I was introduced to the idea of The Catcher in the Rye in 1979. I’d heard about this 1950s novel through my parents, both educators. I’d also heard about it through a Freshman English teacher at my High School. The reason I’d only heard about it and not seen it was because I was living in Tennessee and at the time it was a banned book. By banned, I don’t mean that there were any Fahrenheit 451 Fireman to come and burn them up — although I am sure there were those who wished that to be true. By banned I mean that the book was considered an unhealthy read and stores and libraries were urged not to provide them to young healthy minds. So it was with great delight that I was able to buy a copy of the book in 1981 at the local Walden Books store, who provided it from a box in the backroom and sold to me wrapped in brown paper so no one would see what I’d purchased. Continue reading
Upcoming: CYPHER by Rich Larson (Orbit)
I’ve only read some of Rich Larson‘s short fiction, but so far it has all been superb. Last year, Orbit published his debut full-length novel, and first in the Violet Wars series, the critically-acclaimed Annex, which is rapidly climbing my TBR mountain (which I fell behind on during 2018). Luckily, I have some time before the sequel is published: Cypher is due to published in December 2019 by Orbit in North America and in the UK.
The stunning cover was unveiled relatively recently. I’m really looking forward to it. Here’s the skinny:
The gripping sequel to Rich Larson’s beautiful and gut-wrenching debut Annex about two outsiders surviving, fighting back, and finding family at the end of the world.
The invasion is over, but not all the aliens are gone. As the outside world learns what happened to the city, Violet and Bo struggle to keep their ally Gloom hidden from prying eyes.
Those in power believe he is the key to unlocking the invaders’ technology, and will stop at nothing to capture him.
All the while, the invasion’s survivors are being drawn to a mysterious anomaly that might be their destruction — or their salvation from an even greater threat.
Also on CR: Interview with Rich Larson (2018)
Interview with P. DJÈLÍ CLARK
Let’s start with an introduction: Who is P. Djèlí Clark?
I’m a writer of speculative fiction by night and a mild-mannered assistant professor of history by dayd. Neither of those personas fights crime.
Your latest novella, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, will be published by Tor.com early next year. It looks really interesting: How would you introduce it to a potential reader? Is it part of a series?
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 takes place in the same world as a 2016 novelette published on Tor.com titled, A Dead Djinn in Cairo. Set in an alternate 1912 Egypt of steampunk, djinn, magic and clockwork angels, that initial story follows the exploits of Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities — tasked with policing the boundaries of the supernatural and the mundane. The Haunting of Tram Car 015 opens up this world further through two new characters — Agents Hamed Nasr and Onsi Youseff — as they attempt to deal with a case of magic and transportation gone awry. Hilarity and hijinks ensue. Continue reading
Upcoming: THE HOUND OF JUSTICE by Claire O’Dell (Voyager)
Claire O’Dell‘s sci-fi take on Holmes and Watson return in the follow-up to the critically-acclaimed A Study in Honor. I’ve heard really good things about the series, but have yet to read the first novel (so many new series, so little time…). The Hound of Justice is due to be released in July 2019, though, so I have plenty of time to get caught up. Here’s the synopsis:
Dr. Janet Watson and former covert agent Sarah Holmes continue their dangerous investigation into the new American Civil War with the help of fresh allies, advanced technology, and brilliant deduction in this superb reimagining of Sherlock Holmes.
It’s been two months since Dr. Janet Watson accepted an offer from Georgetown University Hospital. The training for her new high-tech arm is taking longer than expected, however, leaving her in limbo. Meanwhile, her brilliant friend and compatriot, Sara Holmes, has been placed on leave — punishment for going rogue during their previous adventure. Neither is taking their situation very well.
Then an extremist faction called the Brotherhood of Redemption, based in the New Confederacy, launches an assassination attempt on the president. The attempt fails but causes mass destruction — fifty dead and hundreds more injured, and Holmes takes on the task of investigating the Brotherhood.
Holmes is making progress when she abruptly disappears. Watson receives a mysterious message from Holmes’s cousin Micha and learns that her friend has quit the service and is operating in the shadows, investigating clues that link the Brotherhood to Adler Industries.
She needs a surgeon, Micha tells Watson. She needs you.
Reunited once more, Dr. Watson, Holmes, and Micha embark on a mission through the deep South to clear Holmes’s name, thwart the Brotherhood’s next move, and most important, bring their nemesis to justice for the atrocities she’s committed in the New Civil War.
The Hound of Justice is due to be published by Harper Voyager in North America and in the UK, in July 2019.
