Stella thought she’d made up a lie on the spot, asking her childhood friend if he remembered the strange public broadcast TV show with the unsettling host she and all the neighborhood kids appeared on years ago. But he does remember. And so does her mom. Why doesn’t Stella? The more she investigates the show and the grip it has on her hometown, the eerier the mystery grows.
Joining a boyband gave Tyler everything he ever dreamed of. A close-knit group of friends, the chance to model a beautiful masculinity, and a vocal implant that lets him sing even better than he did before transitioning. But deep on tour, Tyler realizes he wants more from one of his bandmates, yearns for a love that would never fit the image that has been carefully crafted for him. His manager wants him to be the heartthrob: available, wholesome, and pure. And since his manager gave Tyler his voice, he can always take it away again.
A young academic has been granted permission to travel to a mining outpost on a small planetoid far from the sun to study the culture of a small squatter population that lives in total darkness.
Former Academician Anna Kim’s research into AI cost her everything. Now, years later, the military has need of her expertise in order to prevent the destruction of their AI-powered fleet.
In the year 2073, humanity is making progress toward restoring the environment and fixing the mistakes of the past. Ellie has spent the last ten years going even further by working to resurrect the thylacine, extinct since 1936. But with no results and increasingly impatient bureaucrats threatening to pull her funding, the thylacine’s future—and Ellie’s—is in danger of reaching the point of no return.
For over 25 years, the Wild Cards universe has been entertaining readers with stories of superpowered people in an alternate history. “Berlin is Never Berlin” by Marko Kloos draws upon the seedier side of the city, beyond the dance club lights and all-night parties, as one bodyguard with a certain feline distinction goes on the prowl….Khan only had one job: chauffeur and guard an American wealthy socialite and her friends. When his client Natalie Scuderi gets nabbed by the Georgian mafia, this joker-ace has no choice but to go underground and rescue her. “Losing the man’s daughter on the job would be a fatal black mark on his professional resume. Khan had never lost a client, and he wasn’t about to start a habit.”
With the announcement of Stephenie Meyer’s forthcoming Midnight Sun, vampires are fresh on everyone’s mind. Meyer’s return to her world of sparkling vampires in Forks, Washington takes the YA classic Twilight and reimagines the love story from vampire Edward Cullen’s point of view.
Casual lovers of the genre might say that vampires are back! But to that I would say that vampires never left. Follow me through the journey of YA vampires.
It feels like the right time to be reading (or rereading) Terry Pratchett, doesn’t it?
A lot of us are exhausted, the truth often seems to pass people right by, and we could all use something comforting, I think. So here’s a little corner of the internet where we can perhaps spend some time together and enjoy some very good books.
It feels like centuries ago that I sat down to write my 25 Most Anticipated SFF Books of 2020 at the end of last year, right before we had our break for the holidays. But things have radically changed. Generally, since then, I’ve taken the stance of escapism—Tor.com is a unique platform on which we can be as nerdy and weird as we want. And I believe it is part of our mission to be a source of joy in the world, where readers and SFF enthusiasts can come to talk about things they love. For a while, I was avoiding The Thing(s). That is now impossible to do. As one of this website’s contributors told me, escapism through science-fiction and fantasy is good until it’s all we have. Personally, I think we can’t be running away from things, but towards something better.
Attention fellow queer nerds and weirdos: if you dig boundary-pushing drag, general gender-fuckery, and also alternative culture… well, have I got a recommendation for you. While seeking comfort this June—resting the body from protest marching, or the heart after reading the news, or the soul that longs for Pride festivals cancelled—might I suggest diving into The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula, with all three seasons currently available for streaming?
This Friday, June 19, will see the launch of the first inaugural Juneteenth Book Fest, celebrating Black American stories and all the Black writers, artists, publishing professionals, and social media influencers behind their creation. “The goal is to shine a light on the width and breadth of Black American literature, to strengthen the connection to the communities we write for, and to honor the legacy of Black American storytelling,” reads the press release.
Announced by critically acclaimed author L.L. McKinney, author of the Nightmare-Verse series, including the A Blade So Black trilogy, in partnership with book publicist and The Bronx Is Reading founder Saraciea Fennell, the festival will feature more than 30 critically acclaimed authors and publishing professionals.
When a princess’s commoner true love is kidnapped to coerce her into a political marriage, she doesn’t give in—she goes to rescue him.
We’re excited to share an excerpt from Sarah Henning’s The Princess Will Save You, a YA fantasy adventure inspired by The Princess Bride—available July 7th from Tor Teen.
I love a good time loop story, whether it’s films like Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, and Source Code or episodes from TV shows like Day Break, Dark Matter, or Stargate SG-1. Now a new film is going to play with the time loop trope: Palm Springs, starring Brooklyn Nine-Nines’s Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, best known for her roles in Wolf of Wall Street, How I Met Your Mother, and Black Mirror.
As befitting a show whose entire plot rests on all that timey-wimey stuff (thanks, Number Five!), next season of The Umbrella Academy is going to be a period piece. Netflix has released first-look pictures and a synopsis for season 2, and it looks like our favorite dysfunctional family of ex-child-superheroes is taking a trip back to the ’60s.
Spoilers ahead for The Umbrella Academy season 1.
