A new science fiction adventure from the author of the Three-Body Trilogy, Cixin Lu’s Ball Lightning is a fast-paced story of what happens when the beauty of scientific inquiry runs up against the drive to harness new discoveries with no consideration of their possible consequences.
We’re excited to share an excerpt from the audiobook below, translated by Joel Martinsen and read by Feodor Chin.
Tor Books has acquired two novels from Annalee Newitz, Lambda Award-winning author of Autonomous, in addition to another novel slated for Fall 2019.
The Future of Another Timeline, publishing in Fall 2019, is a mind-bending and thought-provoking speculative thriller about a group of time-traveling geologists who are trying to prevent a dark future from coming to pass.
Fall of 2021 will see the release of The Terraformers, a multi-generational tale of love and politics, set against the backdrop of an awe-inspiring feat of environmental science. This is a book about building good ecosystems, fighting natural disasters, and falling in love. It’s a big, sweeping future-historical novel driven by the idealistic visions and emotions of its characters as well as by ideas about environmentalism and urban social structures the author has researched and written about extensively in her career as a science journalist and author.
There will be another novel from Newitz in 2023, details forthcoming.
Newitz is the author of four books: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction; She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Geeky Stuff; Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, and Autonomous. The latter, in addition to winning the Lambda Award, was also nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
One thing that makes George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series a unique superhero tale is that its superpowered heroes and villains all share the same origin story: when an alien virus fell from the skies on September 15, 1946, its effects spread like the shuffling of a deck of cards. Ninety percent of those who contracted it drew the black queen and died in a brutal fashion; 9% suffered the twisted transformations that marked them as jokers; and a mere 1% became the aces, afforded extraordinary powers.
It may not surprise you to learn that many of the authors of the Wild Cards grew up reading classic comic books. As part of a special Wild Cards event hosted by George R.R. Martin in August 2017, authors including Melinda Snodgrass, the late Victor Milán, Walton Simons, Carrie Vaughn, and more shared their favorite childhood superheroes—including some you may not have heard of.
For two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s best science fiction & fantasy books.
A little bit of horror, a little bit of near-future weirdness, a little bit of nonfiction, a little bit of Catwoman … this month’s in-between books are delightfully all over the place. A Short Film About Disappointment is entirely told in movie reviews. Severance has a cover the color of a pink slip. An Informal History of the Hugos does what it says on the tin. You’ve got stories from Ben Marcus and Abbey Mei Otis; a fabulist take on Moby-Dick from Jeffrey Ford; epic Nordic historical fiction; and Yellow Submarine. There’s truly something for everyone.
We’re excited to share the cover for Tessa Gratton’s forthcoming novel Lady Hotspur, the follow-up to The Queens of Innis Lear. An epic fantasy for fans of BBC’s The Hollow Crown, but with a timely twist of ignored prophecies and luminous women determined to carve a place for themselves against the punishing landscape of history.
There’s no catchy saying about August—maybe we’re just too hot to think of one—but from the looks of this SF list, it’s time to take your imagination to a dark (maybe cool?) place. The world is ending, or at least being direly threatened, in all kinds of ways this month: carnivorous giants, the end of the species, scary alternate futures, superpowered soldiers, televised cage fights, and so much more. (You can also revisit the Cylon threat in the Battlestar Galactica oral history So Say We All.) It’s sort of a choose-your-own-adventure of conflict and high-stakes action. Enjoy!
Steal the Stars, Tor Labs and Gideon Media’s sci-fi/noir alien heist love story, premiered a year ago. For the audio drama’s one-year anniversary, Macmillan Podcasts and Tor Labs have a special treat for fans of the series: a new prequel episode, “Deputy.” Recorded at the Brooklyn Podcast Festival in 2017, “Deputy” was previously available only as a special feature on the Steal the Stars e-bundle.
We are getting epic this month. Or at least fantastical. From shapeshifters to demons to mind-controlling elves, magic and the supernatural are making it a rough summer for do-gooders, lords, sorceresses, and the like. Join up with a young, talented thief in Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside; escape sweltering New Orleans for an airship ride in The Black God’s Drums; find out what it’s like to be a cruel princess’s body double in Mirage; or head back to the world of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunters in Stygian. Which fantastical country would you like to visit first?
The winners of the 2018 Seiun Awards were announced July 21 by Duracon, the 57th Japanese Science Fiction Convention. Among them was Sleeping Giants, the first novel in Sylvain Neuvel’s Themis Files series, translated by Chiori Sada (Tokyo Sogensha), and named Best Translated Novel.
The Seiun Awards were founded in 1970, and are voted on by the participants of the annual Japan Science Fiction Convention. (While Seiun literally means “nebula” in Japanese, the award is not affiliated with the Nebulas.) Previous award winners in the Translated Novel category include Peter Tieryas, Ann Leckie, Andy Weir, and more.
The finalists for the 2018 World Fantasy Awards have been announced, including Lifetime Achievement recipients Charles de Lint and Elizabeth Wollheim. The winners of the 2018 World Fantasy Awards will be announced at the World Fantasy Convention, November 1-4, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. This year’s themes are “Port in a Storm,” including a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
The full list of finalists follows.
“If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams… And from there, it’s easy to control our entire lives.”
We’re excited to share the cover and a preview excerpt from Charlie Jane Anders’ The City in The Middle of the Night, a haunting, futuristic tale of a young girl who just might save humanity—if she can stay alive.
In Rebecca Roanhorse’s award winning story “Welcome To Your Authentic Indian Experience(TM)”, a tour guide leads virtual reality “experiences” for tourists who want to know what it’s like to be Native American. Think Black Mirror meets Westworld.
Originally published in Apex Magazine in August 2017, Roanhorse’s story is now kicking off the third season of the short fiction podcast LeVar Burton Reads, in which host LeVar Burton invites you to take a break from your daily life, and dive into a great story. LeVar’s narration blends with gorgeous soundscapes to bring stories by Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury and more to life. We’re excited to share an exclusive clip from “Welcome To Your Authentic Indian Experience(TM)” below!
The winner of the 32nd annual Arthur C. Clarke Award was announced today at a special ceremony held at Foyles’ flagship store in London. Anne Charnock was honored with the UK’s most prestigious award for science fiction literature for her novel Dreams Before the Start of Time, a near-future tale that explores the intended and unintended consequences of reproductive technology when infertility is a thing of the past.
“Humanity’s attitudes to reproduction have been core to science fiction at least as far back as Frankenstein,” Andrew M. Butler, chair of judges for the 2018 award, said in the official announcement. “Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time explores the theme with a delightfully rich but unshowy intergenerational novel that demands rereading.” Award director Tom Hunter added: “This is a much-deserved win for a writer whose time has definitely come. Charnock’s multi-generational vision of expanding human reproductive technologies is smart, science-literate fiction that embraces the challenge of humanising big ethical questions, and succeeds by exploring possible future scenarios that feel utterly real.”
San Diego Comic-Con begins on July 18th, and it is bigger and better than ever this year! Tor Books and Tor.com Publishing are proud to announce a long list of programming, so see below for panels, signings, giveaways, author meet & greets with Nerdist, and more!
