Books Received

Haven’t done one of these for a while. Here’s the stuff that’s come in for Interzone, the BFAs and one or two other places.

Angel City by Jon Steele

Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh

The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig

Tomorrow the Killing by Daniel Polansky

World War Z by Max Brooks

The People’s Will by Jasper Kent

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon

God’s War by Kameron Hurley

The Adjacent by Christopher Priest

Theatre of the Gods by M. Suddain

The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross

Slave State by Chris Kelso

The Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen

Vurt by Jeff Noon

Pollen by Jeff Noon

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

Slaine: The Grail War by John Smith, art by Nick Percival & Steve Tappin

Blood and Bone: a Novel of the Malazan Empire by Ian C. Esslemont

Across the Event Horizon by Mercurio D. Rivera

Misspent Youth by Peter F. Hamilton

The Age Atomic by Adam Christopher

The Lives of Tao by Wesley Chu

Indigo Prime: Anthropocalypse by John Smith, Lee Carter, Edmund Bagwell

Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins

Play With Fire & Midnight at the Oasis by Justin Gustainis

Solaris Rising 2 edited by Ian Whates

Sea Change by S.M. Wheeler

The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett

Seoul Survivors by Naomi Foyle

Spectrums: Our Mind-boggling Universe from Infinitesimal to Infinity by David Blatner

The New Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones

Sold for Endless Rue by Madeleine E. Robins

Angelopolis by Danielle Trussoni

Burnt Island by Alice Thompson

Gemsigns by Stephanie Saulter

City in the Dusk and other stories by Matt Colborn

The Warring States by Aidan Harte

The Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan

Nod by Adrian Barnes

Hair Side, Flesh Side by Helen Marshall

Peel Back the Sky by Stephen Bacon

The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle

There is obviously not enough space to review everything and it should be stated that the absence of a review is no reflection on the quality of the book. Editing is a messy business and sometimes a great book will fall by the wayside for all sorts of reasons. Feel free to use the links to browse any of the books that look of interest.

Hope I haven’t missed anyone out. Apologies if I have; please let me know and I will rectify it.

Vector 265

Photograph by NASA

The latest issue of Vector is a Stephen Baxter special with no less than nine different features by Jonathan McCalmont, Gary K. Wolfe, Adam Roberts, Simon Bradshaw, Tony Keen, Andy Sawyer, Niall Harrison and Graham Sleight.

The review section has my reviews of Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine and Marcher as well as Paul Graham Raven’s interview with Beckett. No review of Music For Another World, though, but the British Science Fiction Association Awards 2010 booklet that come with this mailing reprints Neil Williamson’s Arrhythmia from the anthology as well as the other shortlisted stories: Nina Allan’s Flying in the Face of God (Interzone 227), Aliette de Bodard’s The Shipmaker (Interzone 231) and Peter Watt’s The Things (Clarkesworld 40).

And there is another booklet with this mailing. Into The Woods: Robert Holdstock Remembered has contributions from Paul Kincaid, Niall Harrison, Stephen Baxter, David Schwatz and Liz Williams, not to mention an interview and a poem from the late and sorely missed writer.

Vector 265

The latest issue of Vector has just been published and it contains my reviews of Chris Beckett’s The Holy Machine and Marcher as well as somebody else’s review of Music For Another World. Probably. I haven’t actually seen a copy yet.

The Turing Test

David Hebblethwaite reviews Chris Beckett’s The Turing Test (Interzone 183). He’s one of NextRead’s guest reviewers for their recent Short Story Month. There’s an interesting selection, with Interzone reviewer Ian Sales receiving the singular honour of being both reviewer and reviewed.

Johnny’s New Job

David Hebblethwaite reviews Chris Beckett’s story from Interzone 227.

The Short Review

Chris Beckett talks to The Short Review about Interzone and The Turing Test (which they review here).

Interzone 227

Artwork by Warwick Fraser-Coombe

Can you tell what it is yet? The second of Warwick Fraser-Coombe’s six linked covers is another astonishingly striking piece that works equally well as an individual work of art. But then, I’m biased.  The interior’s pretty – um – pretty as well, with full-colour artwork from Robert Dunn, Jim Burns, Ben Baldwin and Dave Senecal. Chris Beckett contributes a guest editorial as well as a short story, and John Ingold, Mercurio D. Rivera, Jim Hawkins, Nina Allan and Steve Rasnic Tem provide the rest of this issue’s fiction. Regulars David Langford, Tony Lee and Nick Lowe contribute their usual high-quality non-fiction.

