—forthcoming in March 2022 from Tordotcom Publishing.
Nothing tears two women apart like the men who want and take indiscriminately. In this retelling of “The Crane Wife”, a makeup artist and her actress lover struggle to stay together as the glitz and glamour of old Hollywood transforms into a cruel and manipulative beast that threatens to pluck them apart.
Content warning: This story contains fictional depictions of domestic violence.
Peter Ocko, the showrunner for AMC’s Lodge 49 (pictured above) and producer for Starz’s Black Sails has a new project in the works: according to The Hollywood Reporter, AMC has greenlit a new series about a pilot marooned on a lunar colony.
Last year, A24 released a first look at its upcoming adaptation of the Arthurian story Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Green Knight, and its had us salivating for it ever since.
The COVID-19 pandemic scuttled the film’s intended release, but now it looks as though we won’t have to wait too much longer. A24 released a new trailer for the project, as well as a release date: July 30th.
P. Djèlí Clark has been one of my auto-buy authors for a few years now, so when I heard he was putting out a full-length novel (finally!), I jumped at the chance to review it. Of all his works, his Dead Djinn series is my favorite. I’m a sucker for urban fantasy mysteries, and especially drawn to those with locales, leads, and legends who aren’t white and Western/European/British. Happily for me, A Master of Djinn did not disappoint.
