a view from the stars - Tor/Forge Blog

We’ve got something to put a spring in your step this season! Check out this rundown of every new title from Tor over the next few months 😎

April 2, 2024

A View from the Stars by Cixin Liu

A View from the Stars features a range of short works from the past three decades of New York Times bestselling author Cixin Liu’s prolific career, putting his nonfiction essays and short stories side-by-side for the first time. This collection includes essays and interviews that shed light on Liu’s experiences as a reader, writer, and lover of science fiction throughout his life, as well as short fiction that gives glimpses into the evolution of his imaginative voice over the years.

April 9, 2024

Lyorn by Steven Brust

Another Opening…Another Cataclysm? Vlad Taltos is on the run. Again. This time from one of the most powerful forces in his world, the Left Hand, who are intent on ending his very lucrative career. Permanently. He finds a hidey-hole in a theatre where the players are putting on a show that was banned centuries ago…and is trying to be shut down by the House that once literally killed to keep it from being played. Vlad will take on a number of roles to save his own skin. And the skins of those he loves. And along the way, he might find a part that was tailor-made for him. One that he might not want…but was always his destiny.

Forge of the High Mage by Ian C. Esslemont

After decades of warfare, Malazan forces are poised to consolidate the Quon Tali mainland. Yet it is at this moment that Emperor Kellanved orders a new, some believe foolhardy campaign: the invasion of Falar that lies far to the north . . . And to fight on this new front, a rag-tag army raised from orphaned units and broken squads is been brought together under Fist Dujek, and joined by a similarly motley fleet under the command of the Emperor himself. So the Malazans head north, only to encounter an unlooked-for and most unwelcome threat. Something unspeakable and born of legend has awoken and will destroy all who stand in its way.

April 23, 2024

Necrobane by Daniel M. Ford

Aelis de Lenti, Lone Pine’s newly assigned Warden, is in deep trouble. She has just opened the crypts of Mahlgren, releasing an army of the undead into the unprotected backwoods of Ystain. To protect her village, she must unearth a source of immense Necromantic power at the heart of Mahlgren. The journey will wind through waves of undead, untamed wilderness, and curses far older than anything Aelis has ever encountered. But as strong as Aelis is, this is one quest she cannot face alone. Along with the brilliant mercenary she’s fallen for, her half-orc friend, and a dwarven merchant, Aelis must race the clock to unravel mysteries, slay dread creatures, and stop what she has set in motion before the flames of a bloody war are re-ignited.

April 30, 2024

Web of Angels by John M. Ford

Originally published in 1980, the legendary John M. Ford’s first published novel was an uncannily brilliant anticipation of the later cyberpunk genre—and of the internet itself. The Web links the many worlds of humanity. Most people can only use it to communicate. Some can retrieve and store data, as well as use simple precoded programs. Only a privileged few are able to create their own software, within proscribed limits. And then there are the Webspinners. Grailer is Fourth Literate, able to manipulate the Web at will—and use it for purposes unintended and impossible for anyone but the most talented Webspinner. Obviously, he cannot be allowed to live. Condemned to death at the age of nine, Grailer must go underground, hiding his skills, testing his powers- until he is ready to do battle with the Web itself. With a new introduction from Cory Doctorow, written especially for this edition.

May 7, 2024

The Silverblood Promise by James Logan

Lukan Gardova is a cardsharp, academy dropout, and—thanks to a duel that ended badly—the disgraced heir to an ancient noble house. His days consist of cheap wine, rigged card games, and wondering how he might win back the life he threw away. When Lukan discovers that his estranged father has been murdered in strange circumstances, he finds fresh purpose. Deprived of his chance to make amends for his mistakes, he vows to unravel the mystery behind his father’s death. His search for answers leads him to Saphrona, fabled city of merchant princes, where anything can be bought if one has the coin. Lukan only seeks the truth, but instead he finds danger and secrets in every shadow. For in Saphrona, everything has a price—and the price of truth is the deadliest of all.

