VIDEO | Neil Gaiman on a Trampoline

A friend pointed me to this little video made by Olga Nunes in appreciation of the webcomic xkcd.  Come one, come all and see Neil Gaiman along with daughter Maddy on a Trampoline, which also features Wil Wheaton, Cory Doctorow, and Tor Editors Patrick & Teresa Nielsen Hayden all singing no less.  You may want to turn your volume up a little to hear all the little variations.



You Might Also Like:
10 Facts About John Scalzi
VIDEO | The Mice Templar Vol. 2 Trailer
CHARACTER INTERVIEW | Alexia and Lord Maccon from Gail Carriger's Soulless

REVIEW | Sleepless by Charlie Huston (Ballantine)

Sleepless is Charlie Huston's 11th and probably most challenging book to date. It is definitely one of the most difficult books I've read in recent years, but not challenging in the sense that I couldn't follow what was going on as the events and actions of the characters are all too believable. Sleepless while in keeping with Huston's noir style is vastly different from his other works. This is more than just a brooding type book like the Joe Pitt casebooks.

Sleepless is horrifically real. The realism is at such a high level I felt I was reading the personal journal of someone who went through these events.  We are thrown into a harsh near future apocalyptic where a disease called Sleepless is running rampant. Those with the disease slowly degrade mentally and physically over a year before dieing. If anything they are very zombie-like yet worse off for realizing what is happening to them as opposed to becoming completely mindless, which would be a blessing in this case. This is a Los Angeles where factions have sprung up dividing the city and hope is all but completely lost. The SLP disease is spreading with more than 10% of the world's population infected. There is no cure and no hope for one. The only relief suffers can hope for is the highly regulated drug Dreamer/DR33M3R, which can alleviate most of the pain for a short time.

At first I didn't realize the story was told from two different points of view, which was probably just me missing a cue, but once I had a better handle everything coalesced well. The main part is from Parker Haas's compelling perspective who is a hard nosed undercover cop. I was immediately drawn to Haas as he is in a horrible situation from all angles, but he is still trying to do his job and care for his family as his wife suffers and his empathy for her captures you in its wake.

Haas was forced to go into drug investigation work while his wife is at home suffering from Sleepless with their infant. He trudges through LA's seedy underbelly dealing with drugged out rich boys and hardworking RPG entrepreneurs with selflessness and& resilience. A strong online RPG element is enmeshed in this world as everyone is trying to escape the daily horror that is real life, which echoes the fears of many mothers nowadays. The other point of view is that of a hitman who always collects his due. I was a bit taken aback by some of his proclivities as they seemed out of place, but he grew on me with the telling.

Huston proves with this work he is more than capable taking chances that pay off. Sleepless is a high concept Thriller that mixes just the right amounts of Noir Crime, Horror, and Science Fiction that'll keep you coming back despite the anxiety caused from the story. I give Sleepless 8.5 out of 10 Hats. It is a dark, but worthy journey to undertake. I'll definitely need some lighter fiction though to cleanse my reading spirit a bit lest it rebel.


You Might Also Like:
REVIEW | Already Dead by Charlie Huston
REVIEW | The Map of Moments by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon

REVIEW | The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

NEWS | Angry Robot to Reissue K.W. Jeter's Steampunk Classics

A few months ago I sent out this twitter:

I wish a publisher would reprint some Steampunk classics like Newman's Anno Dracula and KW Jeter's Infernal Devices.

It just so happened that Marty Halpern a freelance Editor of some very fine SFF answered me back as he knew Jeter. At the time Jeter said he wanted to keep the rights.  I like to think my little note may have inspired him to seek republication as I received this wonderful press release from Angry Robot today:

The Father of Steampunk Signs With Angry Robot

KW Jeter coined the term Steampunk, but unbelievably his classic novels Infernal Devices and Morlock Night have been out of print since the early 1980s. Angry Robot are delighted to announce that we are bringing them back to a new generation of readers in paperback, audio and eBook formats.

Infernal Devices tells the story of George – a Victorian watchmaker who has inherited his father’s shop, though not his talent. A tale of time travel, music and sexual intrigue, Infernal Devices is a true classic.

Morlock Night, meanwhile, is a wild sequel to Wells’ The Time Machine – having acquired a device for themselves, the brutish Morlocks return to invade sleepy old England…

So, don your brass goggles, wind your mechanisms and sit back with a couple of true classics from a steam-driven Angry Robot.

This is indeed splendid news. It is great to see original examples of a sub-genre movement in print so people can read where we've have come from.  And from what I know both are enjoyable reads.  I myself just tracked down an old copy of Infernal Devices after a long search.


You Might Also Like:
So Much Steampunk, So Little Time
LOOKING FORWARD Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi, & Steampunk Coming in 2010

REVIEW | The Affinity Bridge by George Mann

Contest for Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

It is the time of the Great Depression.

Thousands have left their homes looking for a better life, a new life. But Marcus Connelly is not one of them. He searches for one thing, and one thing only. Revenge.

