Here’s what went on sale today!
Easy Pickings by Richard S. Wheeler
Life hasn’t always been easy for March and Kermit McPhee, but things are looking up. March gives birth to a healthy son, and their small gold mine is looking better and better as Kermit blasts his way along a good seam of ore. Then Kermit is crushed by a cave-in.
As soon as her husband dies, crooks are at March’s door, eager to get their hands on the mine. The peaceful town of Marysville, Montana, is peaceful no more. March’s home is burned and her baby killed. Terrified and threatened, she is targeted by the wealthy and powerful.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer–a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.
The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours would be to a native of the 1500s. It is a hard-won utopia built on technologically-generated abundance, and also on complex and mandatory systems of labelling all public writing and speech. What seem to us normal gender distinctions are now distinctly taboo in most social situations. And most of the world’s population is affiliated with globe-girdling clans of the like-minded, whose endless economic and cultural competion is carefully managed by central planners of inestimable subtlety. To us it seems like a mad combination of heaven and hell. To them, it seems like normal life.
NEW FROM TOR.COM:
A Whisper of Southern Lights by Tim Lebbon
Death and destruction follow the demon wherever he treads, and Gabriel is rarely far behind, waiting for his chance to extinguish the creature known as Temple once and for all.
But in Singapore during the Second World War, a lone soldier in possession of a shattering secret gets caught up in their battle. The knowledge he holds could change the course of their ancient conflict… and the fate of the world.
NOW IN PAPERBACK:
Corsair by James L. Cambias
In the early 2020s, two young, genius computer hackers, Elizabeth Santiago and David Schwartz, meet at MIT, where Schwartz is sneaking into classes, and have a brief affair. David is amoral and out for himself, and soon disappears. Elizabeth dreams of technology and space travel and takes a military job after graduating. Nearly ten years later, David is setting himself to become a billionaire by working in the shadows under a multiplicity of names for international thieves, and Elizabeth works in intelligence preventing international space piracy.
Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Reports of a strange, new habitable planet have reached the Twenty Planets of human civilization. When a team of scientists is assembled to investigate this world, exoethnologist Sara Callicot is recruited to keep an eye on an unstable crewmate. Thora was once a member of the interplanetary elite, but since her prophetic delusions helped mobilize a revolt on Orem, she’s been banished to the farthest reaches of space, because of the risk that her very presence could revive unrest.
Upon arrival, the team finds an extraordinary crystalline planet, laden with dark matter. Then a crew member is murdered and Thora mysteriously disappears. Thought to be uninhabited, the planet is in fact home to a blind, sentient species whose members navigate their world with a bizarre vocabulary and extrasensory perceptions.
Melissa Ann Singer, Senior Editor: I had the great good fortune to be raised by parents who read science fiction and fantasy and comics…and the further good fortune that the children’s librarian at my local public library loved SF/F and was on a mission to fill the children’s department (and the teen department, which she basically created around 1970) with a wide range of science fiction and fantasy. Through her, I discovered Lloyd Alexander and John Christopher and Ursula K. Le Guin and Suzette Haden Elgin and many more. A few weeks ago, at a used book sale, my heart skipped a beat at the sight of a copy of Enchantress From the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl, with cover art by the Dillons. This was not the edition I read (which had a white cover, iirc), but I can’t have been more than 10 or 11 years old the first time I read that book, and seeing it in a box—where it was the only SF/F title—gave me a pang. So I bought it (for a whole dollar), and it’s sitting on my coffee table at home. While I read it several times in my early teens, I haven’t read it since, and part of me is afraid that it won’t have the magic I remember. But I’m going to read it again anyway, hoping to recapture the sense of wonder I felt back then, when I was a fairly newly-minted SF/F fan and had so much to discover.
Stuart J. Miller, Senior Sales & Publisher Administration Manager: For the last several months I’ve been on a reading fixation consisting of books about New York City local history. Awaiting my attention for this holiday season is this wonderful book published by Johns Hopkins University Press titled It Happened on Washington Square by Emily Kies Folpe. It is a narrative history of the last 125 years of events in Greenwich Village in the vicinity of Washington Square Park. It covers art, literature, social history and government.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Executive Editor: The Luttrell Psalter is a medieval illuminated manuscript created between 1320 and 1345 by an unknown group of scribes and artists under the sponsorship of Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Lincolnshire (1276-1345). Its over 300 leaves have survived to the modern era in a state of excellent preservation, and it’s one of the prize manuscripts on display at the British Library. It’s of particular interest to modern people because its pages are replete not only with images of everyday fourteenth-century rural life—animals, daily work, festivals, and so forth—but also with fantastic monsters and beasts, many of them extravagant and even downright comical. At times the Psalter’s sensibility seems impossibly modern, like a brilliant graphic novel that just happens to have been set down on vellum nearly seven hundred years ago. To see what I mean, just type “Luttrell Psalter” into Google Images, and prepare to be amazed. So anyway, the book I’m looking forward to finishing is Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England by Michael Camille, a chewy, detailed study of the Psalter that sets its imagery into the context of the gentry and feudal life of its day. With, naturally, hundreds of illustrations.