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!
If you think of early Gothic women writers, your mind probably leaps to Mary Shelley. She does tend to get all of the attention: her own books, her own films, cameos in Doctor Who… you can’t help but be happy that a woman writer is getting the attention she deserves.
It’s clear why Mary Shelley’s become a Gothic pinup. You don’t get much more Goth than sex on your mother’s grave and keeping your husband’s heart in a drawer. And that’s not to mention the fact that she came up with one of the most famous Gothic novels of all time. It doesn’t hurt that she did it in a ghost story competition with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley where she showed them exactly where they could stick their monstrous egos.
“How do you know about Gandalf?” Sam Wilson asks Bucky Barnes in the second episode of the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, after Bucky mocks Sam for talking about fighting wizards. Bucky snaps back that he read The Hobbit when it was first published in 1937. It’s a fun character moment, one that sparked some debate on social media about whether or not a guy like Bucky Barnes would have read a kid’s book, but what’s interesting to me about the scene is the source of Sam’s confusion. Why would he assume Bucky, a contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien, wouldn’t know about Gandalf? It’s because Sam thinks of The Lord of the Rings as a 21st-century cultural phenomenon, one that a man out of time like Bucky would need to catch up on.
And the thing is, Sam’s not wrong…
Where do all the siblings go? One of my earliest book memories was of Ida in Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There taking matters into her own hands to rescue her baby sister, who has been replaced with a changeling (and, in the movies, the well-named Sarah similarly setting off to save her little brother from the clutches of the Goblin King). The Pevensies ruled Narnia together. Meg Murry and her brother Charles Wallace traveled the universe to get their father back in A Wrinkle in Time, their brothers Sandy and Dennys traveled back to biblical times, and all sorts of other adventures befell their family, as well as the other assorted O’Keefes and Austins and their acquaintances. And I adored William Sleator’s Singularity, in which teenage Harry figured out a way to get out from under the shadow of his twin.
All of that drove home what I knew from my own experience: siblings could be maddening, but they were important.
[Here are 5 SFF books built around a rich, gooey, sibling core.]
In the city of Bassa, everything exists in a strict hierarchy. Fifteen districts spiral out from the center, each populated by people locked into a caste through complicated social, political, and cultural equations. Danso, a novitiate scholar, is one of those lower castes due to being Shanshi, or biracial. No matter how hard he tries to exceed their expectations, everyone expects him to fail due to his supposedly innate inadequacies. His bride-to-be is Esheme, another Bassai whose dubious parentage has placed her in a lower caste. She, however, is not content to fight for scraps when the whole table is up for grabs.
When an injured islander spellcaster named Lilong crashes into Danso’s life, she brings with her the promise of violent change in the form of ibor, a material that gives the person wielding it impossible powers. An iborworker can change the color of their skin, manipulate the elements, even raise the dead into zombie puppets. As each of the trio get their hands on this powerful weapon, the future of Bassa is called into question. One wants to reform the system, another wants to abandon it to the consequences of its own making, and a third wants to destroy it and rebuild it in their image. Nothing will ever be the same.
K. J. Parker returns to the amoral world of Prosper’s Demon with a wry, sardonic novella that flips the eternal, rule-governed battle between men and demons on its head. Inside Man arrives June 15th from Tordotcom Publishing—read an excerpt below!
Deadline reports that Warner Bros. is bringing hot vampires back with a remake of 1983’s The Hunger. As you may or may not remember, depending on your age and level of David Bowie obsession, that film starred Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and Catherine Deneuve in a tangle of dangerous vampire attraction. It was, as Deadline succinctly put it, “atmospheric and sexy,” and based on a novel by Whitley Strieber.
Space is way, way big. Bigger than you can imagine. Compared to the size of the Milky Way (which is only our local galaxy, one of 225 billion), even very fast ships are likely to be comparatively slow. Among the options open to travellers who do not want to invest large fractions of their conscious lives getting from A to B: hibernation. Given the correct technology, travellers can just take a chill pill and sleep the dark light years away.
How well this works in practice depends on a number of factors, such as the degree to which metabolism is slowed in hibernation, the frequency of lost luggage scenarios involving sleepers, and of course, the need by authors for dramatic scenarios. Consider these five works featuring hibernation.
