Books in the Mail (W/E 2016-03-12)

It is Sunday, so that means I post the books I received the weeks before

Shattered Spear (The Lost Stars #4) by Jack Campbell (Ace Hardcover 05/03/2016) – Fourth installment of the side-quel(?) parallel series to Campbell’s extremely popular The Lost Fleet series. I’ve read a handful of the books in the series and enjoyed them, but the series has sort of fallen to the back burner.

The New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Fleet returns to the “strong saga”* of a rebellion against a totalitarian regime and the determination of two people to create a better future in the farthest reaches of the colonized galaxy…

The Syndicate Worlds continue to splinter as more star systems pledge allegiance to President Gwen Iceni, General Artur Drakon, and the new government they’re establishing at Midway. But the toxic legacy of Syndicate rule continues to undermine their efforts as the rebels encounter difficulty trusting one another and believing their new leaders’ promises of freedom from tyranny.

Before Iceni and Drakon can put their house in order, they must deal with an even greater threat. An enigma warship has appeared and vanished near a Syndic colony. If the aliens are capable of jumping into other human-occupied star systems, then billions of people could be vulnerable to a hostile invasion fleet anywhere they choose to strike.

But an even greater vulnerability lies with Iceni and Drakon, as a once-trusted adviser-turned-saboteur plans revenge…

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (Crown Hardcover 08/02/2016) – New SF Thriller from Crouch, whose popular Wayward Pines trilogy was adapted for television in Summer 2015. The marketing material sent with this book (which came in a big, black bubble envelope) indicates this is the book Crouch has been working his life to finish.

“Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious.

Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.

Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

From the author of the bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, Dark Matter is a brilliantly plotted tale that is at once sweeping and intimate, mind-bendingly strange and profoundly human—a relentlessly surprising science-fiction thriller about choices, paths not taken, and how far we’ll go to claim the lives we dream of.

Children of the Earth and Sky by Guy Gavriel Kay (New American Library, Hardcover 05/10/2016) – A new novel from Guy Gavriel Kay is always cause for celebration. I’m a few novels behind, but I’ve never been disappointed by anything he’s written.


The bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, Guy Gavriel Kay is back with a new book, set in a world inspired by the conflicts and dramas of Renaissance Europe. Against this tumultuous backdrop the lives of men and women unfold on the borderlands—where empires and faiths collide.

From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates, a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different people: a young artist traveling to the dangerous east to paint the grand khalif at his request—and possibly to do more—and a fiercely intelligent, angry woman, posing as a doctor’s wife, but sent by Seressa as a spy.

The trading ship that carries them is commanded by the accomplished younger son of a merchant family, ambivalent about the life he’s been born to live. And farther east a boy trains to become a soldier in the elite infantry of the khalif—to win glory in the war everyone knows is coming.

As these lives entwine, their fates—and those of many others—will hang in the balance, when the khalif sends out his massive army to take the great fortress that is the gateway to the western world...

Books in the Mail (W/E 2013-03-16)

A smattering of books this week, all except one of them is from the fine folks at Tor. One of this is a must read for me, which I'm sure will be easy enough to determine.


Range of Ghosts (The Eternal Sky #2) by Elizabeth Bear (Tor, Hardcover 03/17/2013) – I read the opening novel in this sequence last year and was blown away


The Shattered Pillars is the second book of Bear’s The Eternal Sky trilogy and the sequel to Range of Ghosts. Set in a world drawn from our own great Asian Steppes, this saga of magic, politics and war sets Re-Temur, the exiled heir to the great Khagan and his friend Sarmarkar, a Wizard of Tsarepheth, against dark forces determined to conquer all the great Empires along the Celedon Road.

Elizabeth Bear is an astonishing writer, whose prose draws you into strange and wonderful worlds, and makes you care deeply about the people and the stories she tells. The world of The Eternal Sky is broadly and deeply created—her award-nominated novella, "Bone and Jewel Creatures" is also set there.

The Gate Thief by Orson Scott Card (Tor Hardcover 03/19/2013) – Second installment in Card’s Urban Fantasy which began with The Lost Gate



In this sequel to The Lost Gate, bestselling author Orson Scott Card continues his fantastic tale of the Mages of Westil who live in exile on Earth.

Here on Earth, Danny North is still in high school, yet he holds in his heart and mind all the stolen outselves of thirteen centuries of gatemages. The Families still want to kill him if they can't control him…and they can't control him. He is far too powerful.

And on Westil, Wad is now nearly powerless—he lost everything to Danny in their struggle. Even if he can survive the revenge of his enemies, he still must somehow make peace with the Gatemage Daniel North.

For when Danny took that power from Loki, he also took the responsibility for the Great Gates. And when he comes face-to-face with the mages who call themselves Bel and Ishtoreth, he will come to understand just why Loki closed the gates all those centuries ago.


