Welcome to the Library of Lost Things, where the shelves are stuffed with books that have fallen through the cracks—from volumes of lovelorn teenage poetry to famous works of literature long destroyed or lost. They’re all here, pulled from history and watched over by the Librarian, curated by the Collectors, nibbled on by the rats. Filed away, never to be read. At least, until Thomas, the boy with the secret, comes to the Library.
Immortality, but at what price, in what form, and how could you be you? In the near future it’s possible to build a new you, a better you, one that could carry on forever. But if you could carry on, if you could make choices about who you would be forever, how much of your past would you bring with you? Would you be tempted to maybe…edit? Adam isn’t all that he used to be, but he wants to be.
In the aftermath of the First Martian War, in the interim between it and what was to come later, England seemed to once again become a green and peaceful place, if one haunted by the terrible events in Surrey that had happened in those early years of the century. Although people hoped and prayed peace had come, they were wrong. Across the gulf of space, plans were being drawn for a return, but before they could bear fruit a terrible discovery was made deep in Holmburgh Wood, one that would tear a family apart and shock the world.
A horror tale about the Witch Bride, second wife of a King, and the discord between her and her young stepson.
Forget dragons and wolves and mockingbirds and lions. My very immediate reaction is a pained cry at the thought of having to wait until 2019 to find out what happened to the most beautiful ginger in Westeros.
I mean, sure, some earth-shattering things happened in the Game of Thrones finale, but I stand by my feelings, okay?
Spoilers for the currently published George R. R. Martin novels are discussed in the review and fair game in the comments. We highly suggest not discussing early preview chapters, but if you must, white it out. Have courtesy for the patient among us who are waiting and waiting (and waiting) for The Winds of Winter. Play nice. Thanks.
Seeing a picture from the Wonder Woman movie underneath a title implying that comic book movies haven’t been good enough to be the best movie of the year might make you feel annoyed and dismissive. So it’s probably best if I preface my point by clarifying what this article is not. This isn’t a criticism of the entertainment value of comic book movies, since this year alone has put out some very enjoyable and successful superhero films that have earned tons of money. This also isn’t anything against the Wonder Woman movie in particular, as I enjoyed it, and was very happy to see such an iconic character overcome the cynicism about whether or not female protagonists hurt marketability. What this article is about is the significance of the Best Picture award.
The name sounds so self-explanatory: an award that should go to whatever movie was the best of the year. But the word “best” is also open to interpretation. Is your idea of the best movie the one that was the most fun to watch? The one that was the most thought-provoking? The one with the most original concepts? Ideally a movie would have all of those qualities, but frequently the nominees are each strong in one way or the other, and we’re all left with our own preferences on which quality deserves the highest praise.
Start reading Oathbringer, the new volume of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive epic, right now. For free!
Tor.com is serializing the much-awaited third volume in the Stormlight Archive series every Tuesday until the novel’s November 14, 2017 release date.
Every installment is collected here in the Oathbringer index.
Need a refresher on the Stormlight Archive before beginning Oathbringer? Here’s a summary of what happened in Book 1: The Way of Kings and Book 2: Words of Radiance.
This week we’re going to cover ourselves in sandtrout and morph into a superbeing? Yeah, it’s clearly one of those days….
Index to the reread can be located here! And don’t forget this is a reread, which means that any and all of these posts will contain spoilers for all of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. If you’re not caught up, keep that in mind.
You’ve got just one shot to save the kingdom, the love interest, the world, the day. Real life doesn’t usually work like that, but the reason we tell stories isn’t to experience the ordinary. We read to participate in the extraordinary, and we put very high expectations on protagonists. What are they there for if not for redeeming the coupon of salvation?
Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes the day in question had a different savior penciled in on the agenda. Sometimes destiny calls and has to cancel the date at the last minute.
Sometimes it’s better that way.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s new book, The Beautiful Ones, is available October 24th from Thomas Dunne Books—and to celebrate, we want to send you a prize pack of three of her books! Five lucky winners will each receive copies of Signal to Noise (available now from Solaris) and Certain Dark Things (available now from Thomas Dunne Books), and a galley copy of The Beautiful Ones.