Because out there, riding the rails, stalking the camps, is the scarred vagrant who murdered Connelly's daughter. No one knows him, but everyone knows his name: Mr. Shivers.

In this extraordinary debut, Robert Jackson Bennett tells the story of an America haunted by murder and desperation. A world in which one man must face a dark truth and answer the question-how much is he willing to sacrifice for his satisfaction?


To celebrate yesterday being the most visited day ever on Mad Hatter's Bookshelf I have an ARC of Robert Jackson Bennett's horror debut Mr. Shivers to give away to one lucky person. To enter send an email to madhatterreview (AT) gmail (dot) com with your full name and snail mail address and "SHIVERS" in the subject line. The deadline is midnight February 12th. I'll announce the winner on the following day. This contest is open to the people of the United States and Canada only. If you send multiple entries you will be disqualified from the contest.   Definitely check out the cool site Orbit put together to support Mr. Shivers and here it the book trailer.

What is the Weirdest Book You've Ever Read?

Every so often a book comes along that leaves you shaking your head. Whether that shaking is a good or bad thing can often be very subjective as well. In some ways aren't the books that confound you the very books that stay with you because they provoke much thought even long after you've finished? Well, I am always curious about these books, which is why I asked more than a dozen authors: What is the weirdest book you've ever read? The earliest response by Lavie Tidhar is already up, but seeing all the different takes gives some wonderful perspective of what people consider weird.

The last entry is my own as Gail Carriger politely asked whether I was going to participate.  Me thinks she was merely goading me into taking a bit of my own medicine, but I laud her for it.  Please feel free to chime in with your own weirdest read in the comments.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mark Teppo

In many ways, I prefer weird, but at the same time, there are levels of weird. Jeff Vandermeer's Finch is weird, but it's a comprehensible weird. William Burroughs gets really weird, but you sign on for that ride when you open one of his books, and part of the ride is the alien landscape. The truly weird are books that I realize I don't have the right cipher keys to completely decode. Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books fall into this category. I understand the words on the page, but I'm very conscious that I'm not fully grokking the sub-text. You have to keep coming back to these sorts of books because they test your growth as a reader and as a thinker. It's only been in the last year that I feel that I've finally unlocked most of the secrets in Gene Wolfe's Books of the New Sun and Philip K. Dick's Valis.

These are the sorts of things that are constantly fascinating to me: how a writer can bury story in their language, how much meaning can be imparted by a single word choice, how they rely on the knowledge of the reader to supply context and meaning. These books stop being story--a defined tale with a beginning, middle, and end that communicates a linear progression of events that lead to a authorial summation of human nature--and become a clandestine transmission--a secret message passed between two people that is unique to their connection. What is written and what is read are never the same thing, really.

Mark Teppo is author of the Codex of Souls series which includes Lightbreaker and the recently released Heartland both published by Night Shade Books.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Blake Charlton

Okay, so, so far the strangest book I've ever read I'm actually reading right now. It's titled Kill as Few Patients as Possible: and Fifty-Six Other Essays on How to be the World's Best Doctor by Oscar London.

It's a bit dated, creative-nonfiction humor. Sometimes funny, sometimes not. Never laugh-out-loud funny. But it is often insightful--albeit sometimes in an ironic or roundabout way--regarding the medical life (so far as I know as a med student). But what's odd about it is how earnest it is. One gets a sense of how much the author cares about and loves medicine. Most other medical humor I've encountered (many will be familiar with the laugh-out-loud House of God by Samuel Shem) is cynical and ultimately corrosive, using medicine's foibles to tear medicine into pieces. Reading London, however, is both frightening and encouraging.

I'm presently writing a novel with a physician protag, and I'm hoping to make her cynical, witty, and yet sympathetic (i.e. _not_ House MD). Add on to that the fact that in a few years I'll enter the hospital as a clinical med student, and try to get a hold on when and how to use humor appropriately. So reading this book feels a bit like my present is smashing up against a possible future in a disconcerting but at least interesting way.

Currently, Blake Charlton is writing fantasy novels, science fiction short stories, and academic essays on medical education and biomedical ethics. His debut Spellwright is due to be published in March by Tor. His short story Endosymbiont is featured in the anthology Seeds of Change.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lev Grossman

I initially said The Falls, by Peter Greenaway, but I'm reneging. It is, undoubtedly, a strange book, but I think some of the strangeness comes from its connection to the film of the same name. (Which I haven't seen.) Seems like cheating.

So instead I'm going to go hearken back to a time when I actually almost knew French well enough to read novels in it, at which time I read Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style. It's about a guy who sees another man, a stranger with a long neck, get into a disagreement with somebody else on a bus. Later that day he sees the same man in a railroad station. The man is explaining to a friend that he should get a button put on his overcoat.

