New Procurements after my last major bookstore visit

With my limited book buying pledge taking effect in a few days this will be the last major haul of books I'll be purchasing for a while, but there are also a couple of review copies that showed up in the post this week including what I'll refer to as "the Mystery book". It is pictured below, but you can't tell at all what it is since it is a bound manuscript, which is a manuscript printed on normal paper which they than drive through pins to bind it. No fancy spine or cover. I guess you could call it a proto-galley. Any guesses as to what the Mystery book is? I'll give a couple hints. It is a new Fantasy book many people are looking forward to by a best-selling male author.

Death Most Definite by Trent Jamieson - Review copy. First in a new Urban Fantasy series that reminds me a little of a grown-up version of the Dead Like Me TV show.

Steven de Selby has a hangover. Bright lights, loud noise, and lots of exercise are the last thing he wants. But that's exactly what he gets when someone starts shooting at him.

Steven is no stranger to death-Mr. D's his boss after all-but when a dead girl saves him from sharing her fate, he finds himself on the wrong end of the barrel. His job is to guide the restless dead to the underworld but now his clients are his own colleagues, friends, and family.
Mr. D's gone missing and with no one in charge, the dead start to rise, the living are hunted, and the whole city teeters on the brink of a regional apocalypse-unless Steven can shake his hangover, not fall for the dead girl, and find out what happened to his boss- that is, Death himself.

Is Anybody Out There? ed. by Nick Givers & Marty Halpern - Review copy, which I hope to get to very soon as I've been talking it up for a while now. Includes stories by James Morrow, Jay Lake, Pat Cadigan, Paul Di Filippo, Matthew Hughes, Alex Irvine, Mike Resnick, Lezli Robyn, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and many others. I'm most eager to check out the Morrow and Rusch.

Are we alone in the universe, and if not, who else-or what else-is out there? Here are thought-provoking stories that explore such questions as: Do intelligent species invariably destroy themselves by nuclear war or ecological collapse? Are the sentient aliens that do exist just too far away? Do they exist in forms beyond our comprehension? Are they among us, but undetectable? These are just some of the possibilities explored by a stellar lineup of contributors.

Gravity's Angels by Michael Swanwick - Swanwick is one of those author's I've been meaning to try on a larger scale for years. I've had a taste of him through shorts in various anthologies, but this collection should give me a good feel for him over all. I nabbed this from the rare book room at The Strand.

Aliens who absorb the memories of those they've slain, magicians slugging it out in present-day Philadelphia, and Janis Joplin reborn as an obsessed-over saint in a barbarous post-technological U.S: these are a few of the motifs from one of science fiction's modern masters.

Kraken by China Mieville - Also, grabbed from The Strand. I went there in specific hope they'd have a copy. This will be read very soon.

With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.

In the Darwin Centre at London’s Natural History Museum, Billy Harrow, a cephalopod specialist, is conducting a tour whose climax is meant to be the Centre’s prize specimen of a rare Architeuthis dux—better known as the Giant Squid. But Billy’s tour takes an unexpected turn when the squid suddenly and impossibly vanishes into thin air.

As Billy soon discovers, this is the precipitating act in a struggle to the death between mysterious but powerful forces in a London whose existence he has been blissfully ignorant of until now, a city whose denizens—human and otherwise—are adept in magic and murder.

There is the Congregation of God Kraken, a sect of squid worshippers whose roots go back to the dawn of humanity—and beyond. There is the criminal mastermind known as the Tattoo, a merciless maniac inked onto the flesh of a hapless victim. There is the FSRC—the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime Unit—a branch of London’s finest that fights sorcery with sorcery. There is Wati, a spirit from ancient Egypt who leads a ragtag union of magical familiars. There are the Londonmancers, who read the future in the city’s entrails. There is Grisamentum, London’s greatest wizard, whose shadow lingers long after his death. And then there is Goss and Subby, an ageless old man and a cretinous boy who, together, constitute a terrifying—yet darkly charismatic—demonic duo.
All of them—and others—are in pursuit of Billy, who inadvertently holds the key to the missing squid, an embryonic god whose powers, properly harnessed, can destroy all that is, was, and ever shall be.

Gateways ed. by Elizabeth Anne Hull - The last book I bought at The Strand on my birthday visit. I think Pohl's Gateway is an absolute classic and I couldn't pass up this collection honoring what he started. Great line-up as well, but a few too many appreciations instead of stories.

An anthology of new, original stories by bestselling SF authors, inspired by SF great Frederik Pohl and edited by his wife Elizabeth Anne Hull.

It isn’t easy to get a group of bestselling SF authors to write new stories for an anthology, but that’s what Elizabeth Anne Hull has done in this powerhouse book. With original tales by Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, David Brin, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Gene Wolfe, and others, Gateways is a SF event that will be a must-buy for SF readers of all tastes, from the traditional to the cutting edge; from the darkly serious to the laugh-out-loud funny.

City of Ruin by Mark Charan Newton - Later this week my review of Nights of Villjamur will be going up. The week after I finished Nights I had to order the sequel, which just came out in the UK.

Villiren: a city of sin that is being torn apart from the inside. Hybrid creatures shamble through shadows and barely human gangs fight turf wars for control of the streets. Amidst this chaos, Commander Brynd Lathraea, commander of the Night Guard, must plan the defence of Viliren against a race that has broken through from some other realm and already slaughtered hundreds of thousands of the Empire's people. When a Night Guard soldier goes missing, Brynd requests help from the recently arrived Inqusitor Jeryd. He discovers this is not the only disappearance the streets of Villiren. It seems that a serial killer of the most horrific kind is on the loose, taking hundreds of people from their own homes. A killer that cannot possibly be human. The entire population of Villiren must unite to face an impossible surge of violent and unnatural enemies or the city will fall. But how can anyone save a city that is already a ruin?


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