May 14, 2024

When Among Crows by Veronica Roth

We bear the sword, and we bear the pain of the sword. Pain is Dymitr’s calling. His family is one in a long line of hunters who sacrifice their souls to slay monsters. Now he’s tasked with a deadly mission: find the legendary witch Baba Jaga. To reach her, Dymitr must ally with the ones he’s sworn to kill. Pain is Ala’s inheritance. A fear-eating zmora with little left to lose, Ala awaits death from the curse she carries. When Dymitr offers her a cure in exchange for her help, she has no choice but to agree. Together they must fight against time and the wrath of the Chicago underworld. But Dymitr’s secrets—and his true motives—may be the thing that actually destroys them.

June 11, 2024

Rogue Sequence by Zac Topping

Ander Rade is a super-soldier, a genetically engineered living weapon, and has been dutifully following orders since he gave himself to Xyphos Industries’ Gene-Mod Program several years ago. But when a mission goes sideways, he’s captured, imprisoned, and forced into brutally violent fighting pits for the better part of the next decade…until agents from the Genetic Compliance Department of the United American Provinces appear in the visiting room. Things have changed since Rade was captured. Shortly after his incarceration, the World Unity Council banned human genetic engineering and deemed all modified individuals a threat to society. Overnight, an entire subculture of people became outlaws simply for existing. But instead of leaving Rade locked behind bars, the GCD agents have come with an offer: Freedom in exchange for his help tracking down one of his former teammates from that ill-fated mission all those years ago.

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

SF titan Kim Stanley Robinson’s breakout novel, now in a Tor Essentials edition with a new introduction by Henry Farrell

Decades before his massively successful The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote one of SF’s greatest meditations on extended human lifespan, the limitations of human memory, and the haunted confabulations that go with forgetting. On the North Pole of Pluto there stands an enigma: a huge circle of standing blocks of ice, built on the pattern of Earth’s Stonehenge—but ten times the size, standing alone at the edge of the Solar System. What is it? Who could have built it? The secret lies in the chaotic decades of the Martian Revolution, in the lost memories of those who have lived for centuries.

June 18, 2024

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.

Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

June 25, 2024

The Daughter’s War by Christopher Buehlman

Galva — Galvicha to her three brothers, two of whom the goblins will kill — has defied her family’s wishes and joined the army’s untested new unit, the Raven Knights. They march toward a once-beautiful city overrun by the goblin horde, accompanied by scores of giant war corvids. Made with the darkest magics, these fearsome black birds may hold the key to stopping the goblins in their war to make cattle of mankind. The road to victory is bloody, and goblins are clever and merciless. The Raven Knights can take nothing for granted — not the bonds of family, nor the wisdom of their leaders, nor their own safety against the dangerous war birds at their side. But some hopes are worth any risk.

Foul Days by Genoveva Dimova

As a witch in the walled city of Chernograd, Kosara has plenty of practice treating lycanthrope bites, bargaining with kikimoras, and slaying bloodsucking upirs. There’s only one monster she can’t defeat: her ex, the Zmey, known as the Tsar of Monsters. She’s defied him one too many times and now he’s hunting her. Betrayed by someone close to her, Kosara’s only choice is to trade her shadow—the source of her powers—for a quick escape. Unfortunately, Kosara soon develops the deadly sickness that plagues shadowless witches—and only reclaiming her magic can cure her. To find it, she’s forced to team up with a suspiciously honorable detective. Even worse, all the clues point in a single direction: To get her shadow back, Kosara will have to face the Foul Days’ biggest threats without it. And she’s only got twelve days. But in a city where everyone is out for themselves, who can Kosara trust to assist her in outwitting the biggest monster from her past?

“We’re Sci-Fi Fans”

We’re mysterious aliens in the crowd. We jump like fleas from future to past and back again, and float like clouds of gas between nebulae; in a flash, we can reach the edge of the universe, or tunnel into a quark, or swim within a star-core . . . We’re now as weak and unassuming as fireflies, yet our numbers are growing like grass in spring.