The Beautiful Ones‘ Antonina Beaulieu is in the glittering city of Loisail for her first Grand Season, where she will attend balls and mingle in hopes of landing a suitable husband. But Antonina is telekinetic, and strange events in her past have made her the subject of malicious gossip and hardly a sought-after bride. She is finally ready to shed the past and learn the proper ways of society—but Antonina finds it increasingly difficult to conform to society’s ideals for women, especially when she falls under the spell of the dazzling telekinetic performer Hector Auvray. Little does Antonina know that Hector and those closest to her are hiding a devastating secret…
Mexico City, 1988: Long before iTunes or MP3s, you said “I love you” with a mixtape. In Signal to Noise, Meche, awkward and fifteen, has two equally unhip friends—Sebastian and Daniela—and a whole lot of vinyl records to keep her company. When she discovers how to cast spells using music, the future looks brighter for the trio. Two decades after abandoning Mexico City, Meche returns for her estranged father’s funeral. It’s hard enough to cope with her family, but then she runs into Sebastian, and it revives long-buried memories from her childhood. What really happened back then? And is there any magic left?
In Certain Dark Things, Domingo, a lonely garbage-collecting street kid, is eking out a living when a jaded, hungry vampire swoops into his life. Smart, beautiful, and dangerous, Atl needs to escape to South America, far from the rival narco-vampire clan pursuing her. The only living creature Atl loves is her trusty Doberman—but she finds herself warming up to scrappy, smitten young Domingo and his effervescent charm. And then there’s Ana, a cop who finds herself following a trail of corpses and winds up smack in the middle of vampire gang rivalries. Do Atl and Domingo even stand a chance of making it out alive?
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A Song for Quiet is Cassandra Khaw’s second Lovecraftian novella to be published by Tor.com Publishing, after last year’s Hammers on Bone. The series is called Persons Non Grata, a pun on the name of recurring character John Persons—a not-exactly-human man and private investigator whom no one seems to like, not even Lovecraftian monsters.
A Song for Quiet doesn’t feature John Persons in a starring role, although he does appear. Instead, its main character is Deacon James, a musician from Georgia. Deacon is black and a bluesman, and he’s just buried his father. The narrative of A Song for Quiet suggests this story can be set in America somewhere in the first three-fifths of the 20th century, before desegregation, when people still hopped into cargo carriages of trains to ride routes without a passenger ticket. The general feel is very much 1920s/1930s with a noir cast.
When you watch a Mac Rogers play or listen to a Mac Rogers podcast, you’re putting an extra level of trust into his storytelling: Often you don’t actually see the pivotal science fiction element around which the narrative revolves. Rogers is the only playwright who could write a three-play, miniseries-long alien invasion epic where the most the audience ever glimpses of the giant extraterrestrial bugs is one (chillingly massive) leg. It’s fitting, then, that Steal the Stars, Rogers’ latest audio drama presented by Gideon Media and Tor Labs, centers on a seven-foot-tall gray alien nicknamed Moss that the characters spend every day with but listeners will never lay eyes (or ears) on.
But here’s the secret: It’s not about the alien. In classic Mac fashion, the high-security Quill Marine compound and its incredible extraterrestrial find are the sci-fi backdrop for Steal the Stars’ true heart: the human desire for forbidden connection and the extreme lengths people will go to to hold on to it.
Claudia Gray’s Defy the Stars is an odd and interesting book. It may, though, be more ambitious than successful: while it attempts to express a deeply meaningful environmentalist message (I think) and to discuss the nature of free will and of the soul by means of the very human-like “mech” character, but ultimately it comes across as a shallow and didactic parable.
For me, at least. On the other hand, it’s a fun and readable journey on its way to didactic-parable-land, so there is that.
Crete is not an island.
Crete is a fleet in space, under attack, housing the last of an under-equipped race of people, all of whom are desperate to survive, all of whom depend on the ability of an exhausted group of pilots to defend them from the vacuum of space and the predators that live there.
Crete is a heavily armed underground bunker in a district that has been erased from textbooks and maps and oral history and a people’s understanding of their nation’s geography.
Crete is a damaged shuttle, aswim with radiation, a fragile little poison pill attempting to re-enter an atmosphere that will destroy it.
Crete is not an island. Crete is a prison.
And Icarus knows someone who can help him escape.
Start reading Oathbringer, the new volume of Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive epic, right now. For free!
Tor.com is serializing the much-awaited third volume in the Stormlight Archive series every Tuesday until the novel’s November 14, 2017 release date.
Every installment is collected here in the Oathbringer index.
Need a refresher on the Stormlight Archive before beginning Oathbringer? Here’s a summary of what happened in Book 1: The Way of Kings and Book 2: Words of Radiance.
Entertainment Weekly announced today that V.E. Schwab has signed a $1 million deal with Tor Books for a new fantasy trilogy as well as a standalone novel. The Threads of Power trilogy is set within the same world as the Shades of Magic series, which concluded earlier this year with A Conjuring of Light. The fourth novel, tentatively titled Black Tabs, will focus on a female assassin in futuristic New York City.
