Following the death of her mother, Fiona buys a new house in order to start a new chapter of her life, one with fewer reminders of painful memories. Unbeknownst to Fiona, this house has a melancholy history, and slightly more ghosts than she anticipated. In learning to live with her unexpected companions and their losses, Fiona might find a way to make peace with her own.
A day laborer hired to clean up a flooded creek outside of Boulder, Colorado uncovers what could be a valuable find—if it doesn’t kill him first.
Humanity has settled space and left Earth to its destruction. Connor and Ines have traveled back to Earth on a preservation project to find the human “jacks” that sacrificed their bodies to prop up the United States’s failing infrastructure. But the jacks hold a secret, one Connor would rather keep hidden than risk the truth being made public.
As a girl, Maggie dreamed of joining the Sisters, a group of women who enjoy the status and attention afforded by their beautiful wings. Now, years later, she has wings of her own. But an encounter in the woods forces her to reckon with her past—and the painful price her wings demanded.
Exile’s End is a complex, sometimes uncomfortable examination of artifact repatriation and cultural appropriation. An artifact of indescribable and irreplaceable beauty created by an “extinct” culture has been the basis of another culture’s origin stories. The race who created the artifact has survived on a distant world and has sent a representative to reclaim it, throwing everything into question.
Inspired by the SF camp in Danzhai, China, which is co-hosted by the Future Administration Authority (FAA) and Wanda Group.
Each of the Empire’s houses keeps secrets, even from themselves. For the bookish academics of the Sixth, every secret is a mystery, and every mystery is a puzzle to be solved or a paper to be published. Deep in the bowels of their house, one such secret is about to reveal itself. The study of the famed academic Donald Sex, sealed since the moment of his death, is about to open, and archivists are ready to dissect what he left behind. They are not ready for the macabre surprise that awaits them.
Enter Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect, age thirteen.
There’s a meme going around, I’ve seen it on Twitter and now it’s on a Discord I’m on, where you post the picture of the cover of a book you love every day for a week. It’s much better than asking what one book you love, but for anyone who reads a lot and has been reading a lot for some considerable time now, it’s too difficult to pare it down to seven books, from all the books there are.
Paring it down is a case of canon forming even when it’s “books I love,” because you want to be representative and that always means leaving things out that I love just as much. I am discriminating but wide ranging in my book love; I love a lot of books. Why, ha ha, I thought, walking over to the bookshelves, even if I limit myself to one per author I could almost find seven books I love just on the alphabetical-by-author fiction shelves under A! And indeed I could, with no trouble at all, and they were a fun mixed set. So I thought I might share them with you, and perhaps you could share your favourite books whose authors begin with A, and if this was fun we could go on through the alphabet, and if it wasn’t fun we could stop.
Movies and TV shows aimed at children are always a delicate mix of cutesy innocence and potentially weighty subject matter—kids might get bored of endless sunshine without any conflict, but go too dark and you risk mauling delicate sensibilities, Return to Oz-style. And kid-friendly SFF can be tricky to navigate for even the most well-meaning guardian, after all what harm could be lurking in a puppet-filled fantasy adventure? Of course, there are also the traumatic moments we inflicted upon ourselves, staying up late only to peep at the screen through our fingers. Even if you had a storybook childhood, the odds are low that you escaped without being emotionally sideswiped by an intense moment or two…
We’ve polled our extended Tor.com family, and gathered up the moments that shaped us into the warped creatures we are today.
Most fans of fantasy and science-fiction literature are familiar with the concept of alternate history—tales that spring from such speculations as “What if the Confederacy had won the Civil War?” or “What if the Roman Empire had never fallen?” and so forth—but less well known is the niche of secret history (sometimes referred to as “shadow” history).
Unlike their cousins of alternate history, tales of secret history are designed to mesh with reality and history as we think we know it. Rather than posit changes to major events of the past, stories in the secret history subgenre speculate what might have happened behind the scenes, or in the shadows, of the past or present that we all take for granted.
Andrea Stewart’s debut novel The Bone Shard Daughter, the first book in the Drowning Empire trilogy, follows four intertwining stories in a vast and rich world inspired by Asian cultures.
Lin is the heir to the throne of the Phoenix Empire, but her father, the current emperor, refuses to recognize her status until she proves herself worthy to him. Trapped in a palace of locked doors, Lin hatches a plan to learn forbidden bone shard magic and overtake her rival Bayan to get her father’s approval.
What have I read recently? I am so happy to have imagined someone asking me that conveniently leading question.
I should note that I have embraced the concept of comparative advantage by focusing on activities at which I am acceptably competent (reading, reviewing, encountering wild animals), freeing people who are not me up for other activities at which they are superior (anything social). The end result is more productivity all round! Plus, it turns out that, at the moment, a simple handshake can be akin to French-kissing Death herself, so all in all, this anti-social, work-focused lifestyle is working out pretty well! For me, anyway. Without further ado, here’s a survey of what I’ve been reading over the last month…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Piranesi, a new novel from Susanna Clarke, the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Available from Bloomsbury, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.