Upcoming: IMPOSSIBLE TIMES series by Mark Lawrence (47 North)
Mark Lawrence is best-known for his excellent, best-selling grimdark fantasy novels, including the Broken Empire and Red Queen’s War trilogies, and, most recently, the Book of the Ancestor series. Next year, 47 North are due to publish Lawrence’s first series outside of the fantasy genre (to my knowledge, anyway): the Impossible Times. Described as “Ready Player One meets Stranger Things“, it sounds like a lot of fun. Here’s the synopsis for the first book in the series, One Word Kill:
In January 1986, fifteen-year-old boy-genius Nick Hayes discovers he’s dying. And it isn’t even the strangest thing to happen to him that week.
Nick and his Dungeons & Dragons-playing friends are used to living in their imaginations. But when a new girl, Mia, joins the group and reality becomes weirder than the fantasy world they visit in their weekly games, none of them are prepared for what comes next. A strange — yet curiously familiar — man is following Nick, with abilities that just shouldn’t exist. And this man bears a cryptic message: Mia’s in grave danger, though she doesn’t know it yet. She needs Nick’s help — now.
He finds himself in a race against time to unravel an impossible mystery and save the girl. And all that stands in his way is a probably terminal disease, a knife-wielding maniac and the laws of physics.
Challenge accepted.
One Word Kill and Limited Wish are due to be published by 47 North in May and June 2019, respectively.
Also on CR: Interview with Mark Lawrence (2011); Reviews of Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns and Prince of Fools
Follow the Author: Website, Goodreads, Twitter
Upcoming: A SHADOW INTELLIGENCE by Oliver Harris (Little, Brown)
Oliver Harris is the critically-acclaimed author of the Nick Belsey series of London crime novels. His next novel is A Shadow Intelligence, the first in a new espionage thriller series starring Elliot Kane. I’m really looking forward to reading this one. Here’s the synopsis:
The intelligence service puts two years and over £100k into the training of new field officers. You’re shown how to steal cars, strip weapons, hack bank accounts. There are courses on the use of blackmail and improvised explosives, two workshops solely dedicated to navigating by the stars. But nothing about what I had heard one old spy call whiplash. No one tells you how to go home.
There is a dark side to MI6 that needs men like Elliot Kane — mercurial, inquisitive, free floating. He’s spent fifteen years managing events overseas that never make the papers, deniable and deeply effective. Kane is a ghost in his own life, picking up and dropping personalities as each new cover story comes into play. But when a woman he loves, Joanna Lake, vanishes without a trace in Kazakhstan, he is forced centre stage.
Drawn ever deeper into a realm of deception, Kane moves from merely infiltrating events to steering them. He’s used to a new mode of hybrid psychological warfare — but snowbound Kazakhstan presents unique challenges. Poised between China, Russia and the West, dictatorship and democracy, state intelligence and an increasingly powerful world of private agencies, it’s impossible to work out who is manipulating who. And Kane’s not the only one trying to figure out where Joanna Lake has gone or what she learned before disappearing.
Unable to trust anyone, hunted by his own colleagues, and with the life of someone he loves at stake, Kane needs to work out who is driving events, and why…
A Shadow Intelligence is due to be published in the UK by Little, Brown, in May 2019.
Upcoming: FINDER by Suzanne Palmer (DAW)
Described as an “action-packed sci-fi caper” starring an “interstellar repo man and professional finder”, this debut space opera looks like a lot of fun! Suzanne Palmer‘s Finder (maybe the first in a series?) is due to be published by DAW Books in North America, on April 2nd, 2019. At the time of writing, I couldn’t find any information about a UK edition. Here’s the synopsis:
Fergus Ferguson has been called a lot of names: thief, con artist, repo man. He prefers the term finder.
His latest job should be simple. Find the spacecraft Venetia’s Sword and steal it back from Arum Gilger, ex-nobleman turned power-hungry trade boss. He’ll slip in, decode the ship’s compromised AI security, and get out of town, Sword in hand.
Fergus locates both Gilger and the ship in the farthest corner of human-inhabited space, a gas-giant-harvesting colony called Cernee. But Fergus’ arrival at the colony is anything but simple. A cable car explosion launches Cernee into civil war, and Fergus must ally with Gilger’s enemies to navigate a field of space mines and a small army of hostile mercenaries. What was supposed to be a routine job evolves into negotiating a power struggle between factions. Even worse, Fergus has become increasingly — and inconveniently — invested in the lives of the locals.
It doesn’t help that a dangerous alien species thought mythical prove unsettlingly real, and their ominous triangle ships keep following Fergus around.
