Many publishers haven't firmed up their winter releases for next year, so most of these books are coming in spring and summer 2010. Keep on the lookout for them!

The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald (Pyr)
The author of several smart, politically-savvy tales of the near future, McDonald is back with this story of nanotech set in Istanbul:

In the sleepy Istanbul district of Eskiköy stands the former whirling dervish house of Adem Dede. Over the space of five days of an Istanbul heatwave, six lives weave a story of corporate wheeling and dealing, Islamic mysticism, political and economic intrigue, ancient Ottoman mysteries, a terrifying new terrorist threat, and a nanotechnology with the potential to transform every human on the planet.

A tale of terrorism and outlaw science from the guy who penned Brasyl and River of Gods? Hell yeah.

Kraken, by China Miéville (Ballantine)
Miéville plunged us into magical noir realism with this year's The City & The City, but promises to return to a more scifi/fantasy world with Kraken. The author is so spoiler-averse that very little is known about this book, other than the auspicious title. Given how brilliantly he depicted sea monsters in The Scar, I think we're in for a treat with this one. And even if the title turns out to be entirely misleading, I'm still along for the ride.

Running With the Pack, edited by Ekaterina Sedia (Prime)
We were crazy about Sedia's recent novel The Alchemy of Stone, about a clockwork cyborg caught up in a workers' revolution, and we weren't the only ones. Josh Friedman, creator of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, said the book dealt with a lot of themes he was trying to get at in his cyborg-centric series. Sedia is back next year with this anthology about (yes!) contemporary werewolves. Includes stories from Carrie Vaughn, Laura Anne Gilman, and C.E. Murphy.

For the Win, by Cory Doctorow (Tor)
The prolific Doctorow can't let a year go by without blowing our minds with a new tale about high tech rebels who commit acts of subversion in the most unexpected - and profound - of ways. Doctorow spent time in China last year researching For the Win, a young adult story about gamers in the East.

The Restoration Game, by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)
One of my personal favorite authors, MacLeod is famous for combining detailed political futurism with intriguing science. In his recent The Night Sessions, for example, evangelical Christian robot terrorists fight a battle on a technically-accurate space elevator. Wow. According to the publisher, here's a quick description of The Restoration Game:

There is no such place as Krassnia. Lucy Stone should know - she was born there. In that tiny, troubled region of the former Soviet Union, revolution is brewing. Its organisers need a safe place to meet, and where better than the virtual spaces of an online game? Lucy, who works for a start-up games company in Edinburgh, has a project that almost seems made for the job: a game inspired by The Krassniad: an epic folk tale concocted by Lucy's mother Amanda, who studied there in the 1980s. Lucy knows Amanda is a spook. She knows her great-grandmother Eugenie also visited the country in the '30s, and met the man who originally collected Krassnian folklore, and who perished in Stalin's terror. As Lucy digs up details about her birthplace to slot into the game, she finds the open secrets of her family's past, the darker secrets of Krassnia's past - and hints about the crucial role she is destined to play in The Restoration Game ...

Virtual histories, virtual worlds, and virtual nation-states? Count me in.

Digital Domains, edited by Ellen Datlow (Prime)
This anthology brings together two legends of science fiction: the late, great OMNI magazine, and its science fiction editor Ellen Datlow. OMNI, a science and futurism magazine whose format inspired io9, published some of the greatest, most experimental science fiction of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Thanks to Datlow's keen eye for talent, the magazine always challenged its readers with stories that went beyond the ordinary. In Digital Domains she's collected her favorite stories from her years at OMNI, along with two other magazines she worked on, Event Horizon and SCIFICTION, and we can't wait to tear through them.

Geosynchron, by David Louis Edelman (Pyr)
This is the third novel in Edelman's crazy-brilliant series about nano-enhancement and corporate culture, which began with Infoquake and Multireal. In a world where the "multireal" tech allows people to see multiple versions of their futures and pick between them, what happens next? Anyone who read the first two books in this "Jump 225 Trilogy" is basically waiting on tenderhooks to find out.

