Winslow Remington Houndstooth, notorious outlaw, handsomest heartbreaker in the American South, has just finished a lucrative job, but he’s faced with a hippo-sized problem that would test even the most seasoned of hoppers. A slyly funny, raucous adventure in the alternate America of Sarah Gailey’s River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow.
A composer in an unstable city-state accidentally discovers the perfect singer for his work—a clockwork man—and sows the seeds of revolution.
A fantasy about a woman bequeathed an odd gift by a former lover who broke up with her, then died—his handwriting. Why did he do this and what does it mean?
Metallurgists are both admired and feared. They splinter their own minds in order to manipulate metal at the microscopic level, creating shadow selves to craft the nano-architecture of metal alloys into perfection. Near the vast steelworks of Karshad, a journalist has fallen in love with the residual personality of a metallurgist, but what will happen when realliance—and forgetting—comes?
A futuristic story about a high-ranking soldier in a criminal gang who has conflicting loyalties to his monstrous boss and that boss’s innocent young son.
“Breakwater” by Simon Bestwick is a science fiction novelette about an engineer—who with her late, marine biologist husband designed an underwater research platform—caught up in the war between humans and mysterious creatures beneath the seas that are destroying coastal cities around the world.
I love villains. I really, really do. In all of their sneering, cackling, impeccably dressed glory.
I’m lucky to be a fan of genre fiction, the home of some of the best villains in popular culture. The ultimate villains—supervillains—are the children of genre fiction. The archetypal Dark Lord is most at home glowering down from spectacular towers in blasted fantasy landscapes. An all-powerful emperor of a single country is one thing—but what about an all-powerful emperor of an entire galaxy?
It is difficult to overestimate the tremendous value of editors. The contributions that authors make to their respective fields, and their impact on the readers that encounter their work, can’t be overstated either, of course—but it is equally important to remember that no truly great author goes it alone; there are always strong editors behind the scenes, shaping the individual stories themselves as well as the publishing world at large. The Hugo Awards are named for an editor, after all.
Yet I can count most of the editors I recognize by name on one hand. Even with such a limited group to choose from, only two have had an extremely significant, identifiable impact on me as a reader: Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow. I could never hope to cover everything the two have contributed to the publishing world—their careers have stretched too far and are too varied and far-reaching for me to do them full justice. However, there are several projects that are worth looking at in order to appreciate their impact and get a sense of how influential their work has been, and continues to be.
In the earliest tales, Robin Hood was many things—gambler, fighter, braggart, gentleman, con artist, master of disguise—but he was never a nobleman.
Despite scholarly fights and centuries of material to choose from, no one has ever agreed on why this change became so popular. It may have been a desire to link the legendary bandit with a real live person (such as Fulk fitz Warin or Robert Hod), or fear that the poor folks of the world might read stories of Robin’s origin and start a rebellion of their own, or simply the novelty of a man displaced and still carrying on despite it all. No matter the cause, the version of Robin that we come across most often is a figure of privilege. He’s an earl or a member of the landed gentry. He’s in the forest for now, while he waits for the rightful king and the restoration of his lands and position. With very few exceptions, modern Robin Hood stories are about a rich dude who is briefly less rich, and thankfully doesn’t hate poor people.
This week, Mark, Kareen, Ekaterin, and Enrique visit the Vorkosigans’ District to look at possible new facilities for their butter bug enterprise. They also collect some rocks for Miles’s garden and some samples of Barrayaran native vegetation for Enrique, and have lunch with Tsipis. To his great dismay, Miles was excluded from this trip because there wasn’t room for him in the lightflyer. He seems to have taken a hand in the arrangements for lunch at the Count’s Residence in Hassadar. In other news, Mark and Kareen still aren’t having sex. They would both love to, but she doesn’t feel independent enough to flaunt Barrayar’s rules while living on the planet. She’s a very honest person—not the sort of person who feels comfortable leading a double life. Mark has led a double life before at several notable points in the past, and I don’t think he was comfortable with it either. He’s frustrated with Kareen’s decisions, but he keeps that to himself and respects her boundaries.
Playwright and author Scotto Moore joins Tor.com Publishing with his debut novella Your Favorite Band Cannot Save You, a story of music, of obsession, of violence, and of madness.
Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + the Divine, Phonogram) said it best when he said that Scotto Moore “understands a key truth about Ziggy Stardust: Rock and roll messiahs are really fucking scary.”
The Deadmen are back, but so are the demons who have broken free of their eternal prison and are bent on mankind’s destruction. The worst of the lot is Vine, determined to claim their lives for taking hers. She will see the world burn…and has the perfect lure to destroy them all. One of their own.
Kalder Dupree has never known a day of mercy. Born to the cruelest of mer-races, he sacrificed himself for his crew and is in Vine’s hands. He expects no mercy or rescue.
Yet Cameron Jack is determined to set Kalder free. As a Hellchaser, it’s her calling, and she cannot allow even a not-so-innocent to be tortured for an act of kindness that spared her damnation.
To defeat evil, it sometimes takes an even worse evil, and Cameron is willing to do whatever she must to make this right. If Vine thought she had her hands full before, she hasn’t seen anything nearly as powerful as Cameron’s resolve.
Death Doesn’t Bargain is the second historical fantasy title in Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Deadman’s Cross series—available May 8th from Tor Books.
So, when people want to know what subjects you’re interested in, they’re probably expecting to hear something like “art” or “the Boston Red Sox” or “Batman.” Not “ways in which thousands or even millions of people die.” Which is why I usually keep this fascination to myself—it sounds a little weird.
