Deep Ones and naga and hippos, oh my! Tor.com Publishing has all of your science fiction and fantasy summer fun lined up, from the next installments in some of our most popular and beloved series (more Murderbot!) to new books by Karl Schroeder, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Brian McClellan, and P. Djèlí Clark. We’re also publishing one of the year’s most anticipated debuts, Witchmark by C.L. Polk, and bringing you the prequel to John Scalzi’s Lock In, the story of how Haden’s Syndrome began, for the first time in print. Check out the covers for all of our books from May through August below and start planning your summer reading list now!
All titles will be available world-wide in print, ebook, and audio. As always, our ebooks are DRM-free.
Black Helicopters
Written by Caitlín R. Kiernan
Design by Christine Foltzer
Photo © Don Seymour/Getty Images.
Available May 1st
What’s it about?
A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original.
Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency’s world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable.
Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters.
An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future.
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Black Helicopters
Artificial Condition (Murderbot Diaries #2)
Written by Martha Wells
Illustrated by Jaime Jones
Designed by Christine Foltzer
Available May 8th
What’s it about?
It has a dark past—one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more.
Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue.
What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…
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In Our Own Worlds eBook Bundle
The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang
A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy
Available May 15th
What’s it about?
In celebration of Pride, Tor.com Publishing presents four critically acclaimed novellas featuring LGBTQ+ characters. In these stories you’ll find reflections of queer identity both as it exists in our world and in imagined worlds from queer authors, augmenting lived experiences with fantastical flourishes, magical monks, alternate realities, time travel, and demonic deer.
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American Hippo
Written by Sarah Gailey
Illustrated by Gregory Manchess
Designed by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Available May 22nd
What’s it about?
In 2017 Sarah Gailey made her debut with River of Teeth and Taste of Marrow, two action-packed novellas that introduced readers to an alternate America in which hippos rule the colossal swamp that was once the Mississippi River. Now readers have the chance to own both novellas in a single, beautiful volume.
Years ago, in an America that never was, the United States government introduced herds of hippos to the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This plan failed to take into account some key facts about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.
By the 1890s, the vast bayou that was once America’s greatest waterway belongs to feral hippos, and Winslow Houndstooth has been contracted to take it back. To do so, he will gather a crew of the damnedest cons, outlaws, and assassins to ever ride a hippo. American Hippo is the story of their fortunes, their failures, and his revenge.
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Outbreak (Nightshades #3)
Written by Melissa F. Olson
Designed by Fort
Photos © Getty Images
Available June 5th
What’s it about?
The Chicago field office of the Bureau of Preternatural Investigation is facing its deadliest challenge, yet—internal investigation! Alex and Lindy are on the hook, and on the run.
But when all of the BPI’s captive vampires are broken free from their maximum security prison, and Hector finally steps out of the shadows, Alex must use every trick to stay ahead of both the BPI and the world’s most dangerous shade.
Confrontation is inevitable. Success is not.
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Witchmark
Written by C. L. Polk
Illustrated and designed by Will Staehle
Available June 19th
What’s it about?
In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own.
Magic marked Miles Singer for suffering the day he was born, doomed either to be enslaved to his family’s interest or to be committed to a witches’ asylum. He went to war to escape his destiny and came home a different man, but he couldn’t leave his past behind. The war between Aeland and Laneer leaves men changed, strangers to their friends and family, but even after faking his own death and reinventing himself as a doctor at a cash-strapped veterans’ hospital, Miles can’t hide what he truly is.
When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.
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Deep Roots (The Innsmouth Legacy #2)
Written by Ruthanna Emrys
Illustrated by John Jude Palencar
Designed by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Available July 10th
What’s it about?
Aphra Marsh, descendant of the People of the Water, has survived Deep One internment camps and made a grudging peace with the government that destroyed her home and exterminated her people on land. Deep Roots continues Aphra’s journey to rebuild her life and family on land, as she tracks down long-lost relatives. She must repopulate Innsmouth or risk seeing it torn down by greedy developers, but as she searches she discovers that people have been going missing. She will have to unravel the mystery, or risk seeing her way of life slip away.
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The Expert System’s Brother
Written by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Illustrated by Raphael Lacoste
Designed by Christine Foltzer
Available July 17th
What’s it about?
After an unfortunate accident, Handry is forced to wander a world he doesn’t understand, searching for meaning. He soon discovers that the life he thought he knew is far stranger than he could even possibly imagine.
Can an unlikely saviour provide the answers to the questions he barely comprehends?