That's it for action. It takes about two pages. For the rest of the book Queneau goes on to retell the same pointless story 99 times, in 99 different literary styles. He tells it from all points of view, in all tenses and moods. He tells it as a sonnet, as a word game, as a telegram, in anagrams, in different dialects, as a blurb for a novel, without using the letter 'e,' and on and on and on.

It's also impossible to say, when you're done, whether or not you enjoyed it, or what it meant, or if it meant anything. But it is unquestionably weird.

Lev Grossman is the New York Times best-selling author of The Magicians and Codex.  He is hard at work on the sequel to The Magicians currently titled The Magician King.  Grossman is senior book reviewer for Time and also the creator of the Nerd World blog.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ekaterina Sedia

Boy, that's a tough one. I have to say, for me it's a toss up between Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, and Michael Cisco's The Traitor. Both are difficult to describe, but manage to create a very profound sense of surreal displacement within one's own skin -- these two books permanently tilt your point of view some imperceptible degrees, and you feel like you have a new set of eyes to look at the world with. This is not a pleasant feeling, necessarily, but for me these two books were terribly effective. They were so strange that they could not exist in the world as I perceived it, and thus the world needed to be expanded to accommodate them.

Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone were published by Prime Books. Her next one, The House of Discarded Dreams, is coming out in 2010. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen's Universe, Dark Wisdom, and Clarkesworld, as well as Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies. She is also an award-winning editor of Paper Cities anthology, with Running with the Pack forthcoming.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Lou Anders

The weirdest book I ever read was Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory, his debut novel, published in 1984 and written without the middle initial. Oddly, it's the only Banks I've ever read, but it made a huge impression on me. It's impossible to talk about without spoiling, but its a deeply disturbing novel with a most unusual, and most unreliable, narrator/protagonist. I think if I didn't work in SF&F, I'd be a Chuck Palahniuk kind of reader, and Banks was in that space before there was a space. But since I do work in SF&F, I'll take a moment to shameless plug James Enge's Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. As books that evolve directly out of the sword & sorcery stories of the Weird Tales tradition, these would be the "Weirdest" books we publish!

Lou Anders is the three-time Hugo nominated editor of Pyr Books, as well as the editor of 9 critically-acclaimed anthologies. He has been nominated for the PKD and WFC awards, and won the Chesley Award for Best Art Director.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Sam Sykes

Probably the weirdest book I've ever read was Talyn by Holly Lisle. It had a very cool setting (two armies at war) with a very neat premise (fought entirely through magic). Somewhere along the line, though, the story began a very dramatic change that I will describe through my reactions in parentheses: it began as a war story (cool), a war story with MAGIC (COOL), a sudden peace breaks out (oh), a brief view of soldiers trying to cope without the war that gave them identity (very cool), a romance story (uh), a bondage fetish story (wait), a betrayal by a bondage fetishist mind controlling wizard (I said wait!), and then the last hundred pages were basically any excuse to do a strange sex scene at all points. By the time I read a character say (paraphrased): "Shit, she's (the main heroine) in shock! Get her naked! GET HER NAKED RIGHT NOW!" this book had basically secured the top list in my most unforgettable reads. It wasn't so much the weird sex fetishes that came out, but rather how abruptly they came out. Basically, it was like going to a dinner theater to watch a magician, only instead of seeing the magician pull a rabbit out of his hat, my waitress hopped up on my table, hiked up her skirt and peed on my steak. I was surprised, but not necessarily in a good way.

I also keep a running list of weird sexual phrases from books I've read. Currently topping that list is the phrase "his clockwork balls" from Andy Remic's Kell's Legend, with "the whorl of his anus" and "the root of his cock" from Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains and Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold coming in second and third, respectively.

Sam Sykes is the author of Tome of the Undergates, published in the UK by Gollancz in April of this year. He once wrestled an African White Rhino to the ground, can defeat nine out of ten Prime Ministers and is largely suspected to be the chief culprit behind reality television.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I have a lot of contenders for the weirdest book I ever read. I thought of including some truly strange books, including things I’d read in galleys that were nearly unreadable, but then decided that wouldn’t be fair. Then I decided to define “weird” my way, which is “I can’t believe someone published this” primarily because the book breaks a bunch of rules. The problem is that most of the books that I define as weird in that way have become classics or familiar to us now, but they were so revolutionary in their time that people talked about them. I’m thinking in particular of Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, which is all diary entries, homework assignments, and e-mails, and yet manages to have a great voice and a riveting style. (Now everyone is doing this.) By that definition, though, the weirdest book I can remember reading is Flowers in the Storm by Laura Kinsale. It’s an historical romance novel, so our handsome hero and our beautiful heroine should suffer the slings and arrows of love, separating and getting together again, with a happily ever after. But...her hero, while handsome and rich, has just suffered a stroke. In Regency England. While alone. So everyone thinks he went crazy—and he’s put into Bedlam, the insane asylum, where our heroine, a Quaker, helps her father care for the demented. Kinsale portrays the insane asylum in a historically accurate way—in other words, it’s a horrible place—and the romance continues from there, as our hero slowly recovers from the stroke, but doesn’t really recover the power of speech. It goes from there. It’s now considered a romance classic, but when it was published, it was revolutionary. (I really love this book—and recommend Kinsale to everyone who likes to read. She did some paranormal stuff before it became popular too, for you who like fantasy with your romance.)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written some weird books in her time as well, including a romance (as Kristine Grayson) whose hero is a garden gnome, kinda. (Completely Smitten) Her current novel is Diving into the Wreck, which is science fiction adventure, and was published by Pyr. Her next book is a collection of her award-winning short stories, called Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories to be published in the spring from Golden Gryphon. An even weirder Grayson novel, The Charming Way, in which Prince Charming (one of them, anyway) falls in love with the Evil Stepmother, will be published in Spring of 2011.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Gail Carriger

