Congratulations to Nnedi Okorafor on Binti taking home the 2016 Novella Nebula Award! Her name is Binti, and she is the first of the Himba people ever to be offered a place at Oomza University, the finest institution of higher learning in the galaxy. But to accept the offer will mean giving up her place in her family to travel between the stars among strangers who do not share her ways or respect her customs. Knowledge comes at a cost, one […]
Jordan Brown at Balzer + Bray has preempted Justina Ireland’s DREAD NATION and an untitled sequel, a YA duology set in a post-Reconstruction America beset by an undead plague that rose from the battlefields of the Civil War. The book follows Jane, the daughter of a plantation-owner mother and enslaved father, who is training as an attendant in Baltimore to protect well-to-do white folk from the undead. Publication is scheduled for 2018. Amy Boggs did the deal for North American rights.
Dan Koboldt’s THE ISLAND DECEPTION and THE WORLD AWAKENING, sequels to THE ROGUE RETRIEVAL. A Las Vegas stage magician joins a mercenary extraction force infiltrating a world where magic is all too real and the penalty for impersonating a true magician is death, to David Pomerico at Harper Voyager Impulse for publication in February 2017 and 2018, by Paul Stevens.
Tor.com: Sometimes I read a book and I know it’s going to be a huge important book and everyone’s going to be talking about it and it’s going to change the field and be a milestone for ever after. It’s always a great feeling, but it’s never happened to me before with a first novel written by a friend, which is an even greater feeling. I’ve been waiting for the book to come out so I can talk to people […]
Environmental Scientist Kate Brandes’ debut novel THE PROMISE OF PIERSON ORCHARD, pitched as Erin Brockovich meets Promised Land, about a Pennsylvania family threatened by betrayal, financial desperation, old flames, fracking, and ultimately finding forgiveness, to Nancy Cleary at Wyatt-MacKenzie, for publication in Spring 2017, by Katie Shea Boutillier.
Boing Boing: Too Like the Lightning, a book more intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall. […] Palmer writes science fiction like a historian, maneuvering vast historical forces deftly, plunging effortlessly into their minutae and detail, zooming out to dizzying heights to show how they all fit together. Her acknowledgements cite Alfred Bester as an influence, and that’s no surprise — few writers can trump Bester for the sense of a world that contains within it […]
Culture journalist and selfie expert Alicia Eler’s THE SELFIE GENERATION, an exploration of the most direct form of visual communication in the digital age and how it shapes our culture, including discussions of digital privacy, selfie psychology, and depictions of selfie culture in mainstream media, to Maxim Brown at Skyhorse, by Caitlin McDonald.
NPR: The world Palmer creates is extraordinarily intricate, with forces and organizations forming a delicate web of tenuous coexistence. It’s a thrilling feat of speculative worldbuilding, on par with those of masters like Gene Wolfe and Neal Stephenson. […] The next book, Seven Surrenders, is due in December. That may be just enough to fully savor and digest this first installment, a novel that’s one of the most maddening, majestic, ambitious novels — in any genre — in recent years. Read […]
Nicky Drayden’s debut novel THE PREY OF GODS, a near future thriller set in South Africa in which a diverse set of characters imbued with supernatural abilites by a street drug called Godsend must band together against a disenfranchised goddess who intends to remake their world and change the fate of humanity forever, along with a second untitled novel, to David Pomerico at HarperCollins Voyager by Jennifer Jackson.
B&N SF/F: The plot is dense in a way that can be almost challenging, but the sheer invention carries you through. […] Once you adjust to the unique rhythms of the story, the rewards are many. There an intriguing mystery at the heart of Too Like the Lightning, and a love of history and language that bleeds through from the very first page. Read B&N’s full review of Too Like the Lightning here.