The Shape Stealer by Lee Carroll (Tor Trade Paperback 03/05/2013) – Third book in to the Carroll’s sequence (who is a pseudonym for the husband and wife author team of Carol Goodman and Lee Slonimisky) which began with, Black Swan Rising, which Mark enjoyed when it published in the UK last year.

Jewelry designer Garet James is the Watchtower—the last in a long line of powerful women sworn to protect the world from evil. Although she had once defeated evil in New York City, her pursuit of her true love, the 400-year-old vampire Will Hughes, has now unleashed an age-old evil onto the modern world, and the entire planet is at risk.

Marduk, the ageless descendant of a demonic Babylonian deity, is now loose in Paris. He has joined forces with the villainous John Dee in a plan to destroy the world’s economy and plunge the entire world into chaos.

To fight this threat, Garet enlists the help of a modern-day band of knights who are dedicated to preserving the sanctity of the timeline. As she and her allies face this threat, new challenges arise in the form of a rival faction of knights who will stop at nothing to bring about the destruction of everything Garet holds dear.

River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay (Roc, Trade Paperback 04/02/2013) – Kay is a magnificent writer, I’ve enjoyed all of what I’ve read by him. This is set in the same world as Under Heaven though it seems as if it could stand on its own. This is the finished copy of the ARC I received back in January.

In his critically acclaimed novel Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay told a vivid and powerful story inspired by China’s Tang Dynasty. Now, the international bestselling and multiple award-winning author revisits that invented setting four centuries later with an epic of prideful emperors, battling courtiers, bandits and soldiers, nomadic invasions, and a woman battling in her own way, to find a new place for women in the world – a world inspired this time by the glittering, decadent Song Dynasty.



Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate of Kitai. That moment on a lonely road changed his life—in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later—and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles towards the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north.
Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor—and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has.

In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading to events no one could have foretold, under the river of stars.



Queen Victoria's Book of Spells: An Anthology of Gaslamp Fantasy by Ellen Datlow and Terry Windling (Tor, Trade Paperback 03/17/2013) – Datlow and Windling are the pre-eminent short-fiction editorial duo, for years they edited the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthology as well as many, many themed anthologies.


“Gaslamp Fantasy,” or historical fantasy set in a magical version of the nineteenth century, has long been popular with readers and writers alike. A number of wonderful fantasy novels, including  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, and The Prestige by Christopher Priest, owe their inspiration to works by nineteenth-century writers ranging from Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Meredith to Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and William Morris. And, of course, the entire steampunk genre and subculture owes more than a little to literature inspired by this period.

Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells is an anthology for everyone who loves these works of neo-Victorian fiction, and wishes to explore the wide variety of ways that modern fantasists are using nineteenth-century settings, characters, and themes. These approaches stretch from steampunk fiction to the Austen-and-Trollope inspired works that some critics call Fantasy of Manners, all of which fit under the larger umbrella of Gaslamp Fantasy. The result is eighteen stories by experts from the fantasy, horror, mainstream, and young adult fields, including both bestselling writers and exciting new talents such as Elizabeth Bear, James Blaylock, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner, Tanith Lee, Gregory Maguire, Delia Sherman, and Catherynne M. Valente, who present a bewitching vision of a nineteenth century invested (or cursed!) with magic.

• “The Fairy Enterprise” by Jeffrey Ford
• “From the Catalogue of the Pavilion of the Uncanny and Marvelous, Scheduled for Premiere at the Great Exhibition (Before the Fire)” by Genevieve Valentine
• “The Memory Book” by Maureen McHugh
• “Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells” by Delia Sherman
• “La Reine D’Enfer” by Kathe Koja
• “Briar Rose” by Elizabeth Wein
• “The Governess” by Elizabeth Bear
• “Smithfield” by James P. Blaylock
• “The Unwanted Women of Surrey” by Kaaron Warren
• “Charged” by Leanna Renee Hieber
• “Mr. Splitfoot” by Dale Bailey
• “Phosperous” by Veronica Schanoes
• “We Without Us Were Shadows” by Catherynne M. Valente
• “The Vital Importance of the Superficial” by Ellen Kushner and Caroline Stevermer
• “The Jewel in the Toad Queen’s Crown” by Jane Yolen
• “A Few Twigs He Left Behind” by Gregory Maguire
• “Their Monstrous Minds” by Tanith Lee
• “Estella Saves the Village” by Theodora Goss

Kay Excperted, Silverberg and Manieri Reviewed at SFFWorld

Two weeks in a row with one of these “new reviews at SFFWorld” posts from me? Say it ain’t so! In addition to the reviews, we’ve also posted an excerpt of Guy Gavriel Kay’s forthcoming novel River of Stars:

Mark returns to a classic fantasy milieu with a series of short stories in Robert Silverberg’s Tales of Majipoor:

… For those who don’t know the books, the Valentine’s Castle series is Silverberg’s take on a planetary romance, echoing a Jack Vance or a Gene Wolfe style, where the glory is in not so much the plot as the luxuriance of the nomenclature and the opulence of the varied environments. Whole dynasties are covered in a sentence, tales that could be the basis of a separate novel. As the book often reminds us, Majipoor is a big planet, which can lead to a variety of unusual things to be seen and places that are not visited very often.