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams is my first pick. It wasn't until I read this book that I realized how utterly acid-trip bizarre a story could be and get away with it, especially if it also happened to be side-achingly funny. Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair is right there in the same arena.

Ms. Gail Carriger began writing in order to cope with being raised in obscurity by an expatriate Brit and an incurable curmudgeon. She is fond of teeny tiny hats and tropical fruit. She is the author of the Parasol Protectorate series, Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jeffrey Thomas

I've read a lot of bizarre books, perhaps more bizarre than my choice, but I also have to consider literary merit...so the book that comes to mind is the novel The Other Side of the Mountain by Michael Bernanos. Bernanos was the son of the well known French author, George Bernanos, and if I recall correctly he was a troubled soul who died young. My aunt gave me this novel when I was a teenager, and its haunting imagery and desolate atmosphere have remained with me over the decades. The story itself is simple: a merchant vessel becomes becalmed at sea, and then wrecked, the only survivors being the young protagonist and an older cook. They reach an eerie island, where the trees all bow down to the ground at night, and where the statues (or are they statues?) of human beings can be found on the slopes of the island's ominous central mountain. Did the characters survive the wreck after all, or are they actually in Hell? Their efforts to survive are both depressing in their futility, and inspiring, in that the characters never cease to struggle against their circumstances, and their friendship sustains them where nothing else can. The story can be seen as a descent into madness (the author's?), and its hellish feel may have been inspired in part by the fact that Bernanos' father was a devout Catholic. The novel was republished a few years ago by Cherokee Publishing Company; it's a short read and I encourage readers of horror, dark fantasy, and the surreal to check it out.

Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Blue War, Deadstock, Punktown, Letters from Hades, A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and the forthcoming The Fall of Hades. He lives in Massachusetts.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Alex Bledsoe

The strangest book I've run across is a slender little volume called Dragons: The Modern Infestation, by Pamela Wharton Blanpied, first published in 1980.  I discovered it in one of those remainder stores that pop up every so often in otherwise abandoned shopping centers. This one was in Florence, Alabama, in the late 80s. They had two big stacks of the book, probably fifty copies in all. I picked it up because the title seemed intriguing, and when I flipped through it, it perplexed me even more. It seemed to be a straight non-fiction book, complete with diagrams, a bibliography, and photographs detailing the current efforts to understand dragons, real fire-breathing dragons, throughout the world. Yet even with helpful arrows indicating where the dragons were supposed to be in the photos, I couldn't see them. Or could I? Because if you stare at anything long enough, you start to see what you're looking for....

It wasn't until the advent of the internet a decade later that I finally learned the book was intended as a parody of scholarly works poking fun at their seriousness by applying it to a ridiculous topic like dragons. And I guess in a sense the joke was on me, because even after reading the book and realizing it couldn't be legitimate (one dragon converses, Pern-like, with a researcher) I still didn't understand the point.

When I began researching dragons for my novel Burn Me Deadly, I tried unsuccessfully to track down Ms. Blanpied. She is evidently as elusive as the beasts in her book, if she even truly exists (if you read this, Ms. Blanpied, I'd still love to talk to you). But whoever she is, wherever she is, I hope she finally got her laugh.

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. I now live in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls. The author of the Eddie LaCrosse high fantasy/hardboiled mysteries (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly and the forthcoming Dark Jenny), two novels about vampires in 1975 Memphis (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood) and the first Tufa novel, The Hum and the Shiver, due in 2011.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Victor Gischler

In the broadest sense of the word "weird" I shall pick Joe Meno's wonderful The Boy Detective Fails. I think there are many books that are much, much weirder, but Meno's book was an odd, strange little fairy tale that I enjoyed so much it still stays with me. What struck me as most "weird" was less the story itself and more the way I enjoyed the book. Usually I want to be driven through a story. I want the pace to keep me flipping pages. But I found myself sort of gently floating through The Boy Detective Fails as this gentle, whimsical story unfolded.

