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New Releases: 9/20/16

Here’s what went on sale today!

Deadlands: Thunder Moon Rising by Jeffrey Mariotte

Deadlands: Thunder Moon Rising by Jeffrey MariotteFear is abroad in the Deadlands as a string of brutal killings and cattle mutilations trouble a frontier town in the Arizona Territory, nestled in the forbidding shadow of the rugged Thunder Mountains. A mule train is massacred, homes and ranches are attacked, and men and women are stalked and butchered by bestial killers who seem to be neither human nor animal, meanwhile a ruthless land baron tries to buy up all the surrounding territory-and possibly bring about an apocalypse.

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

Death’s End by Cixin LiuWith The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to experience the multiple-award-winning and bestselling Three-Body Trilogy by China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. Three-Body was released to great acclaim including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. It was also named a finalist for the Nebula Award, making it the first translated novel to be nominated for a major SF award since Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities in 1976. Now this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End.

The Family Plot by Cherie Priest

The Family Plot by Cherie PriestChuck Dutton built Music City Salvage with patience and expertise, stripping historic properties and reselling their bones. Inventory is running low, so he’s thrilled when Augusta Withrow appears in his office offering salvage rights to her entire property. This could be a gold mine, so he assigns his daughter Dahlia to personally oversee the project.

The crew finds a handful of surprises right away. Firstly, the place is in unexpectedly good shape. And then there’s the cemetery, about thirty fallen and overgrown graves dating to the early 1900s, Augusta insists that the cemetery is just a fake, a Halloween prank, so the city gives the go-ahead, the bulldozer revs up, and it turns up human remains. Augusta says she doesn’t know whose body it is or how many others might be present and refuses to answer any more questions. Then she stops answering the phone.

Metaltown by Kristen Simmons

Metaltown by Kristen SimmonsThe rules of Metaltown are simple: Work hard, keep your head down, and watch your back. You look out for number one, and no one knows that better than Ty. She’s been surviving on the factory line as long as she can remember. But now Ty has Colin. She’s no longer alone; it’s the two of them against the world. That’s something even a town this brutal can’t take away from her. Until it does.

Lena’s future depends on her family’s factory, a beast that demands a ruthless master, and Lena is prepared to be as ruthless as it takes if it means finally proving herself to her father. But when a chance encounter with Colin, a dreamer despite his circumstances, exposes Lena to the consequences of her actions, she’ll risk everything to do what’s right.

Red Tide by Marc Turner

Red Tide by Marc TurnerThe Augerans are coming. And their ships are sailing in on a red tide.

The Rubyholt Isles are a shattered nation of pirate-infested islands and treacherous waterways shielding the seaboards of Erin Elal and the Sabian League, a region even dragons fear to trespass.

The Augerans beseech the Warlord of the Isles, seeking passage for their invasion fleet through Rubyholt territory. But they are sailing into troubled waters. Their enemies have sent agents to sabotage the negotiations, and to destroy the Augeran fleet by any means necessary.

Vassa in the Night by Sarah Porter

Vassa in the Night by Sarah PorterIn the enchanted kingdom of Brooklyn, the fashionable people put on cute shoes, go to parties in warehouses, drink on rooftops at sunset, and tell themselves they’ve arrived. A whole lot of Brooklyn is like that now—but not Vassa’s working-class neighborhood.

In Vassa’s neighborhood, where she lives with her stepmother and bickering stepsisters, one might stumble onto magic, but stumbling out again could become an issue. Babs Yagg, the owner of the local convenience store, has a policy of beheading shoplifters—and sometimes innocent shoppers as well. So when Vassa’s stepsister sends her out for light bulbs in the middle of night, she knows it could easily become a suicide mission.

NEW FROM TOR.COM:

The Warren by Brian Evenson

The Warren by Brian EvensonX doesn’t have a name. He thought he had one—or many—but that might be the result of the failing memories of the personalities imprinted within him. Or maybe he really is called X.

He’s also not as human as he believes himself to be.

But when he discovers the existence of another—above ground, outside the protection of the Warren—X must learn what it means to be human, or face the destruction of their two species.