Charlie Jane Anders is writing a nonfiction book—and Tor.com is publishing it as she does so. Never Say You Can’t Survive is a how-to book about the storytelling craft, but it’s also full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish in the present emergency.
Below is the seventeenth chapter, “Good Worldbuilding Shows How Things Could Be Different.” You can find all previous chapters here. New chapters will appear every Tuesday. Enjoy!
Here, as the world ends and dies and ends again, Mark Oshiro brings forth a daybreak of brilliant, hard-won hope.
In Each of Us a Desert, Oshiro moves away from the contemporary settings of their powerhouse debut, Anger Is a Gift. This is a propulsive fantasy novel, set in a vast desert and las aldeas that dot its expanse. Though they shift genres, Oshiro’s ability to blend beauty with brutality, to build love alongside grief, is as vividly drawn here as in their first book. They re-establish themselves as one of the most daring, purposeful, masterful authors writing today.
This week in Reading The Wheel of Time, we return to the Threefold Land to catch up with Rand and Mat. One of them is struggling with the burden of leadership, trying to hold the Aiel together, and to him, while fending off Moiraine and Egwene and secretly learning how to channel saidin from one of the Forsaken; the other wasted and getting a girlfriend who is definitely also a spy. Let’s go!
[By my honor and the Light, my life will be a dagger for Sightblinder’s heart.]
Lucasfilm has released a first look at the upcoming second season for its live-action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian.
The short teaser trailer gives us a good idea of where we’ll be headed this season, including a number of new planets as Din Djarin takes on the mission to deliver the Child to whatever Jedi he can track down.
The first time I picked up The Bone Doll’s Twin, the first book in the Tamir Triad, I was in a dusty library in Calcutta. I’d recently discovered a room off the main building, lined with ceiling to floor bookshelves, dedicated entirely to science fiction and fantasy. I was probably around 12, and I didn’t know I was about to fall in love.
The Tamir Triad is a trilogy about a kingdom called Skala, in which according to prophecy, the matrilineal line of the King Thelatimos reigns. However, King Erius has seized power and has started to kill off the female heirs who can be contenders to the throne. The latest target is his beloved sister, who’s about to give birth to twins. A pair of wizards, guided by Illior, work with a hill witch to change the girl child’s gender so she’s brought up as a boy until she’s old enough to rule. The series follows the trials and tribulations of this motley group and the other court players as Tamir, raised as Tobin, navigates a world where she doesn’t even know the truth about herself.
Welcome back to the read-along discussion, on this fine Tuesday morning. We’re taking a sharp turn in this week’s new chapter—which of course you’ve already read. After all that time in Hearthstone and the Shattered Plains, we’re leaping over to Kholinar today. Yes, it’s finally time to get inside the head of our new main character, Venli, the listener turned Regal turned Radiant. Along with her private thoughts and plans, we’ll have lots of information about the Fused to discuss, so come on in and join us.
On November 17, 2020, The Stormlight Archive saga continues in Rhythm of War, the eagerly awaited fourth volume in Brandon Sanderson’s #1 New York Times bestselling fantasy series.
Tor.com is serializing the new book from now until release date! A new installment will go live every Tuesday at 9 AM ET.
Every chapter is collected here in the Rhythm of War index.
Once you’re done reading, join our resident Cosmere experts for commentary on what this week’s chapter has revealed!
Want to catch up on The Stormlight Archive? Check out our Explaining The Stormlight Archive series!
There’s a weird internal nostalgia in this entry in the Norton canon. It’s both a Ruritanian romance and a Gothic romance. On the one hand it harks all the way back to Norton’s first published novel, The Prince Commands. On the other, it was published during her Gothic period, in 1980, and there are echoes of the Witch World that almost made me think she was hinting very vaguely at one her other favorite themes, parallel worlds.
The result is a strange, dark, not quite coherent novel.
The Ant-Man 3 cast just got bigger: According to Deadline, Jonathan Majors has been tapped to join Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, and the rest of the quirky cast in the upcoming Marvel sequel. And if the incredible performances Majors delivered in Da 5 Bloods and Lovecraft Country aren’t enough to get fans excited about his casting—the rumors of who he’s playing definitely will.
Now the hand of Henry Jekyll…was professional in shape and size: it was large, firm, white, and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough…was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.
In Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic 1886 science-fiction novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the estimable Dr. Jekyll’s hand is white. But the hand of his evil alter-ego, Mr. Hyde, is “of a dusky pallor.” Jekyll creates a potion that turns him from an upstanding citizen into someone “wholly evil.” And for Stevenson, someone who was wholly evil had also to be non-white.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a brand-new epic science fiction novel from author Christopher Paolini. We’re thrilled to share clips from the audiobook edition, read by Jennifer Hale—perhaps best known for her various voice acting roles, including Shepard in Mass Effect and Rosalind Lutece in BioShock Infinite. Listen to the first nine chapters below!
“Displaced”
Written by Lisa Klink
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 3, Episode 24
Production episode 166
Original air date: May 7, 1997
Stardate: 50912.4
Captain’s log. Paris and Torres depart the holodeck, arguing, when suddenly a humanoid appears out of nowhere in the corridor, acting very confused. So are Torres and Paris, who take him to sickbay.