Foolhardy. Eccentric. Reckless. Whatever he’s called, Fergus will need all the help he can get to take back the Sword and maybe save Cernee from destruction in the process.
Looking forward to this one!
Quick Review: THE CORROSION OF CONSERVATISM by Max Boot (Liveright)
An interesting account of a Republican’s departure from his life-long political home
Warning that the Trump presidency presages America’s decline, the political commentator recounts his extraordinary journey from lifelong Republican to vehement Trump opponent.
As nativism, xenophobia, vile racism, and assaults on the rule of law threaten the very fabric of our nation, The Corrosion of Conservatism presents an urgent defense of American democracy.
Pronouncing Mexican immigrants to be “rapists,” Donald Trump announced his 2015 presidential bid, causing Max Boot to think he was watching a dystopian science-fiction movie. The respected conservative historian couldn’t fathom that the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan could endorse such an unqualified reality-TV star. Yet the Twilight Zone episode that Boot believed he was watching created an ideological dislocation so shattering that Boot’s transformation from Republican foreign policy adviser to celebrated anti-Trump columnist becomes the dramatic story of The Corrosion of Conservatism.
No longer a Republican, but also not a Democrat, Boot here records his ideological journey from a “movement” conservative to a man without a party, beginning with his political coming-of-age as a young émigré from the Soviet Union, enthralled with the National Review and the conservative intellectual tradition of Russell Kirk and F. A. Hayek. Against this personal odyssey, Boot simultaneously traces the evolution of modern American conservatism, jump-started by Barry Goldwater’s canonical The Conscience of a Conservative, to the rise of Trumpism and its gradual corrosion of what was once the Republican Party.
While 90 percent of his fellow Republicans became political “toadies” in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Boot stood his ground, enduring the vitriol of his erstwhile conservative colleagues, trolled on Twitter by a white supremacist who depicted his “execution” in a gas chamber by a smiling, Nazi-clad Trump. And yet, Boot nevertheless remains a villain to some partisan circles for his enduring commitment to conservative fiscal and national security principles. It is from this isolated position, then, that Boot launches this bold declaration of dissent and its urgent plea for true, bipartisan cooperation.
With uncompromising insights, The Corrosion of Conservatism evokes both a president who has traduced every norm and the rise of a nascent centrist movement to counter Trump’s assault on democracy.
I’ve been aware of Max Boot’s writings for a long time. I read many of his articles as part of my research for one of my PhD chapters. I frequently disagreed with him, especially on US domestic policy, but was always interested in reading what he thought about foreign policy (the subject of my thesis). During 2016, like many who are interested in/obsessed with US politics, I noticed his sharp break from his party and have watched with interest his evolution as his former-party has imploded and wholly bought into Trumpism. Continue reading
Upcoming: THE WICKED AND THE DAMNED by David Annandale, Phil Kelly and Josh Reynolds (Black Library)
Next year, Black Library are going to kick off their range of horror fiction, and I for one can’t wait! It looks like the series is going to include re-issues of Kim Newman’s Genevieve novels, as well as some brand new works. First up is The Wicked and the Damned by David Annandale, Phil Kelly and Josh Reynolds. A portmanteau novel, here’s the synopsis:
Drawn together by mysterious circumstances, three strangers meet in the mists of a desolate cemetery world. As they relate their stories, the threads of fate are drawn around them, and destiny awaits…
On a misty cemetery world, three strangers are drawn together through mysterious circumstances. Each of them has a tale to tell of a narrow escape from death. Amid the toll of funerary bells and the creep and click of mortuary-servitors, the truth is confessed. But whose story can be trusted? Whose recollection is warped, even unto themselves? For these are strange stories of the uncanny, the irrational and the spine-chillingly frightening, where horrors abound and the dark depths of the human psyche is unearthed.
The Wicked and the Damned will be available to pre-order from Black Library on March 23rd, 2019, and will arrive in stores on April 4th.
Follow the Author (Annandale): Website, Goodreads, Twitter
Follow the Author (Kelly): Website, Goodreads
Follow the Author (Reynolds): Website, Goodreads, Twitter
Music: Within Temptation’s dystopian Sci-Fi video for “Raise Your Banner”…
Back in September, I shared some info about Within Temptation‘s upcoming new album, Resist, including the music video for the first single, “The Reckoning”. Today, we have the second video, for “Raise Your Banner” (above). This single also features Anders Fridén, vocalist for In Flames (one of my all-time favourite bands).
Resist is due to be released on February 1st by Spinefarm Records (I think it’s been delayed, as I originally thought it was due out in December).
Here’s the video for “The Reckoning”, again:
Civilian Reader 