The Passage by Justin Cronin

Afterlight by Alex Scarrow

Wolfsangel by MD Lachlan

The Castle Omnibus by Steph Swainston

Above the Snowline by Steph Swainston

Horns by Joe Hill

Spirit by Gwyneth Jones

Archangel’s Kiss by Nalini Singh

Angel’s Blood by Nalini Singh

WWW: Wake by Robert J Sawyer

Awesome books to look forward to! You may now all drool.

Be EPIC!

I’ve not yet watched the last season of Heroes (still planning to, ye naysayers!), but I’ll definitely be reading Shift when it’s released! Here’s the news, from the press-release:

“Transworld Publishers are pleased to announce the acquisition of a trilogy of novels by Tim Kring and Dale Peck. Kring is best-known as the creator of the hit TV series, Heroes, which is regularly watched by 3-4 million viewers per episode.
Simon Thorogood and Simon Taylor jointly acquired the series of novels from Kring’s US publisher, Crown. The first novel introduces Chandler Forrestal, a man whose life is changed forever when he is unwittingly dragged into a CIA mind-control experiment. After being given a massive does of LSD, Chandler develops a frightening array of mental powers.

The first in the series, Shift, will be published by Bantam Press in January 2011.”

What do you all think? Good idea? Cool premise?

Be EPIC!

P.S. Thanks to The Mad Hatter for the Amazon link and the cover.

A Local Habitation is the second book in the October Daye series from Seanan McGuire, featuring October ‘Tobey’ Daye, one of the most interesting characters in fiction, not to mention Urban Fantasy. I was lucky enough to have received the first Tobey Daye novel, Rosemary and Rue (reviewed here) from Seanan and yesterday my copy of A Local Habitation arrived (also from Seanan) so I’ll be reviewing it soon.

Why read Rosemary and Rue, and A Local Habitation? Tobey is such a cool character (being a Changling and a Private Investigator-type), for one, and the world that she reveals to us (San Fransisco and the worlds of the Fae) is fantastically realized! If you’re looking for an excellent mystery, very cool magic, fantastic creatures and a heroine to admire and cheer, then A Local Habitation and Seanan McGuire is just the thing for you!

Order your copies here, and for those in the UK, the book will be available on the 8th of April, so pre-order your copies here. For those of you in South Africa, head over to your closest Exclusive Books and, if they’re struggling to find the book to order it, give them this info: ISBN 978075640596 and tell them they can order it from Ingrams. Here are the details for Rosemary and Rue for you, too: ISBN 9780756405717 also from Ingrams.

For those lucky enough to be in the US, Seanan will be touring to promote the book, so head over to her website and check out where she’ll be appearing.

A Local Habitation will be followed up with An Artificial Night in September of this year (2010 already, in case you’re a bit behind ), and here’s the great cover (all three covers have been done by Chris McGrath – I hope he does them all! ):

Congrats to Seanan on Launch Day!

Be EPIC!

I’m reading it at the moment, and it’s awesome so far – the magic system is incredible, but not at the expense of the characters and plot; really awesome stuff!

To order your copies, click here for Amazon US and head on over to Blake’s website while you’re at it if you want to heard audio extracts of Spellwright (very cool by the way!).

Congrats to Blake! May this be the start of HUGE things!

Be EPIC!

The cover was done by Richard Jones.

And, to tease you even more until the book hits the shelves, here’s a small blurb for the book:

Gavin Guile is the Prism, the most powerful man in the world. He is high priest and emperor, a man whose power, wit, and charm are all that preserves a tenuous peace. But Prisms never last, and Guile knows exactly how long he has left to live: Five years to achieve five impossible goals.

But when Guile discovers he has a son, born in a far kingdom after the war that put him in power, he must decide how much he’s willing to pay to protect a secret that could tear his world apart.

Looking forward to it!

Be EPIC!

First up, Jasper Kent has redone his website, sprucing things up a bit as well as giving us a neat, spine-tingling intro; Thirteen Years Later, the sequel to the excellent Twelve (reviewed here) will be out shortly, so head on over and check out the revamped site. Twelve will be released on the 18th of March, and you can count on a review as soon as I’ve received a copy and read it!