There’s an incredible, indescribable moment when you first witness yourself represented in fiction. It’s a curious validation of your existence—that your image, personality, and gestures could spring forth from someone else’s imagination. That someone found you worthy of thinking up. Then there’s a sibling moment, one just as incredible and indescribable, when you first witness a loved one represented in fiction. It’s a cathartic Ah-ha! Someone you love is also in multiple dimensions at once. They too have a phantasmagorical reflection worthy of someone else’s imagination, along with their breathing, physical body right next to you.
I experienced the latter moment when my father took me to see Star Wars: Attack of the Clones a few weeks after its release in 2002. I was newly eleven, and immeasurably ecstatic. He was forty-five, and hated almost every second.
The Silver Chair was the fourth book of the Chronicles of Narnia to be published, but the fifth Lewis wrote, and the sixth chronologically (whew!). I had almost no memories of this book from reading it when I was a kid (they started to come back as I read), which is pretty on-brand for the themes of The Silver Chair. Having said that, I enjoyed it! It’s a straightforward adventure novel with some fun moments along the way, and the confrontation with the main villain in particular resonated with me.
The Silver Chair starts out in a terrible school (all of Lewis’ schools are terrible) called Experiment House, where we find a poor, bullied young woman named Jill Pole. Someone comes along to check on her, and it’s none other than our newly chivalrous and kind-hearted Eustace Scrubb, who gets up the guts to do something the Pevensies never really did: he tells a stranger about the beautiful world of Narnia, and how maybe they could escape the cruelties of their world to go there. He leads her in a magical incantation (a sort of prayer, really) that opens a gateway to Narnia, just as the bullies come running up on them.
A biweekly series, The Ursula K. Le Guin Reread explores anew the transformative writing, exciting worlds, and radical stories that changed countless lives. This week we’ll be covering Planet of Exile, first published by Ace Books in 1966. My edition is part of a three-book collection Nelson Doubleday, 1978, and this installment of the reread covers the entire novel.
Among those who care about these things, there are (at least) two ways to divide science fiction. On the one hand we have hard science fiction, with its emphasis on extrapolating futures and possibilities from “real science,” from (exo)biology, (quantum) physics, geology, chemistry, etc. On the other hand, there’s soft science fiction and its supposedly contrasting emphasis on the less-serious, non-natural sciences: sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and so on.
[Of course, look at any attempt to taxonomize genre and it breaks down…]
For more than two weeks now, the United States, and much of the world, has seen daily protests and demonstrations following yet another slew of murders of unarmed Black people. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others, too many others, have had their lives snuffed out by the ever-present pandemic of racial and police violence. As usual, a plethora of hashtags arose from the social media seas. Among them was #AmplifyBlackVoices, meant to highlight works by Black authors and writers.
This led to a boom in follows, subscriptions, book sales, likes, and retweets across the board. Hundreds, if not thousands of people showed up to support Black authors. At least, they showed up long enough to make a few clicks. I, like my colleagues, am grateful for the boost in visibility and sales. I’m delighted by the prospect of gaining and engaging new readers, but this moment is bittersweet. I can’t truly savor what’s happening in any real capacity, because I’m plagued by a particular question:
Where was this support before?
Stella thought she’d made up a lie on the spot, asking her childhood friend if he remembered the strange public broadcast TV show with the unsettling host she and all the neighborhood kids appeared on years ago. But he does remember. And so does her mom. Why doesn’t Stella? The more she investigates the show and the grip it has on her hometown, the eerier the mystery grows.
The Unconquered City marks the third—and so far final—novel in K.A. Doore’s Chronicles of Ghadid series. The Chronicles tell a set of loosely-connected stories centred on the desert city of Ghadid and the loosely-related family of assassins who correct injustice (for a fee) and who, over the course of the three novels, have evolved into a force dedicated to protecting the city from the dangerous guul that roam the desert sands below. From the start, the books in Chronicles of Ghadid series have combined elements of classic sword and sorcery with refreshingly queer romantic elements, and a delightful diversity of protagonists and interests. And The Unconquered City follows enthusiastically in its predecessors’ footsteps.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Relentless Moon, the third novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series! Look for it July 14th from Tor Books.
Virtual convention TorCon was held this past weekend, featuring a number of Tor authors additional special guests, including authors such as Christopher Paolini, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Neil Gaiman, V.E. Schwab, and others.
On Sunday evening, Cory Doctorow (Attack Surface, Little Brother) and Nnedi Okorafor (Binti, Remote Control) wrapped up TorCon with a discussion about how they got started, how they look at and use technology and the the value of science fiction.
Earlier this year, I made a reading list and a review of sorts of speculative short fiction by Africans published in 2019. Because my own published work for the year was set in a dystopian world and post-apocalyptic, and for other reasons, including the times, I attempted to see how many were similar or also post-apocalyptic or set in dystopias at least. My findings were that there weren’t many. Of the almost fifty stories on the list, barely five fit the criteria. Which made me wonder: are post-apocalyptic science fiction/fantasy or speculative stories becoming a thing of the past? Are they now a tired, old, forgotten trope, relics of a past age that must give way for more realistic or relevant storytelling?
Congratulations are in order for Tade Thompson and Adrian Tchaikovsky, who have been nominated for the 2020 Prix Utopiales, an annual prize that awards one speculative fiction novel or short story collection published or translated into French! Thompson was nominated for his 2016 novel Rosewater, while Tchaikovsky was nominated for his 2017 novel Dogs of War, both of which received French translations in 2019.