But I’ve been intrigued by plagues, pandemics, and epidemiology for decades now. Plague, Inc. was on my phone until I realized that this game was taking up time I needed to reserve for things like “work,” “eating,” and “sleep.” The Pandemic board game is played more frequently than any other at my house. And yes, I get a flu shot every year (and if you don’t have specific medical reasons to avoid it, you should too).
It was a book that first got me intrigued—infected me, you might say (if you have a weakness for puns, which I do). Books have taught me the facts of these diseases and about the incredible drama surrounding them, both in fiction and in reality.
Now that Solo: A Star Wars Story is about to hit theaters, the world is primed for more Han and Lando adventures—
—no, wait, I have to stop myself. The world has always been primed for more Han and Lando adventures. And thanks to Daniel José Older’s Last Shot, the world can have what it rightly deserves.
Attention, ticket-holders.
Due to an earlier incident involving a homicidal robot uprising, Westworld park will remain closed indefinitely. There are no refunds. The waiver you pretended to read before signing absolves Delos Corporation of any liability for your untimely demise and, also, like other evil mega-corporations before it, grants troubling privacy permissions. Very troubling.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Now, saddle up. Spoilers ahead.
As with just about anything else in our culture, when it comes to the myth and lore of horses, stallions persistently get top billing. From Shadowfax to the Black Stallion to Secretariat to the Dancing White Stallions of Vienna, it’s boys, boys, boys. Mares get the standard range of sexism: gentle lady’s mare, saggy old broodmare, too slow to keep up with the boys in a race, too weak to dance the dance of the equestrian manege.
Avengers: Infinity War is almost upon us, and it promises to be an explosive experience where a full decade worth of characters and stories collide in roughly two-and-a-half hours of majesty. But despite everything that this film is trying to be, there are at least a few things it can’t be. And no matter how many characters are stuffed into this cinematic turducken, we know we won’t get to see every single one of them.
Which is sad, really. Because there are so many MCU characters we want to put in a room together. Here are just a few perfect, headcanon meetings that are unlikely to grace us on the silver screen this week.
Onward! This time, my subject is women SF writers whose surnames begin with K and who debuted in the 1970s¹.
There are four previous instalments in this series, covering women writers with last names beginning with A through F, those beginning with G, those beginning with H, and those beginning with I & J.
If reading has taught me anything, it’s that pop stars are not to be trusted. They’re all up to something—whether they’re fleshy marionettes of literal spiders from Mars (as in David Lapham’s Young Liars) or just run-of-the-mill Satanists and serial killers. And that’s just the talent. If you have the extreme misfortune of meeting a producer… don’t take their card or shake their thick, ring-encrusted hand; just run.
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, is one of my favorite books of all time—a thousand-page journey to another world that feels just a step removed from ours. It achieves this “existence-next-door” effect in a hundred different ways, but one of the most significant and pervasive is the book’s vocabulary, the very language Stephenson uses to tell his story.
Daredevil was created in 1964 by Stan Lee and Bill Everett, based on a character design by Jack Kirby. DD has one of the more ingenious superhero disguises, as his secret identity is a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock. Thanks to the early-Marvel catch-all of radiation = super-powers, young Matt was blinded by a radioactive canister, but his other senses were expanded a hundredfold.
The character was always something of a B-lister, never having the same level of prominence as Spider-Man and the Avengers and the Fantastic Four throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1980s, the title was on the verge of cancellation, when writer Roger McKenzie departed the title and his artist, Frank Miller, was given the chance to write the book. Under Miller’s guidance, the book was increased to monthly and became immensely popular, as Miller built on the darker tone McKenzie had started, and focused on DD as a city vigilante, fighting gangsters and such, in particular a minor Spider-Man villain, the Kingpin of Crime, as well as ninjas—lots of ninjas.
DD’s popularity meant that the spate of early 21st-century movies featuring Marvel characters almost had to include ol’ Hornhead.
[Muggers don’t usually wear rose oil or high heels—at least not this far from Chelsea……]
We’re excited to share the cover for Sisters of the Fire, the second book in Kim Wilkins’ Norse-flavored fantasy series. In Daughters of the Storm, five very different sisters—the warrior, the magician, the lover, the zealot, the gossip—team up against their stepbrother to save the kingdom. The series continues in Sisters of the Fire, as an old enemy threatens the fragile peace they have built…
Tor Books and Tor.com are excited to announce that Robert Jordan’s iconic work of fantasy, The Wheel of Time, has been named as one of American’s 100 most beloved books by PBS’ Great American Read series!
Jordan’s epic will be included in its entirety (all 10,173 pages!) making it the longest entry in the list of 100 books vying to be named America’s favorite in PBS’ Great American Read, an eight-part television and online series, hosted by Meredith Vieira and designed to spark a national conversation about reading.
In the very first moments of the premiere of Black Lightning, a bleeding Jefferson Pierce lies face-up in a bathtub, open wounds gushing all over him, as he gazes into his wife Lynn’s eyes and promises that he will leave the superhero game for good.
Obviously, if you’re watching a show called Black Lightning, it’s because you assume that he will never keep this promise. Part of us may even cruelly want to see how long Jefferson can keep toeing the line between his own sense of duty and the concerns of his family. How does one keep the streets clean and keep their family’s minds at ease at the same time? Many a superhero show would have their protagonist hide from that pressure for as long as they possibly could.
This show takes a different path—not only does Lynn already know the score, but Jefferson’s daughters Anissa and Jennifer learn about his superhero moonlighting quite early compared to other shows of its kind, and they also learn that they’re all irrevocably connected to the troubled history of their hometown itself. As it stands, they have very little choice about whether they will be forced to respond to that history—the only questions are how, and how much will be asked of them.