In other news, the colossus of Urban Fantasy, China Mieville, has read (and enjoyed) the second novel in Mark Charan Newton’s The Legends of the Red Sun series, City of Ruin; Awesome stuff, right? Check out the post on Mark’s blog to see what China said.

And from Chris Beckett: his tale, Johnny’s New Job, will be published in Interzone’s March 2010 issue (no. 227), but this is a short story with a difference – it was inspired by the events of a case of child abuse (horrific, I might add – and not for the faint of heart). Check out Chris’ website here; even though it was birthed by such a tragic case, the Johnny’s New Job is certain to be an excellent tale!

And finally, here’s the cover of Jaine Fenn’s Guardian’s of Paradise, which will be available from Gollancz in September:

On a completely unrelated-to-John-Jarrold’s-clients note, the cover for Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings has been released, posted over at Tor.com by Irene Gallo; recognize the style of the artwork? If you don’t, think of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. Make of point of heading over to read the post – Michael Whelan (oops, let the cat out of the bag there, didn’t I? ) takes us through the process of creating the cover, too!

That’s what I’ve got for you for the time being. Until next time,

Be EPIC!

Thank goodness for J. Robert King’s Angel of Death, and Angry Robot for bringing us this novel.

As I mentioned to Rob on Twitter, this book is brutal, uncompromising, unsettling… I felt slightly abused at the end of it, rough around the edges and shaken.

Angel of Death is a difficult book to pin down – it has touches of the supernatural (or does it?), it is a murder mystery viewed from the intimacy of the minds of killers, it is a love story, and it is a meditation on the myriad meanings that we, as human beings, push onto the struggle of living.

I found everything in this book – horror that really creeped me out, beauty in the style and simple evocative use of words that Rob employed, moments of utter revulsion and anger and misery (my roller coaster of emotions while reading), and much more besides. I found myself rooting for every character – the victims, the two characters around which the story revolves, even the characters that made my bile rise in my throat, but I hated them all, too, for reasons I can’t really explain. I mean, you can really like being around someone, enjoy their company and enjoy getting to know them, but some thing starts scratching at you, some thing draws your attention and before you know it, you loathe and like the person in equal measure.

But Angel of Death also has some incredibly uplifting moments, moments that helped me see past the brutality of the book, through the shocks and violence, and the even these hectic, cringe-inducing moments had their own stark kind of beauty – I can only liken this to the kind of brutal beauty an explosion seen from a distance has, the kind of thing that you wish you had never seen or experienced but miss, all the same.

This is also a novel that played with my expectations – Rob divided Angel of Death into three ‘Books’, and each book could be a full-length novel in its own right; not in terms of the length of these Books, but in terms of the events -the twists and turns and the paths the characters take – and led me down paths were I thought, more than once, “Okay, I think this’ll happen, yep, seems logical, seems right,” only to be punched in the gut with a turn I never expected.

I found Angel of Death to be an utterly masterful novel – one of those novels that truly only comes along very, very rarely. And it’s still echoing through my head – I replay scenes, hear the dialogue, see the imagery, feel the emotions… I haven’t read anything quite like this before; it stunned me completely, and I truly hope that this book finds its way into the hands of many, many people.

It’s the kind of book that changes you on the inside, that really leaves you shaken, but at the same time, brings into in sharper focus that which gives our lives meaning, and as such, I just can’t give this book a rating.

Do yourself a favour and read this.

Order your copies at the following links:

Amazon UK, Exclusive Books (SA), Kalahari (SA)

Check out Rob’s site here. It goes without saying that I’m trembling while awaiting Rob’s next Angry Robot novel, Death’s Disciples. Stay tuned for details!