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The Expert Systems Brother
Unlocked
Written by John Scalzi
Designed by Peter Lutjen
Available July 24th
What’s it about?
Discover the history of Haden’s Syndrome, the virus that created the world of John Scalzi’s inventive near-future thrillers Lock In and Head On, in the prequel novella Unlocked.
Not long from now, a virus will sweep the globe. Most will suffer no worse than flu-like symptoms, but an unlucky one percent will be changed forever. Hundreds of millions become “locked in”, awake, aware, but completely unable to control their bodies. This is the story of the doctors, scientists, engineers, politicians, and heroes who remade the world. It is the story of the chaotic outbreak, the fight for a cure, the changes that followed. It is an oral history, straight from the mouths of those who survived the most dynamic period in human history.
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Unlocked
The Descent of Monsters (The Tensorate Series)
Written by JY Yang
Illustrated by Yuko Shimizu
Designed by Christine Foltzer
Available July 31st
What’s it about?
Something terrible happened at the Rewar Teng Institute of Experimental Methods. When the Tensorate’s investigators arrived, they found a sea of blood and bones as far as the eye could see. One of the institute’s experiments got loose, and its rage left no survivors. The investigators returned to the capital with few clues and two prisoners: the terrorist leader Sanao Akeha and a companion known only as Rider.
Investigator Chuwan faces a puzzle. What really happened at the institute? What drew the Machinists there? What are her superiors trying to cover up? And why does she feel as if her strange dreams are forcing her down a narrowing path she cannot escape?
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Rogue Protocol (Murderbot Diaries #3)
Written by Martha Wells
Illustrated by Jaime Jones
Designed by Christine Foltzer
Available August 7th
What’s it about?
Sci-fi’s favorite antisocial A.I. is back on a mission. The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah’s SecUnit is.
And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good.
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The Million
Written by Karl Schroeder
Illustrated by Jan Wessbecher
Designed by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Available August 14th
What’s it about?
Every thirty years, ten billion visitors overrun Earth during one month of madness: partying, polluting, and brawling. In between, the world is ruled by the Million; the inheritors and custodians of all of humanity’s wealth and history, they lead unimaginable lives of privilege and wealth, and they see it as their due.
Gavin Penn-of-Chaffee is an illegal child—a visitor hidden among the Million. When the family that raised him in secret is torn apart, Gavin must impersonate a dead boy to survive. What he doesn’t know is that his new identity is expected at the School of Auditors—the Million’s feared police force, sworn to find and capture outcasts like him to keep the peace. In order to solve the murder of his adoptive father, Gavin must keep his disguise and his wits intact within the stronghold of those threatened by his very existence.
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The Black God’s Drums
Written by P. Djèlí Clark
Illustrated by Chris McGrath
Designed by Christine Foltzer
Available August 21st
What’s it about?
In an alternate New Orleans caught in the tangle of the American Civil War, the wall-scaling girl named Creeper yearns to escape the streets for the air – in particular, by earning a spot on-board the airship Midnight Robber. Creeper plans to earn Captain Ann-Marie’s trust with information she discovers about a Haitian scientist and a mysterious weapon he calls The Black God’s Drums.
But Creeper also has a secret herself: Oya, the African orisha of the wind and storms, speaks inside her head, and may have her own ulterior motivations.
Soon, Creeper, Oya, and the crew of the Midnight Robber are pulled into a perilous mission aimed to stop the Black God’s Drums from being unleashed and wiping out the entirety of New Orleans.
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The Black God's Drums
War Cry
Written by Brian McClellan
Illustrated by Richard Anderson
Designed by Christine Foltzer
Available August 28th
What’s it about?
Teado is a Changer, a shape-shifting military asset trained to win wars. His platoon has been stationed in the Bavares high plains for years, stranded. As they ration supplies and scan the airwaves for news, any news, their numbers dwindle. He’s not sure how much time they have left.
Desperate and starving, armed with aging, faulting equipment, the team jumps at the chance for a risky resupply mission, even if it means not all of them might come. What they discover could change the course of the war.
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It’s an exciting new season for us, but we’re already looking ahead to all the great books we’ve got planned for Fall – check out a preview of what’s to come below!
Finding Baba Yaga
Written by Jane Yolen
Designed by Jamie Stafford-Hill
Available October 30th
What’s it about?
You think you know this story.
You do not.
A harsh, controlling father. A quiescent mother. A house that feels like anything but a home. Natasha gathers the strength to leave, and comes upon a little house in the wood: A house that walks about on chicken feet and is inhabited by a fairy tale witch. In finding Baba Yaga, Natasha finds her voice, her power, herself….
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