Victor Gischler is the author of author of 4 hard-boiled crime novels. including his debut novel Gun Monkeys which was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his novel Shotgun Opera was an Anthony Award finalist. His fifth novel Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse and most recent novel Vampire A-Go-Go actually have nothing to do with one another. He is also hard at work on many Deadpool comics for Marvel.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jesse Bullington

Upon first being asked my mind started turning to William S. Burroughs and other experimental authors that seemed way out on the outer fringes, but upon reflection I think that one book that really struck me as intrinsically weird when I first read it was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Unlike Naked Lunch, which is a weird book full of weird stuff, sure, Invisible Cities actually caught me off guard as a teenager--it wasn't that crazy stuff happened or the style was unusual, it was that the entire book as a whole seemed alien to me. The book consists of Marco Polo describing cities he has supposedly encountered to Kublai Khan but the novel is so much more than that--in addition to being a superficially fun read it's also an intricate puzzle, an incredibly nuanced work passed off as a casual series of descriptions. While not as well known as Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (the single best piece of post modern fiction ever written) or The Baron in the Trees (a comparatively straight-forward fable), Invisible Cities remains a masterpiece, and quite possibly the weirdest book I've ever read--it was certainly the weirdest I'd ever read at the time, and don't know of any book that has matched it since.

Jesse Bullington is the author of the novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, as well as numerous articles and pieces of short fiction.  He is currently at work on his second novel The Enterprise of Death.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Michael, The Mad Hatter

For me it would have to be The Shape We're In by Jonathan Letham. It is a bit of a cheat as I asked everyone else to stick to novels, and The Shape We're In is a novelette at best.  Yet, it is the story that had me scratching my head days after finishing.  Told from the point of view of an alcoholic garbage man charged with moving trash from one section of a giant immobile vessel shape of sorts to another it is cynical yet hilarious at the same time. In search of his missing son the garbage man ventures into far off sections of the shape and meets hordes of odd cultures that have evolved there. I hesitate to say more as there is a big reveal that is worth uncovering on your own.

Michael, The Mad Hatter is an elusive hat and book collector spending far too much money and time on both.  He is secretly planning to open the world's first Haberdashery and Book Emporium. He also runs a little book review blog of some sort.

You Might Also Like:

GUEST POST | Lavie Tidhar author of The Bookman

Best Books of 2009 (That I've read)
AUTHOR INTERVIEW | Mark Teppo author of Lightbreaker

New Procurements

Quite a lot of review copies showed up this week along with a nice big package from Night Shade.  Descriptions are in italics.

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar - This is my second copy as I had pre-ordered it and Angry Robot sent me a copy along with the next book.  After reading some of Lavie shorts and his recent guest post I'm eager to get at this.

A masked terrorist has brought London to its knees -- there are bombs inside books, and nobody knows which ones. On the day of the launch of the first expedition to Mars, by giant cannon, he outdoes himself with an audacious attack. For young poet Orphan, trapped in the screaming audience, it seems his destiny is entwined with that of the shadowy terrorist, but how? Like a steam-powered take on V for Vendetta, rich with satire and slashed through with automatons, giant lizards, pirates, airships and wild adventure,

Servant of the Underworld by Aliette de Bodard - Really intrigued by this one, which would be only the second Fantasy book I've read using Aztec mythology. de Bodard has done some wonderful short fiction and has been gain quite a name the last year or two, but this is her debut novel.

Year One-Knife, Tenochtitlan the capital of the Aztecs. The end of the world is kept at bay only by the magic of human sacrifice. A Priestess disappears from an empty room drenched in blood. Acatl, High Priest, must find her, or break the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. Aliette De Bodard is the hottest rising star in world SF and Fantasy, blending ancient crimes with wild imagination.

Ghosts of Manhattan by George Mann - One of my most highly desired titles here as I love the premise of a Steampunk superhero in 1920s NYC.

1926. New York. The Roaring Twenties. Jazz. Flappers. Prohibition. Coal-powered cars. A cold war with a British Empire that still covers half of the globe. Yet things have developed differently to established history. America is in the midst of a cold war with a British Empire that has only just buried Queen Victoria, her life artificially preserved to the age of 107. Coal-powered cars roar along roads thick with pedestrians, biplanes take off from standing with primitive rocket boosters and monsters lurk behind closed doors and around every corner. This is a time in need of heroes. It is a time for The Ghost. A series of targeted murders are occurring all over the city, the victims found with ancient Roman coins placed on their eyelids after death. The trail appears to lead to a group of Italian-American gangsters and their boss, who the mobsters have dubbed ‘The Roman’. However, as The Ghost soon discovers, there is more to The Roman than at first appears, and more bizarre happenings that he soon links to the man, including moss-golems posing as mobsters and a plot to bring an ancient pagan god into the physical world in a cavern beneath the city.

The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas - I've been hearing wonderful things about this book for ages from my UK cohorts so I'm glad Roc is giving it a good push here. The finished cover is gorgeous.

The power of the Realms depends on its dragons. With their terrifying natures, they are ridden by the aristocracy and bred for hunting and war. But as dangerous political maneuverings threaten the complacency of the empire, a single dragon has gone missing. And even that one dragon-returned to its full intelligence and fury-could spell disaster for the Realms...

Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman - The final book in the Jump 225 Trilogy again featuring art from the always impressive Stephan Martiniere.  In this case it will be a little while before I get to it as I still have Infoquake staring at me from my mountainous to-read pile, but this will probably be the push I needed to get to it sooner.

The Extra by Michael Shea - World Fantasy Award winner Shea dusts of a short from the 80s in the first in a trilogy. It looks to be a large scale Running Man type story where movie extra are put in disaster roles and if they survive they get a payday and a chance to get out of the hell that LA has become. At first I wasn't sure if it was something I'd like, but the idea is growing on me.

Books and films have skewered Hollywood's excesses, but none has ever portrayed one man's crazy vision of the future of big action/adventure films as The Extra does. As over-the-top as Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, as savagely dark as Robert Altman's The Player, and more violent than Rollerball, this is the story of the ultimate, so-insane-it-could-only-happen-in-Hollywood formula for success, a brave new way to bring the ultimate in excitement to the silver screen. Producer Val Margolian has found the motherlode of box-office gold with his new "live-death" films whose villains are extremely sophisticated, electronically controlled mechanical monsters. To give these live-action disaster films greater realism, he employs huge casts of extras, in addition to the stars. The large number of extras is important, because very few of them will survive the shoot.

Incandescence by Greg Egan - Looks to be a hard sci-fi novel, but relatively short so I may fit this in between some of the doorstoppers.

The Amalgam spans nearly the entire galaxy, and is composed of innumerable beings from a wild variety of races, some human or near it, some entirely other. The one place that they cannot go is the bulge, the bright, hot center of the galaxy. There dwell the Aloof, who for millions of years have deflected any and all attempts to communicate with or visit them. So when Rakesh is offered an opportunity to travel within their sphere, in search of a lost race, he cannot turn it down. Roi is a member of that lost race, which is not only lost to the Amalgam, but lost to itself. In their world, there is but toil, and history and science are luxuries that they can ill afford. Rakesh's journey will take him across millennia and light years. Roi's will take her across vistas of learning and discovery just as vast.

The Maze of the Enchanter: The Collected Fantasies of Clark Ashton Smith vol. 4 - The prolific Ashton has been quite well regarded for decades for his early work in Fantasy, but I must admit to never having delved in. Maybe this will bring me into the fold.

Published in chronological order, with extensive story and bibliographic notes, this series not only provides access to stories that have been out of print for years, but gives them a historical and social context. Series editors Scott Conners and Ronald S. Hilger excavated the still-existing manuscripts, letters and various published versions of the stories, creating a definitive "preferred text" for Smith's entire body of work.

Tails of Wonder and Imagination edited by Ellen Datlow - One of the best anthologist tries for something a bit different.  At first I wasn't interested, but perusing the stories it looks to be a strong collection with some very familiar names.

What is it about the cat that captivates the creative imagination? No other creature has inspired so many authors to take pen to page. Mystery, horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories have all been written about cats.

Tails of Wonder and Imagination features more than 200,000 words of stories in which cats are heroes and stories in which they're villains; tales of domestic cats, tigers, lions, mythical part-cat beings, people transformed into cats, cats transformed into people. And yes, even a few cute cats.


You Might Also Like:
New Procurements - January 24th, 2010
Covers Unveiled for Simon R. Green, John Scalzi, and Stephen Deas
LOOKING FORWARD Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi, & Steampunk Coming in 2010

Winner of Moxyland

The winner of Lauren Beukes's Moxyland is Travis from SLC, Utah.  Congrats!  Look for another contest later this week as I continue to clean the shelves a bit.

REVIEW | The Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffman (Penguin)

The Left Hand of God is one of a few books gaining quite a bit of buzz or hype as the next best Epic Fantasy.  Some believe when a book is "hyped" it had better be one of best books written that year if not in a few years.  To me that is a bit of a misnomer as hype is really all about what publishers think the general public will key into the most, which does not always denote top quality prose but more of a story that grabs readers.  For example The Windup Girl is a book that deserves hype, but one most of general reading public would find off putting because of its stark realism. While The Left and of God will pull you in from the opening pages if the style hits you right as it did with me. It is a very morose and deeply brutal, but had me staying up late just to get a few more chapters in.  This is why I think it is deserving of the "hype" it has gotten thus far. I was most reminded of Brent Weeks's Night Angel series although with a much smaller cast and not as detailed of a world. That is not to say The Left Hand of God is not without its problems, which I'll go into.

Told in an almost Thriller like fashion with short sentences and short cliff-hanger chapters Hoffman has concocted the story of young acolyte Thomas Cale in service to The Redeemers who have raised him since he was 4 or so.  Cale flips between been quixotic and all too reserved. But nothing feels quite right about Cale, but nor should it. He is an anomaly. A boy who has never been shown any kindness in his upbringing and whenever he did well was punished for it. 