This month’s Bookzone has:

Paul F. Cockburn interviewing Connie Willis and reviewing her latest novel, Blackout.

Terminal World by Alistair Reynolds (reviewed by Maureen Kincaid Speller)

Geosynchron by David Louis Edelman (reviewed by Paul Kincaid)

Naamah’s Kiss by Jacqueline Carey (reviewed by Lawrence Osborn)

The Poison Throne by Celine Kiernan (reviewed by Ian Sales)

Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes (reviewed by Mike Cobley)

WE by John Dickinson (reviewed by Duncan Lunan)

Hyddenworld: Spring by William Horwood (reviewed by Iain Emsley)

Under in the Mere by Catherynne M. Valente (reviewed by Andrew J. Wilson)

A new distribution deal means that, from this issue onwards, Interzone is available in the USA, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Austria, Norway, Croatia, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. Or you can always buy it here.

Andrew Oldham

…writes about The Turing Test in much greater depth than I did. And he uses better sentence structure as well.

The Turing Test

The 2009 Edge Hill Short Story Prize for the best single-author collection has been won by Chris Beckett’s The Turing Test. He won not only the £5000 jury prize but also the £1000 readers’ prize.

It’s a stunning collection, and had to be to beat the other authors on the shortlist, three-quarters of whom had either won or been on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. 

Most of the stories first appeared in Interzone, y’know…

Locus 577

Gardner Dozois reviews Interzone 218 and Interzone 219 in the February Locus.  He says, “The best story in Interzone 218, and one of the best of the year, is Hannu Rajaniemi’s His Master’s Voice…” He then goes on to rate the Chris Beckett stories (Greenland is his favourite), and Tim Lees’s Corner of the Circle.

Aliette de Bodard’s Butterfly, Falling at Dawn is his favourite from Interzone 219, and he also has good things to say about Mercurio D. Rivera’s The Fifth Zhi, Gord Sellar’s The Country of The Young, and Jason Sanford’s When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees.

In the review of 2008, Jonathan Strahan made Greg Egan’s Crystal Nights (Interzone 215) one of his top ten stories of the year.

This issue contains the voting form for the Locus awards, although you can also vote online.  If you’re a subscriber, you will get another issue added to your subscription for taking part, so don’t throw away your envelope before taking a note of your number. All the recommended titles from last year are listed, including the three Interzone titles (one more than 2007), but you can, of course, nominate any title you wish from 2008.

Locus 576

Rich Horton reviews Interzone 218 and Interzone 219 in the January Locus.

In Interzone 218 he liked all of the Chris Beckett stories, especially Greenland, and placed Hannu Rajaniemi’s His Master’s Voice on his list of recommended stories.

In Interzone 219 he liked Alexander Marsh Freed’s The Shenu, and placed Jason Sanford’s When Thorns are the Tips of Trees on his list of recommended stories.

This is merely a summary. He had much more to say about them than that.

Interzone 218

- artwork by Warwick Fraser-Coombe -

The October Interzone was published last Thursday and should be speeding its way to your doormat or local retailer as you read this. Indeed, it may even have already arrived. This time around we have the following reviews:

The Last Reef and Other Stories by Gareth Powell (reviewed and interviewed by Paul Cockburn)
An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe (reviewed by Mike Cobley)
The Kingdom Beyond The Waves by Stephen Hunt (reviewed by Lawrence Osborn)
Template by Matthew Hughes (reviewed by Ian Sales)
Year’s Best Fantasy 8 edited by David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (reviewed by Paul Kincaid)
The Painted Man by Peter Brett (reviewed by Iain Emsley)
Stalking the Unicorn & Stalking the Vampire by Mike Resnick (reviewed by Juliet McKenna)
Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross (reviewed and interviewed by Rick Kleffel)

A big thanks goes out to Paul Raven for his help and Andy Cox for making the review section look so damned good. The rest of the magazine’s not half bad either. It’s a bit of a Chris Beckett special and contains no less than three of his stories and an interview with him, plus more fiction from Daniel Akelrod & Lenny Royter, Hannu Rajaniemi, and Tim Lees. There are also film reviews from Nick Lowe, DVD reviews from Tony Lee, and news and stuff from David Langford.

Doesn’t that cover look wonderful?