In the New Jedi Order, we were treated to a story that stretched over five years, included hundreds of characters and events, but which, ultimately, revolved around the Core characters; what Del Rey and its authors are doing now is going one step further – Fate of the Jedi focuses on the Core characters, but both Crosscurrent and Lost Tribe of the Sith work alongside FotJ, and work well, without having the Core characters in them. Sure, Lost Tribe is set 5000 years before the Battle of Yavin and Crosscurrent was set after the events of the Legacy of the Force, but didn’t bring in the characters we are used to reading about and expecting. How these story lines mix and intertwine (and they will probably continue to do so, with Paul’s sequel to Crosscurrent and the rest of the Fate of the Jedi novels still on the way) perked my interest mightily, and I decided to get Paul and John together for a kind of round-table interview. Here’s the result!

::

Please tell us a bit about yourselves, how you got into writing, etc?

John Jackson Miller:
I started writing comics and prose stories about the same time I started reading them. Reading good stories inspired me to try my own hand at it, and I kept at it over the years, writing my own short stories and producing my own small press comics and magazines. It’s funny, but later on, when I started writing professionally, I found I was drawing on a lot of those experiences when I was just writing things for myself. You need to write for more than just yourself, but you’ve also got to be happy with the work you’re doing, or nobody else will be.

Paul Kemp:
I’m Paul S. Kemp. I’ve been married for seventeen years to a lovely redhead (think Mara Jade, peeps) and we have twin five year old sons. We live in Michigan with a couple cats. My day job is corporate lawyer, which makes me evil. My night job is entertaining writer, which makes me good. So on balance, I guess that makes me about a neutral.

I started writing in law school, when I realized that law was for suckers…er…when I realized, rather, that only practicing law would not lead to a fulfilling life for me. So, I submitted some material to Wizards of the Coast (they had an open submission policy at the time), they liked it, and asked me to submit to an closed call they were having for what would become The Sembia Series. I pitched them Erevis Cale, priest and assassin, they dug that, and here we are.

What does Star Wars mean to you?

John Jackson Miller:
Quite a lot. The movies and the comics based on them were a big part of my childhood and teenage years, and obviously the whole milieu has been a big part of my working life. I even edited a Star Wars collectibles magazine in there somewhere.

Paul Kemp:
Setting aside the fanboy glee I feel for being able to participate in a small way in Lucas’s brainchild, (and here speaking of the movies) I think it’s one of the best fictionalized demonstrations of the Campbellian Hero’s Journey ever made. It’s really a modern myth, which explains why its such a phenomenon from generation to generation.

Considering that Fate of the Jedi, Lost Tribe of the Sith, Legacy and Crosscurrent all borrow characters and share intersecting plots, can you tell us about how this all began – who decided what, and what your roles were in creating these tales? (Without spoiling us, of course)

John Jackson Miller:
I’d been doing more writing in the EU, including some short fiction, and I was always looking for an opportunity to do more. Del Rey and Lucasfilm approached me in early 2009 about creating a supporting storyline that would fill in background about the Lost Tribe of the Sith, right from their beginnings.

The authors of the Fate of the Jedi series had come up with a fairly detailed look at what the Lost Tribe was like today, along with details about how they got stranded in the first place. Most of the intervening years were left available to interpret. We did some coordination to make sure that nothing we came up with caused problems later on, and that “Crosscurrent” and “Lost Tribe” worked together properly.

Since I was starting back five thousand years earlier and working forward, I saw part of my role as illustrating how the Sith got from Point A to Point B. The Sith we saw in the Golden Age of the Sith stories really didn’t have complicated infrastructures or military bureaucracies that we saw — but they needed underlings to be able to run missions like bringing back the Lignan crystals, and of course, the Lost Tribe evolves a fairly detailed command structure. There was also the matter of species to deal with, since the Tribe that we saw was not just human, but also striving for human physical perfection. Both of those things suggested that there was a lot more differentiation in the Sith than we initially saw in the comics — there had to be humans in the mix with some level of contact with outside cultures, even in the “hidden empire” years. The Lost Tribe had lightsabers without power packs; they had to get them from somewhere.

That was the sort of thing I’ve sought to address, while trying to tell an engaging story. Many of the changes that help make the Tribe what it is spring from choices — and unintentional consequences of choices — that our characters made in the past. “Paragon,” the upcoming story, is pretty pivotal in this regard.