NOW IN PAPERBACK:

Nightwise by R. S. Belcher

Nightwise by R. S. BelcherR.S. Belcher, the acclaimed author of The Six-Gun Tarot and The Shotgun Arcana launches a gritty new urban fantasy series set in today’s seedy occult underworld in Nightwise.

In the more shadowy corners of the world, frequented by angels and demons and everything in-between, Laytham Ballard is a legend. It’s said he raised the dead at the age of ten, stole the Philosopher’s Stone in Vegas back in 1999, and survived the bloodsucking kiss of the Mosquito Queen. Wise in the hidden ways of the night, he’s also a cynical bastard who stopped thinking of himself as the good guy a long time ago.

Vienna by William S. Kirby

Vienna by William S. KirbyJustine is an A-list fashion model on a photo shoot in Europe. Adored by half the world, she can have whomever she wants, but she’s never met anyone like the strange English girl whose bed she wakes up in one morning.

Vienna is an autistic savant, adrift in a world of overwhelming patterns and connections only she can see. Socially awkward and inexperienced, she’s never been with anyone before, let alone a glamorous supermodel enmeshed in a web of secrets and intrigue.

NEW IN MANGA

Arpeggio of Blue Steel Vol. 8 by Ark Performance

NTR: Netsuzou Trap Vol. 1 by Kodama Naoko

Tomodachi x Monster Vol. 3 by Yoshihiko Inui

Not at New York Comic-Con Sweepstakes

Not at New York Comic-Con Sweepstakes

Tor Books is heading to New York Comic-Con!

Image Placeholder of - 71We hope to see many of you there. Stop by Booth #920 to say hi or to participate in one of our many events and signings.

But for those of you who couldn’t make it out to New York, we wanted to offer you the chance to grab some of the same amazing swag and books that we’re promoting at #NYCC. To enter for the chance to win one of these five prize bundles, leave a comment on this post telling us one fabulous thing that you’ll be doing this week while you are #NotAtComicCon.

Here’s a look at the prize:

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And here’s a list of what’s included in each prize bundle:

  • Wheel of Time backpack
  • Halo patch
  • Article 5 by Kristen Simmons
  • The Battle of Blood and Ink written by Jared Axelrod and illustrated by Steve Walker
  • The Clockwork Sky Volume One by Madeleine Rosca
  • Dead Space: Martyr by Brian Evenson
  • Earthseed by Pamela Sargent
  • Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
  • The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
  • The Eye of the World: Graphic Novel: Volume 2 Based on the novel by Robert Jordan, written by Chuck Dixon, illustrated by Andie Tong
  • For the Win by Cory Doctorow
  • Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson
  • The Gift of Fire/On the Head of a Pin by Walter Mosley
  • Green by Jay Lake
  • Halo: Cryptum by Greg Bear
  • Halo: Glasslands by Karen Traviss
  • Hellhole by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
  • Inside Straight edited by George R.R. Martin
  • Johnny Hiro: Half Asian, All Hero written and illustrated by Fred Chao
  • Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber
  • Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
  • The Omen Machine by Terry Goodkind
  • Only Superhuman by Christopher L. Bennett
  • Personal Demons by Lisa Desrochers
  • Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
  • The Way of the Kings by Brandon Sanderson

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. You must be 18 or older and a legal resident of the 50 United States or D.C. to enter. Promotion begins October 11, 2012 at 10:00 a.m. ET. and ends October 15, 2012, 12:00 p.m. ET. Void in Puerto Rico and wherever prohibited by law. Please see full details and official rules go here. Sponsor: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

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Immobility: The Fake Book that Became Real

Immobility by Brian Evenson

By Brian Evenson

Books come from all sorts of different places—from a news story, a random idea, a bit of triggering language, or from other books, for instance. But very few books start out like Immobility, which saw the light of day first as an imaginary book, and only later became real.

It happened something like this. I’d been playing around with the idea of a post-apocalyptic detective novel and had a page or so of notes for it. I ended up writing a story called “The Adjudicator” that created the kind of world such a novel might take place in. Then I got busy with other projects and put the notes aside.

