If you like the Green Man mythos but wish it were gayer, if you’re into monster hunting and rainy days and libraries, if you love what Naomi Novik loves, Tor.com Publishing has got your back in 2019. We’re proud to announce that we’ve acquired Emily Tesh’s lush, romantic debut novella Silver in the Wood. Because we love you and we know what it is to be impatient, we’ve also got its stunning cover right here for you to see!
Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce that consulting editor Ellen Datlow has acquired Ormeshadow, an historical novella by Priya Sharma about a farming family, the Belmans; of their estrangements, jealousies, adultery, abuse, and suicide, as seen through the eyes of Gideon Belman from childhood to young man. The Belman fabled fortune and personal myths are rooted in the Orme, land named from the Norse word dragon. The Orme legends become a cornerstone for Gideon when he loses everything that he loves.
Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce that it’s acquired World English rights to Saad Z. Hossain’s The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday.
When the djinn king Melek Ahmer wakes up after millennia of imprisoned slumber, he finds a world vastly different from what he remembers. Arrogant and bombastic, he comes down the mountain expecting an easy conquest: the wealthy, spectacular city state of Kathmandu, ruled by the all-knowing, all-seeing tyrant AI Karma. To his surprise, he finds that Katjmandu is a cut-price paradise, where citizens want for nothing and even the dregs of society are distinctly unwilling to revolt.
Prison without guards? Prison with no memories? Prison with only your lover as company? Bee is determined to escape—but how, when every moment is spent racing to survive?
Consulting editor Christie Yant’s first acquisition for Tor.com Publishing is award-winning author Vylar Kaftan’s novella Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water, a claustrophobic science fiction love story that goes to surprising places.
Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce that consulting editor Ellen Datlow has acquired a new novella from award-winning author C. S. E. Cooney.
In Desdemona and the Deep, the spoiled daughter of a rich mining family must retrieve the tithe of men her father promised to the world below. On the surface, her world is rife with industrial pollution that ruins the health of poor factory workers while the idle rich indulge themselves in unheard-of luxury. Below are goblins, mysterious kingdoms, and an entirely different hierarchy.
In 2017, Murderbot broke onto the SF/F scene with All Systems Red, the first in Martha Wells’ wryly funny, breakneck scifi series about a deadly robotic construct who frees itself from its governor module… in order to double down on grumpily bingeing TV shows on its media feed and studiously avoiding its curious human crew. By turns thrilling and touching, the Murderbot Diaries are both a shoot ’em up rollicking space adventure and a smart, sneakily intimate portrait of how we construct our identities through storytelling and the surprising places where humanity can be found.
With the initial novella series wrapping up with Exit Strategy in October 2018 (and Rogue Protocol before that in August 2018), Murderbot fans have been wondering what’s next for scifi’s most relatable robotic construct.
Tor.com Publishing and Senior Editor Lee Harris are proud to announce that Murderbot will return, making its full-length debut in a new novel.
When I first finished Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby, I wanted to burn the world down. The story of two gifted siblings with extraordinary power whose childhoods are destroyed by structural racism and brutality and whose futures might alter the world, it’s a pulls-no-stops, nitrous-fueled novella that reads like The Fifth Season meets Attack the Block. I’m proud to announce that Tor.com Publishing has acquired World English rights, in a deal negotiated by Noah Ballard at Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Riot Baby is rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger: both a global dystopian narrative that calls on Afrofuturism and resistance ideology and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. I’m thrilled to be editing Tochi in his adult debut and cannot wait for readers to discover these characters.
It’s no accident we’ve chosen to announce this acquisition on Juneteenth. Here’s Tochi on why:
She lived where the railway tracks met the saltpan, on the Ahri side of the shadowline. In the old days, when people still talked about her, she was known as the end-of-the-line woman.
When I came across these eerie, spare opening lines, I knew I owed it to myself to put everything else aside and find out what came next, which turned out be a novella of unusual and unsettling beauty.
Tor.com Publishing is proud to announce the acquisition of debut author Kerstin Hall’s The Border Keeper, a lyrical underworld narrative about loss and renewal that begins around a desolate, near-forgotten border to the land of the dead. Vasethe, a man with a troubled past, comes to seek a favor from a goddess who is not what she seems, and must enter the nine hundred and ninety-nine realms of Mkalis, the world of spirits, where gods and demons rage in an endless war.
“That girl’s got more wrong notions than a barn owl’s got mean looks.”
Esther is a stowaway. She’s hidden herself away in the Librarian’s book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her—a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda. The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.
Tor.com Publishing is pleased to announce that acquiring editor Justin Landon and Sarah Gailey are reuniting with Upright Women Wanted, a dystopian scifi western about love, resistance, and revolution. (No hippos this time, we think.)
If you’ve recently read and raved about Space Opera, watch out for more from author Catherynne M. Valente next year! Jonathan Strahan has acquired her new novella, Green Like Dying, for Tor.com Publishing. The novella returns to Garbagetown, the world of her Theodore Sturgeon Award-winning novelette “The Future Is Blue,” and an outcast girl named Tetley.
Said the author:
Two years and a bit of pocket change ago, Jonathan Strahan asked me to contribute a story to his new anthology of climate change stories, Drowned Worlds. I was tremendously excited—one of my favorite things as an artist is to be asked to create something far outside my wheelhouse. I had no plans to write about rising sea levels, I don’t write much dystopian fiction, it’s just not what I do. Which thrilled me! Some stories would exist no matter what; some come to be by luck and chance, and “The Future Is Blue” is definitely the latter.
Jonathan Strahan has acquired Greg Egan’s next novella, Perihelion Summer, for Tor.com Publishing!
Taraxippus is coming: a black hole one tenth the mass of the sun is about to enter the solar system.
Matt and his friends are taking no chances. They board a mobile aquaculture rig, the Mandjet, self-sustaining in food, power and fresh water, and decide to sit out the encounter off-shore. As Taraxippus draws nearer, new observations throw the original predictions for its trajectory into doubt, and by the time it leaves the solar system, the conditions of life across the globe will be changed forever.
Perihelion Summer is the story of people struggling to adapt to a suddenly alien environment, and the friendships and alliances they forge as they try to find their way in a world where the old maps have lost their meaning.
Tor.com Publishing has bought The Woman at the Tower Window, a radical retelling of a classic damsel in distress fairytale from one of the genre’s luminaries that upends the idea of the sheltered princess waiting for her prince. Here, Rapunzel is a young woman who has retreated from the world by choice. Her older lover, a female professor of anthropology, is a witch only in the eyes of her suitor, a man who feverishly misreads the situation.
P. Djèlí Clark has already delighted Tor.com readers with tales of an otherworldly Cairo in “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” and Tor.com Publishing is thrilled to announce that it will be publishing not one but two novellas from him: The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015.