Paul Kemp:

My contribution here is pretty small. In my original pitch for Crosscurrent, I had included the existence of an ancient Sith ship carrying Force-enhancing ore (what would later become Lignan) that found itself flung into the future due to a relativity shielding malfunction. My editor (I think), saw some possible connections in that to the story the team was developing for Fate of the Jedi. So she asked me if I could include a second ship that doesn’t jump into the future but instead just misjumps in some way — all of this became Lignan, Harbinger, and Omen, which are the “connectors” between Crosscurrent and the much larger story in Fate of the Jedi.

After that decision was made, I traded emails with some of the authors doing FotJ and JJM (John Jackson Miller), just to keep the various details correct. It was a great experience. Christie, Troy, and JJM (not to mention Sue, Leland, and my editor) were awesome to this Star Wars newbie.

The stories you write are separated by thousands of years of history – how do you give a tale the hallmarks of the Star Wars universe while also giving the tale its own era-specific flavor?

John Jackson Miller:
Oh, I think the trappings of Star Wars are always there. Beyond the physical things like the lightsabers and phenomena like the Force, a lot of the same themes are in play —good versus evil, redemption and betrayal, etc. Whatever the time period, it’s all Star Wars.

Paul Kemp:
Historical touchstones, mostly. Obviously there are some technological differences that get highlighted (ancient lightsabers are not “modern” lightsabers, for example), but little references to current events in the particular timeline can also ground the narrative in an particular era.

When you sit down to write tales in the Star Wars galaxy, what’s the most important aspect of the Galaxy Far, Far Away that you want to capture?

John Jackson Miller:
As I’ve said above — you want to make sure it feels all of a piece with the movies. It’s OK to branch out and explore new kinds of stories, but you don’t want the story to feel completely out of place and unconnected. The feel of stories is pretty important; Star Trek stories have a different feel from Star Wars stories, and so on. Readers tend to know when something feels like it belongs in a particular milieu.

Paul Kemp:
For me, the sense that Star Wars (and the EU) is a setting for myth-making. What I mean by that is that Star Wars touches on foundational moral questions by exploring through the lens of the Force (a kind of Manichean moral construct, really). Its themes are universal. I wanted to at least try and take a stab at that with Crosscurrent.

Also, blasters. And lightsabers.

Coming back to the current EU: with opinions divided on whether or not the Legacy of the Force series worked –comparing it to the New Jedi Order- do you think that the editors and authors of the EU now have a better understanding of how to handle these complex storylines?

Paul Kemp:
Dave, my experience is so limited that I can’t speak to that at all. I’ll say only that the folks I’ve worked with have been extraordinarily knowledgeable and helpful. It’s been a real treat.

What would you say to writers out there who want to someday write in the EU? Any advice or warnings?

John Jackson Miller:
Most licensed properties are invitation-only and don’t look at unsolicited submissions, and Star Wars is no exception. So the important thing is to get established — and that means writing for a variety of places and really polishing your skills. As a former journalist, I think all kinds of writing are important practice, from blogging to covering the sports for your local paper. It’s all about learning to communicate clearly, and to hit your deadlines.

Paul Kemp:
The same thing I say to any aspiring writers: read widely (and not just in genre), and learn what you can from great writers. Then, stop talking/thinking about what great ideas you have. Instead, put yourself in a chair and just friggin’ write. This is a craft. You only get better by doing it.

Finally: what would be the one EU story you would like to tell, if you could?

John Jackson Miller:
Heh! I don’t know – maybe a reality show following Lando’s life might be entertaining!

Paul Kemp:
I mentioned this in one other place, but I’d love to write Luke’s epic finale in the EU (if that finale were ever to come).

::

There we go, hope you all enjoyed that. It goes without saying that the guys took time out of their busy schedules, and I thank them for that.

Want more info on the authors and their work? Click on the links to head over to their websites: John Jackson Miller, Paul S Kemp.

I’ll be reading John’s third Lost Tribe of the Sith story, Paragon, this week or next week, and then I’ll post a review of all three stories.

Until then,
Be EPIC!

Looks awesome! Love the cover!

I’ll be reviewing Red Claw in the next couple of months, keep an eye out for it.