I might not have ever come back to it except that I had an email from Charlie Orr asking me to imagine a fake book for his blog, The Hypothetical Library. It made me think of Stanislas Lem’s A Perfect Vacuum, a series of book reviews of non-existent books, and was unlike any other project I’d done. The idea was that I’d give him jacket copy for a book that I’d like to write and that would “sound” like me, but that I’d probably never get around to actually writing. I decided to pick up that page of notes for the post-apocalyptic detective novel again and see what I could do with them.

The notes weren’t much. All I had was a title, Immobility, a few fragments of ideas, a few scraps of language, and the notion that the main character would be paralyzed from the waist down and carried around by other characters that were in the process of dying. It look me a lot longer than I thought it would to write the flap copy, partly because I found myself having to create a different foundation for the ideas. It went from being a detective story to being more of a hapless noir, with the main character confused about who he is or what has actually happened to him. He quickly became someone who didn’t understand the world he was now part of, a world in which humans were either transforming or dying out. Eventually, though, I finished the flap copy and sent it to Charlie. He put together a cover for it, wrote up some commentary himself, and we got Jeff VanderMeer to give a fake blurb for the fake book.

But writing up the fake flap copy had gotten my mind working. I started tapping notes about Immobility on my phone when I was in university meetings. Those notes led to more notes, and slowly the idea became more and more articulated. But I saw it mainly as a way of distracting myself during boring meetings. It still probably wouldn’t have led to anything if Eric Raab at Tor hadn’t seen the fake book and sent me a note encouraging me to actually write it.

So, I started. When I began I wasn’t sure that I had enough to go on, but I was surprised by how quickly everything came together. Apparently I’d been writing the book in my head for months, almost without realizing it. And before I knew it, Immobility went from being a conceptual project to being an actual book.

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From the Tor/Forge April newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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Dead Space: Martyr

Dead Space: Martyr by B. K. EvensonBy Brian Evenson

As my girlfriend knows all too well, I’m an unapologetic gamer. I’m all too capable of sitting down at the computer at ten at night and only realizing that I’ve been playing for eight hours once I see the sun start to come up. I read in something like the same way: I like when I read to fall into another world and stay immersed in it, swimming around in it, only rarely coming up for air.

What I like as both a reader and as a gamer are books and games that are constructed with such attention to detail that you really feel the satisfaction of living inside them. But I also like games and books that don’t solve everything for you, that make you feel like the world goes on well beyond them, that there are other stories just waiting to be told.

 

Dead Space was a game like that for me. From the moment I started to play, I was hooked. I loved the flickering lighting, the grungy industrial feeling of the world of the USG Ishimura, the deep-seated twistedness that infects every level of the game design. I loved being slowly exposed to the cult-like aspects of Unitology and I was crazy for the vision of a society on the verge of ecological collapse. Not to mention liking how the necromorphs are humans that have been twisted into monsters, and enjoying the variety of violent deaths just waiting for Isaac, and being sometimes frightened enough to find myself physically dodging the screen during gameplay.

All this made me jump at the chance to write Dead Space: Martyr. If someone would have told me even a few years ago that I’d write a novel based on a video game, I probably would have laughed. But I’d spent so much time loving being immersed in the game that it seemed completely natural. Dead Space is a window on a great consistent world, and it was a world I wanted to be part of.

In writing Dead Space: Martyr I set out to answer the questions that hadn’t been answered by the game or the motion comics or the graphic novel. I wanted to see into corners of the world that the game had just hinted at. I was interested in the Unitologists and their founder Michael Altman and, of course, in the discovery of the black marker. I wanted to write something worthy of the game itself, to try to give readers some of the pleasure I’d gotten out of the game and to give them answers worthy of the Dead Space franchise, and I wanted it to work, really work, as a novel. I wanted to cut through the layers of myth surrounding the Unitologists by going back to their beginnings to see what happened behind closed doors.

And most of all I wanted to write the kind of novel that, whether you’ve played Dead Space yet or not, will take you deep into that universe, scare you, creep you out a little, and make you want more.

Dead Space: Martyr (0-7653-2503-9; $14.99), by B.K. Evenson, released from Tor last week. The next entry in the videogame series, Dead Space 2, is due out from EA/Visceral Games in early 2011. For more news and updates, visit the official book page at Tor’s website.

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From the Tor/Forge August newsletter. Sign up to receive our newsletter via email.

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