…

Whether it is true or not that Tales of Majipoor can be said to be the work of an author treading water, it must be said that, at the very least, it is entertaining. Ultimately, this is a collection that serves its purpose: it introduces potential new readers to the world of Majipoor and, for the long-term fan, collects the remaining shorter Majipoor fiction together from disparate (and these days some quite hard to get) sources. They vary in length and importance, but there’s not a total dud amongst them, although there’s more than one that seems to finish without a proper conclusion.

Not every book works for every reader, such is the case with Evie Manieri’s Blood's Pride, which is also the first novel of The Shattered Kingdoms:

Manieri has created an interesting world that seems to have parts of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders novels (the Dead Ones/Norlanders ride the equivalent of dragons) and parts of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt (a forming rebellion amongst those under the heel of repressive overlords). The Norlanders also communicate with each other through telepathy, for the most part. While the world is constructed fairly well, the plot seemed a bit uneven throughout the novel. What I found the most confounding about the relationship between the Norlander overlords and their slave Shadari was a lack of fear. Outside of the initial devastating attack the Norlanders made on the Shadari, I didn’t get a sense that there were very high stakes should the Shadari just stand up for themselves.

Books in the Mail (W/E 2013-01-05)

Only one book this week and since this past week was the first full week in 2013, I’ll give the intro-spiel since the last time I did the whole preface to the Books in the Mail post was September 2012 ….

As a reviewer for SFFWorld and maybe because of this blog, I receive a lot of books for review from various publishers. Since I can't possibly read everything that arrives, I figure the least I can do (like some of my fellow bloggers) is mention the books I receive for review on the blog to at least acknowledge the books even if I don't read them.

Some publishers are on a very predictable schedule of releases, making this blog post fairly easy to compose. For example, the fine folks at DAW publish exactly 3 mass market paperbacks a month and often, one of those books is a themed anthology of short stories, and most often, they send their books about a month prior to the actual publication date.

Sometimes I get one or two books, other weeks I'll get nearly a dozen books. Some weeks, I’ll receive a finished (i.e. the version people see on bookshelves) copy of a book for which I received an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) weeks or months prior to the actual publication of the book. Sometimes I'll want to read everything that arrives, other weeks, the books immediately go into the "I'll never read this book" pile, while still others go into the nebulous "maybe-I'll-read-it-category." More often than not, it is a mix of books that appeal to me at different levels (i.e. from "this book holds ZERO appeal for me" to "I cannot WAIT to read this book yesterday"). Have a guess in the comments about which book fits my reading labels “I’ll Never Read…” “Zero Appeal” or “cannot wait” "maybe I'll get to it later" and so forth...

Here's the rundown of what arrived either in the mailbox, in front of my garage (where most packages from USPS and UPS are placed) or on my doorstep...

River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay (Roc, Trade Paperback 04/02/2013) – Kay is a magnificent writer, I’ve enjoyed all of what I’ve read by him. This is set in the same world as Under Heaven though it seems as if it could stand on its own.

In his critically acclaimed novel Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay told a vivid and powerful story inspired by China’s Tang Dynasty. Now, the international bestselling and multiple award-winning author revisits that invented setting four centuries later with an epic of prideful emperors, battling courtiers, bandits and soldiers, nomadic invasions, and a woman battling in her own way, to find a new place for women in the world – a world inspired this time by the glittering, decadent Song Dynasty.



Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate of Kitai. That moment on a lonely road changed his life—in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later—and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles towards the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north.
Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor—and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has.

In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading to events no one could have foretold, under the river of stars.

Books in the Mail (W/E 09/04/2010)

The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor; How to Live in a Science Fictional World by Charles Yu; The Living Dead 2 edited by John Joseph Adams; Zendegi by Greg Egan; Esperanza by Trish J. MacGregor; and Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (TPB reissue, not pictured, to go along with the TPB reissue of Kay's Sailing to Sarantium as a matching set for The Sarantine Mosaic).

Books in the Mail (W/E 08/14/2010)

Fear the Alien edited by Christian Dunn; Temple of the Serpent by C.L. Werner; Elfsorrow and Shadowheart by James Barclay (I was chuffed to see my name in the acknowledgments!); Factotum by D.M. Cornish (I read the first, have the the third, need the second but I'd like to revisit the books), Sailing to Sarantium (re-issue) by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Last Page by Anthony Huso (I'm really looking forward to this one); and Prospero in Hell by L. Jagi Lamplighter.