Be EPIC!

P.S. The cover came about due to the awesome photography of Eric Westpheling.

Let’s launch into the review:

Death Troopers tells the story of what happens when an Imperial Prison barge, travelling to a prison planet, breaks down, stranding the guards, the Warden, the inmates and the prison barge’s medical officer. A Star Destroyer is discovered, floating nearby, and travelling to the Destroyer to find parts to repair the barge’s systems, events are set in motion that plunge the characters, and you, the reader, into a creepy-as-all-hell nightmare…

First thing: is Death Troopers scary? Definitely! There are moments in this novel where I literally felt my skin crawling or cover my eyes; the images Joe creates really stay with you, not the least of which was a scene that involved a young Wookiee… *shudder* I’ve read scarier stuff, sure (Stephen King’s The Shining is the scariest I-crapped-my-shorts novel I’ve ever read), but Joe does a damn good job! He lends the barge a dark atmosphere -I’m not talking about power outages and shadows here, I’m talking about that oppressive pressure you’ve felt when you’ve walked into a place that isn’t all the way right, you know what I mean? The lights can be on, the TV, too, but there’s just something you feel that creeps you out. Joe did this, and more.

Getting to the characters, Joe gives us two brothers, a prison-guard captain, the medical officer, and two surprises later down the line.

The two brothers, Trig and Kale Longo, worked well together in scenes, and Joe managed to make me sympathetic to their situation, though I have to admit, after the first chapter, I guess which one of the brothers would die (as you’ve all guessed, while watching slasher- or zombie-movies, who out of the group will be the first to go); the fact that I was right didn’t negatively affect the tale, however.

The prison-guard captain was my favourite character, by far; the man begins as a certain kind of man and evolves into someone completely different, and the fact that he does so without coming across as shallow and prone to changing his mind and opinions on a whim speaks volumes about Joe’s ability to create engaging characters that will surprise you, as any personality does. When I met the guy (the character, not Joe) I hated him (for reasons that’ll become clear to you as you read), but I really came to respect him and admire him.

The medical officer was the weakest of the characters, in my opinion. Why? Well, I just really didn’t connect with her, to be honest. Her history and backstory were great and made sense, but there was just something there that kept me from really sympathizing with her.

The other characters are all great, including the two surprises – very well written as well as offering us insights into their personalities that haven’t been explored in any other EU novel.

But the burning question, I suppose, is the following: is Death Troopers a Star Wars tale? Well, that’s difficult to answer.

If you look at Star Wars (the entire saga) and compare it to Death Troopers, then no, it’s not a Star Wars novel. There are no dogfights between starfighters (that sounds wrong, reading it aloud), there are no lightsaber duels; but is this what makes a Star Wars tale? I disagree. Sure, having starfighters and lightsaber duels in a Star Wars novel makes it more Star Wars, but there is room in the Galaxy Far, Far Away to play in, considering just how massive the Galaxy is. I never thought I’d say this, but it would be great to see more experimentation happening in the Star Wars EU (just not this, please, not this!)

We’ve already seen what I consider to be Military Star Wars with Karen Traviss’ Republic Commando series (which KICKED ASS, btw), and we’ve seen some decidedly introspective and deep Star Wars novels (Shatterpoint and Traitor spring to mind), so why not explorations of other sub-genres? It’ll be interesting, to say the least.

So, even though Death Troopers doesn’t have the normal Star Wars fare, I consider it to be a Star Wars novel; Joe captures everything that matters, from the ineptitude of Stormtroopers to the hulking mass of a Star Destroyer, and he also involves his characters (and the reader) in the kind of philosophical questions that only Star Wars can pull off so well.

I’m giving this a 7 / 10.

Order your copies of Death Troopers at the following links:

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Kalahari (book, audiobook), Loot, Exclusive Books. And head over to Joe’s blog, too.

Be EPIC!

P.S. The title of Joe’s second Star Wars novel (and prequel to Death Troopers) has been revealed: Black Orchid! Looking forward to it!

P.P.S. The awesome cover was designed by Indika and David Stevenson.