Photo: Sabina Music Rich [via Unsplash]
In my upcoming new YA fantasy, In the Ravenous Dark (out today!), one of the main characters—one of the love interests, in fact—is dead. This bit of information always seems to pique people’s interest, because, well, how is he dead and still walking, talking, and falling in love?
In Ivrilos’s case, he’s a guardian spirit bound to our protagonist, Rovan, in order to control her, particularly her powerful blood magic, but then the two of them become reluctant allies and eventually something more through their shared interest in toppling the underworld authority. It’s through the duality of blood and death magic in the book that these two characters, living and dead, are able to interact and even touch. But this got me thinking about the other types of dead characters I’ve read in (mostly) recent (mostly) YA books, what makes them tick, and more importantly, what makes them compelling. Below are a few of my favorite reads. Expect diversity, queerness, and above all, amazing dead characters!
It’s been two years since James S.A. Corey (the pen name for authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) released the penultimate installment of their Expanse series, and ever since, fans have been wondering when the final book will hit stores.
Back in September, the two officially announced the cover and title of that final book: Leviathan Falls, hitting stores sometime in 2021. We still don’t have a release date, but Corey says that the book has been completed and is now in the hands of their publisher, Orbit Books.
Blues singers, filmmakers, haints, healers, romance, and magic from Georgia to Chicago!
We’re thrilled to reveal the cover for Andrea Hairston’s Redwood and Wildfire—arriving February 1, 2022 from Tordotcom Publishing.
Welcome back to the one and only Reading The Wheel of Time! I fully intended to have a post go up last week—and by that I mean that I had surgery the week before, and still figured I could still churn out a post by Tuesday. Which I’m mostly telling you all because, well, it sure feels like a Rand move right? Just telling myself I’m not doing anything but lying around, I can definitely sit at a computer and yell about Nynaeve for a few hours, right?
I mean… my people need me.
But in the end I was persuaded into being reasonable, and did more sleeping and less typing, and now we are back with new vim and vigor and excitement to talk about Chapter 47! We’re back in Samara as well, with Nynaeve and Elayne and Birgitte, where things are about to get very real.
We really should have trusted Elayne’s judgement.
[Hurry, unless you’re ready to proclaim the Prophet and march to Amadicia!]
Now this is how you celebrate the 10th anniversary of a movie’s release. Writer-director Joe Cornish and star John Boyega are going back to the block for a sequel to 2011’s Attack the Block, a perfect movie about teens in London fending off an alien invasion. Presumably those strange furry aliens are going to try again, though plot details have not yet been released.
I blame Laini Taylor for giving me unrealistic expectations of kissing. Well, okay, maybe my own overactive imagination and hearty diet of fan fiction was more at fault for that. But the way she describes kisses in her incredible works of fantasy never fails to awaken my inner hopeless romantic.
Tordotcom Publishing is thrilled to announce that Christie Yant has acquired the novella The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman. The deal for World English rights was brokered by Kate McKean of the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.
Annae, a brilliant graduate student in psychiatric magic and survivor of academic abuse, can’t stop reading people’s minds. This is how she protects herself, by using her abilities to give her colleagues what they each want out of their relationship with her.
When Annae moves to the UK to rebuild her life and finds herself studying under the infamous, misanthropic magician Marec Górski, she sees inside his head a dangerous path to her redemption. Annae now faces two choices—follow in Dr. Górski’s lead, or break free of a lifetime of conditioning to follow her own path.
Netflix has tapped Bumblebee and Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight to helm an adaptation of Raymond A. Villareal’s 2018 novel, A People’s History of the Vampire Uprising.
According to Deadline, the film will shorten that title to Uprising. It will be produced by Shawn Levy and Dan Cohen of 21 Laps, the company that produced Stranger Things for the streaming service.
When twin heirs are born in Tourin, their fates are decided at a young age…
We’re excited to share an excerpt from the young adult fantasy These Feathered Flames, the debut novel from Alexandra Overy—available from Inkyard Press.
"Herd of horses in the paddock" by Rudolf Albert Becker-Heyer
A frequent subject of my Morning Manure Meditations—the hour of the morning when I feed horses and clean stalls and finish waking up because Not A Morning Person Here—is the way horses live so completely in this physical world. I’ve written about it before, but it keeps showing me new faces of itself, or illuminating older ones.
It was a day like any other. Except it was our last…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Day Zero, a harrowing apocalyptic adventure from author C. Robert Cargill—publishing May 25th with Harper Voyager.