Somewhere in the Vorkosigan universe, Ethan is presenting a newborn son to a grateful father. Cordelia, Jole and Aral are falling ever deeper in love. The Koudelka girls are having cozy chats with their mother about baking cakes, Ma Kosti is packing lunches for her sons, Lem Ksurick is building a hydroelectric power station, Simon Illyan and Lady Alys are exchanging knowing glances, and Bothari lies at peace at the foot of an empty grave.
In our corner of the world, Mark has just proven himself the inept twin. He’s not going to hold exclusive claim to the title for long.
Raise a glass to the acid western. It’s a subgenre that derives much of its power from alternately subverting tropes and undermining them altogether. If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, then you know the drill: a familiar setting—sparse population, lawlessness, a potential for violence—with more than a little concern for altered states and the grotesque. The recent resurgence of interest in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s work suggests the acid Western is gaining ground; novels like Colin Winnette’s hallucinatory Haints Stay and Rudy Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder tap into a similar sense of mood and imagery. The acid Western aesthetic can be spotted further afield as well: in Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher and its television series adaption, and in Ben Wheatley’s film A Field in England.
There’s a whole lot of acid Western in the DNA of Brian Allen Carr’s novel Sip. Admittedly, this isn’t the first of his book about which that could be said: 2013’s Motherfucking Sharks was set in a landscape that could be read as a surreal version of the Old West—or a postapocalyptic landscape in which something has gone horribly wrong with the world. (And by that, I mean: sharks can appear out of nowhere on land, with feeding on their mind.) But Sip pushes against several categories at once: it makes use of a stunning speculative concept, it creates a surreal futuristic landscape, and it heads for the metaphorical and metaphysical in abundance. But at its core is something Western, and something Weird. It’s a high-concept story that never loses sight of the grit.
The northwestern portion of the United States is known for its ubiquitous coffee stands, frequent rain, and forested backdrops, but fantasy books in the setting also incorporate magic and incredible beings—and not just the famously hirsute Big Foot. Genre authors are inspired by legends from native tribes as well as stories brought by new immigrants to the region. Thunderbirds soar high in the sky here. The Wild Hunt races through the urban labyrinths of Seattle. Kitsune may very well prowl beneath water-laden pine boughs. The undead stagger onward, restless as ever, though perhaps they want a nice, hot latte along with a serving of brains.
The Pacific Northwest often becomes a character itself, with its dreary stretches of weather punctuated by brief, delightful sunbreaks. Gray as the skies may be, the history is downright colorful, allowing some authors to draw on a pioneer past that required particular gumption in order to survive.
[Here are my top five fantasy novels set in the Pacific Northwest…]
Is The Tick the greatest of the ’90s reboots?
I really truly madly deeply loved the MST3K reboot, and I hope they get another eleven seasons. But MST3K is like solar energy—an endlessly renewable resource. There will always be cheesy movies, and jerks like me will always love snarking on them, and hearing others’ snark. The Tick, though, was more explicitly of its time—specifically, the late ’80s and early ’90s. Created, like the Ninja Turtles, as a direct response to Frank Miller’s gritty style of comics, The Tick was an absurdist beacon of sunshine that defined Saturday morning in the ’90s, and became a live action cult classic right before 9/11.
Having considered all of that we have to ask ourselves: did this reboot work? Is it necessary? A beacon of mighty blue hope for troubled times? Well chums, I’m ecstatic to say that the new series is pretty much perfect. The characters have been updated fantastically, the superhero parodies are hilarious, and that core Tick/Arthur relationship is lovely. So let me say here in this paragraph, go watch it!
And now I will make with some light spoilers, so don’t read on unless you’re caught up.
I still have no memory of having read this book the first time, but I know I did. It’s been on my shelf since it was new. So now it’s new to me, and reflected through the rest of the Witch World books that I’ve been reading throughout this series.
Let’s see what we have here.
Forget dragons and wolves and mockingbirds and lions. My very immediate reaction is a pained cry at the thought of having to wait until 2019 to find out what happened to the most beautiful ginger in Westeros.
I mean, sure, some earth-shattering things happened in the Game of Thrones finale, but I stand by my feelings, okay?
Spoilers for the currently published George R. R. Martin novels are discussed in the review and fair game in the comments. We highly suggest not discussing early preview chapters, but if you must, white it out. Have courtesy for the patient among us who are waiting and waiting (and waiting) for The Winds of Winter. Play nice. Thanks.