Chinese sci-fi has peaked twice, once in the 1950s and again in the eighties. But no clear boundary then existed between sci-fi and main- stream literature, so no legitimate fan base formed around the genre. After sci-fi came under siege in China in the eighties,* it was abandoned by science and literature alike and left for dead. Then, in an incredible turn, a sci-fi fan base quietly emerged in China. We gave shelter to that half-dead outcast and kept it alive. It went on to sever its umbilical cord to literature and science, establishing an independent identity for itself. This happened in the early nineties, when sci-fi fans were still few and far between.

The third bloom of Chinese sci-fi is currently underway, and though our fan base has expanded dramatically, we’re still much smaller than other, comparable communities. Science Fiction World, which most of us read, sells between four and five hundred thousand copies each month, which are read by somewhere between one and fifteen million people. Excluding casual readers, we can put the total number of sci-fi fans in China somewhere in the range of five to eight hundred thousand people. This figure includes its share of senior citizens, but secondary school and university students make up its vast majority.

We scrupulously follow the Chinese sci-fi endeavor and hope for it to thrive and achieve liftoff. Many of us read each new story as soon as it’s published, regardless of its quality, as if we were duty-bound to do so. Such a phenomenon is rare for other forms of literature. In this regard, we’re a lot like China’s soccer fans—except they seldom kick a ball themselves, whereas most sci-fi fans, at a certain point, feel com- pelled to write stories of their own. Very few of us are lucky enough to have our work published; we post most of our stuff online. In dim internet cafés, we type word after word of our very own works of sci-fi, some of which are as long as War and Peace. We’re the bards errant of the electronic era.

But what’s truly essential about our group is this: To us, sci-fi is not merely a genre of literature, but a cohesive world of the spirit—a way of life. We’re an advance party, a team of explorers; we travel ahead of oth- ers to all manner of future worlds, some foreseeable, others far beyond humanity’s potential. We begin with what’s real, and from there, our experience radiates outward to every possibility. We’re a lot like Alice, there at that convoluted fork in the road: She asks the Cheshire Cat which road to take, and he asks her where she wants to go.

I don’t know, she says.

Then it doesn’t matter.

Twenty years before all the hype around cloning technology, we’d already tracked down twenty-four young Adolf Hitlers in the world of sci-fi. Now, the sort of life that interests us exists in the form of force fields and light. And it was as many years before nanotechnol- ogy entered popular consciousness that a nanosubmarine in sci-fi took its fantastic voyage through the veins of the human body. Now, we’re occupied with whether each fundamental particle is its own universe, replete with trillions of galaxies—or whether our universe itself is a fundamental particle. When we’re at a newsstand, deciding whether to spend our five yuan on breakfast or a copy of Science Fiction World, our spirit has gone to a world of infinite abundance, where each household has a planet of its own. When we’re cramming for our final exam, our other self in the spiritual world is on a hundred-billion-light-year expe- dition into the deep end of the universe. The spiritual world of sci-fi fans is not that of scientists, whose feelers stop far short of where we go. Neither is it that of philosophers, whose world is much less vivid and dynamic than ours. And less still is it the world of myth, as everything in the spiritual world of sci-fi fans might someday come to pass—if it hasn’t already, somewhere out there in the far reaches of the universe.

Other people, they don’t care for us aliens. When one of us gradu- ates and enters society, we find ourselves surrounded at once by for- eign gazes. In this increasingly practical world, lovers of fantasy inspire intense loathing in others. We’re forced to hide ourselves deep inside shells of normalcy.

This group of ours may be weak today, but whoever underestimates it is taking their life in their hands. These kids and teenagers are grow- ing up fast. Already, there are Ph.D.s from Beijing and Tsinghua Uni- versities in our midst. More importantly, ours are the most vivacious intellects in society. Ideas that might blow a normal person’s mind are nothing but insipid old clichés to us. No one is better prepared than we for the shocking concepts the future holds. We stand far off in the dis- tance and wait impatiently for the world to catch up—and we’ll create more astonishing things yet, things that will shake the world.

We sci-fi fans are people from the future.

Tag: a view from the stars

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