The Redeemers are followers of The Hanged Redeemer. Kind of like a Christ-like figure only more mysterious. Basically Redeemers seem like a much screwed up version of Christianity. Think Inquisition times without trials. The Redeemers are one of the most zealous religious groups I've encountered in years nearly beating out the Khalidorians of the Night Angel Trilogy in their cruelty and wanton dismissiveness of other groups. Cale had been singled out by one of its leaders for his special abilities and escaped their clutches after many years as a teenager. Thus ensues the elevation of Cale into world politics because of his skills and knowledge. Cale is accompanied by two other acolytes, who didn't get nearly enough page time as they enliven the story despite the sullen and disconnected Cale. Another standout character is the mysterious IdrisPukke who is a sort of mentor to Cale and brings to mind a cross of Durzo Blint and Nicomo Cosca.

The setting is an alternative Earth with no magic to speak of, where religions and factions took far different turns more than a thousand years ago. There are scant mentions of Jesus, Rabbis, and references to Norway and other countries. Plus the main city involved is named Memphis. I'm still puzzling out exactly where the story is taking place, but it is most likely Europe and Memphis may be the city in Egypt although this is all far from clear. The technology is that of medieval times, but it also feels strangely more advanced because of some of the garb worn and other references.

Some of the bad: The characters are a bit overly terse to nearly everyone whether it be friend to foe or daughter to father. I couldn't find Cale likeable, but I did care what happened to him despite this. The love story didn't feel right even after all the heroics gone through to ensure the parties willingness. A few of the fight scenes were a bit confusing at times where I found myself re-reading sections to make sure I understood precisely what was going on. The ending was all too abrupt, but the big battle scene that precedes was quite unexpected.  By the end we learn what it is that makes Cale so damn important that different groups are willing to fight a war over him.

Even with all the flaws The Left Hand of God is an unrepentantly evil yet enjoyable book for those into the darker side of Epic Fantasy that kept me thinking about it long after I finished. There are many questions unanswered that left me eager to get to the next volume to learn more about this world and its secrets. As of right now I'd be surprised if this made it into my year end best, but there is enough good to recommend it. I give The Left Hand of God 7.25 out of 10 Hats. We only get a glimpse of two major factions in a much broader world of cultures so there should be much to be revealed in the further volumes. The question is does Hoffman go bigger and better from here? Penguin UK has put up a 36 page sample for the book, which definitely gives you a good flavor of whether this is a book for you.


You Might Also Like:
REVIEW | Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
REVIEW | The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington
LOOKING FORWARD  | Fantasy Books to Watch for in 2010

MISHMASH | Dresden Files RPG, ToC for Running With the Pack, and Free Bacigalupi

Four years into development and Evil Hat Productions has finally announced the impending publication of The Dresden Files RPG.  The RPG will be based off the FATE system which I am not familiar with, but it certainly sounds workable for this world.  The game has now grown into at least two volumes: The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 1 – Your Story and The Dresden Files RPG: Volume 2 – Our World.  Fred Hicks from Evil Hat has this to say:

“Originally, we were planning to do this game in a single volume. As time went on and word count grew…so did the amount of flat-out awesome we knew we had on our hands. And so our game grew out of the confines of one book, into two gorgeous volumes.”

Ryan Macklin, head developer-wrangler of Evil Hat added:

"The thing is jam-packed with great rules for making your campaign & playing all sorts of different beasts and badasses from the Dresdenverse, supported by loads of advice for players & GMs as well as a lot of characters and creatures from the books statted out. (To give you an idea of what we mean by A LOT, Fred got to about the 75% mark on the first pass through layout and saw he already had 460 pages of material. The final combined page count of the two books together could break 600. Over 140 pages of that is our comprehensive tour of the characters of the first ten novels, complete with stats where they’re stattable.)"

A preview of Harry Dresden's character sheet is available here.  Evil Hat is hoping to have pre-orders up in June so be on the lookout, but it seems like you may not  have product in hand until July as they are first releasing it at a convention.  Visit the official site for the game for more details as they are released as they've gone all out on the development details.




Ekaterina Sedia has released the table of contents for her second anthology Running With the Pack, which will be released this May from Prime Books.

INTRODUCTION

WILD RIDE by Carrie Vaughn

SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE by Steve Duffy

COMPARISON OF EFFICACY RATES FOR SEVEN ANTIPATHETICS AS EMPLOYED AGAINST LYCANTHROPES by Marie Brennan

BEAUTIFUL GELREESH by Jeffrey Ford

SKIN IN THE GAME by Samantha Henderson

BLENDED by C.E. Murphy

LOCKED DOORS by Stephanie Burgis

WERELOVE by Laura Anne Gilman

IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING by Molly Tanser

ROYAL BLOODLINES by Mike Resnick

DIRE WOLF by Genevieve Valentine

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT by Lawrence Schimmel

MONGREL by Maria Snyder

DEADFALL by Karen Everson

RED RIDING HOOD'S CHILD by N.K. Jemisin

ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? by Geoffrey Goodwin

THE PACK AND THE PICKUP ARTIST by Mike Brotherton

THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL by Amanda Downum

BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE by Jesse Bullington

THE BARONY AT RODAL by Peter Bell

INSIDE OUT by Erzbet Yellowboy

GESTELLA by Susan Palwick

Stories by Jesse Bullington, N.K. Jemisin, and Amanda Downum definitely move this collection up on my list. Also, I love the title of Geoffrey Goodwin's story Are You a Vampire or a Goblin?

iO9 in conjunction with Night Shade Press is giving away the ebook version of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which keeps garnering praise left and right.  So if you haven't picked it up yet now is your chance to grab it for free.  This looks to be a limited time offer to coincide with iO9's book club event for The Windup Girl, so put a request in while you can.

You Might Also Like:
LOOKING FORWARD | Urban Fantasy, Sci-Fi, & Steampunk Coming in 2010
REVIEW | Paper Cities ed. by Ekaterina Sedia
LOOKING FORWARD | Big Anthologies Coming in 2010
REVIEW | The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

LOOKING FORWARD | 3 YA Books (Zafon, Bacigalupi, & van Eekhout)

Examining my "Looking Forward" posts for 2010 releases it seems I neglected to mention any YA books except for Neil Gaiman's The Tales of Odd. That's not too surprising considering I'm far from an expert on YA releases as it would be too much to keep up with both those and adult releases, but I always read a few every year and for the most part they are every bit as enjoyable as adult fiction. In fact many so called adult books would probably fit just as well in the YA category such as Boneshaker by Cherie Priest and Joe Haldeman's Marsbound. Now the books mentioned below may not be me thinking too far outside the box, but they are all books worth pointing out from accomplished and imaginative authors who are for the first time working in the YA arena.


The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Publisher: Little Brown | Release Date: May 4th

Zafon's name is enough to put this on the top of my list unequivocally. He also has a couple other YA books that will be seeing English publication over the next few years.

A mysterious house harbors an unimaginable secret . . . It’s wartime, and the Carver family decides to leave the capital where they live and move to a small coastal village where they’ve recently bought a home. But from the minute they cross the threshold, strange things begin to happen. In that mysterious house there still lurks the spirit of Jacob, the previous owners’ son, who died by drowning.

With the help of their new friend Roland, Max and Alicia Carver begin to explore the suspicious circumstances of that death and discover the existence of a mysterious being called The Prince of Mist—a diabolical character who has returned from the shadows to collect on a debt from the past. Soon the three friends will find themselves caught up in an adventure of sunken ships and an enchanted stone garden, which will change their lives forever.


Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi
Publisher: Little Brown | Release Date: May 5th

Ship Breaker is Bacigalupi's YA debut, but this is also the start to a series. As with The Windup Girl this is set in a dystopian future where resources are scarce and everyday is a challenge.  I love the cover art as it sets the tone for a work by Bacigalupi well.

In a shanty town in America’s Gulf Coast region, 100 years in the future, where grounded oil tankers are dissembled for parts, Nailer, a teenage boy, searches for copper wiring to make quota and live another day. But out on the blue ocean, Nailer can see the new hightechnology clipper ships sailing the open waves, and he dreams of a better life, if only he can figure out a way to get there.

When an accident leads Nailer to discover an exquisite clipper ship and its lone survivor beached during a recent hurricane, he must choose between his dreams and doing the right thing. The decision will lead him on an adventure that could cost him his life—or end up saving it.


Kid Vs. Squid by Greg van Eekhout
Publisher: Bloomsbury  | Release Date: May 11th

van Eekhout's shorts certainly lend themselves to a YA audience.  In fact this story has its impetuous from a piece of flash fiction he wrote a few years back.  Plus I'm a sucker for Atlantis related ficton.  This must stem from all the In Search of episodes I watched as a child narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

The citizens of Atlantis are stuck selling cotton candy on the boardwalk, and only our hero can help

Thatcher Hill is bored stiff of his summer job dusting the fake mermaids and shrunken heads at his uncle’s seaside Museum of Curiosities. But when a mysterious girl steals an artifact from the museum, Thatcher’s summer becomes an adventure that takes him from the top of the ferris wheel to the depths of the sea. Following the thief, he learns that she is a princess of the lost Atlantis. Her people have been cursed by an evil witch to drift at sea all winter and wash up on shore each summer to an even more terrible fate—working the midway games and food stands on the boardwalk. Can Thatcher help save them before he, too, succumbs to the witch’s curse?

With sharp, witty writing that reads like a middle-grade Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Greg van Eekhout’s first book for young readers is a wild ride packed with as many laughs as it has thrills.

Are there any other YA books we should be looking out for?


You Might Also Like:
REVIEW | The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
REVIEW | The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
REVIEW | Norse Code by Greg van Eekhout