Blackout, by Connie Willis (Spectra)
Award-winning author Willis returns to the world she created in her time-travel masterpiece Doomsday Book with this tale of World War II in London. Here's the book jacket description:

Oxford in 2060 is a chaotic place. Scores of time-traveling historians are being sent into the past, to destinations including the American Civil War and the attack on the World Trade Center. Michael Davies is prepping to go to Pearl Harbor. Merope Ward is coping with a bunch of bratty 1940 evacuees and trying to talk her thesis adviser, Mr. Dunworthy, into letting her go to VE Day. Polly Churchill's next assignment will be as a shopgirl in the middle of London's Blitz. And seventeen-year-old Colin Templer, who has a major crush on Polly, is determined to go to the Crusades so that he can "catch up" to her in age. But now the time-travel lab is suddenly canceling assignments for no apparent reason and switching around everyone's schedules. And when Michael, Merope, and Polly finally get to World War II, things just get worse. For there they face air raids, blackouts, unexploded bombs, dive-bombing Stukas, rationing, shrapnel, V-1s, and two of the most incorrigible children in all of history-to say nothing of a growing feeling that not only their assignments but the war and history itself are spiraling out of control. Because suddenly the once-reliable mechanisms of time travel are showing significant glitches, and our heroes are beginning to question their most firmly held belief: that no historian can possibly change the past.

I have a chance to plunge back into Willis' world of brilliant historians who divide their time between academia and traveling through time to their chosen historical periods? Yes, please.

Chill, Elizabeth Bear (Ballatine Spectra)
Bear returns with the second installment in her space opera that began with Dust, about an ancient generation ship whose citizens face danger from both outer space - and from squabbles on board. Expect more genetic engineering and cyborgs mixed with angels and courtly antics. Nobody does escapism better than Bear does, so this early-2010 treat will keep us warm when snow is flying outside.

Edge of Ruin, by Melinda Snodgrass (Tor)
This is another entry in Snodgrass' anti-religion tale of the supernatural, where the forces of rationality fight it out with the forces of close-minded dogma. Here's a description of Edge of Reason, her preceding novel in the series:

Since the dawn of consciousness, a secret war has been fought between the forces of magic and religious fanaticism, and the cause of reason, understanding, and technology. On one side are the Old Ones, malign entities that feed on the suffering of mankind. On the other are the Lumina, an ancient order dedicated the liberation of the human spirit.Officer Richard Oort of the Albuquerque Police Department is caught in the middle of this primal battle when he rescues a mysterious teenage girl from a trio of inhuman hunters. Recruited by the Lumina to serve as their latest paladin, Richard ends up fighting beside a handful of unlikely allies, including an adolescent sorceress, an enigmatic philanthropist, a sexy coroner, and a homeless god with multiple personalities.

Honstly how can you not want to take a peek at this one?

Redemption in Indigo, by Karen Lord (Small Beer Press)
This US edition of Lord's contemporary fairy tale novel has been eagerly anticipated in the scifi/fantasy world. It's the story of a woman who finally leaves her abusive husband, only to find that this step toward empowerment is nothing compared to what comes next. Here's how Small Beer Press describes it:

Redemption in Indigo is a clever and entrancing debut which incorporates folktales to tell the story of a woman who frees herself from a troublesome and capricious husband only to become the unwitting heroine in a fantastic struggle to reconcile the supernatural forces of fate with humanity's free will.

Lord writes that the book is set "in a vaguely African-Caribbean imaginary country (such as one might expect from a Barbadian writer inspired by a Senegalese folk tale)."

Among Others, by Jo Walton (Tor)
Walton is the beloved author of the alternate history series that begins with Farthing, set in London after Hitler wins World War II; and she penned the world's only drawing room melodrama featuring dragons as main characters, Tooth and Claw. She's the master of rich detail, dark wit, and plotting that sucks you in before you realize it. Among Others is a change of pace for her, a semi-autobiographical tale of growing up nerdy. Of course the book contains fantastical subplots, and characters who are heartbreakingly real - especially for people who grew up with their noses buried in fantasy novels. There is no way you should miss out on this one.

The Loving Dead, by Amelia Beamer (Night Shade)
This is the first zombie romance novel. No, it's not a cheesy mashup of a Jane Austen joint. It's just love and sex with zombies. Seriously, do we need to say more? Want. Now.

Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals, by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Tachyon)
When Ann VanderMeer told me about this book, I was instantly in love with the idea. A handsomely-illustrated collection of imaginary creatures, this is actually a Kosher cooking guide for those with fantastic palates. The VanderMeers consulted with chefs familiar with Kosher cooking to find out which creatures of yore belong on the Passover table, and which should be avoided if you want to stay Kosher. A demented homage to cooking, Judaism, and monsters, this is pretty much the perfect book for your coffee table.

Zendegi, by Greg Egan (Night Shade)
Anything new from Egan is always cause for celebration, because this guy knows his science and has an imagination that's ridiculously pyrotechnic. Though he's penned some incredible space operas set a zillion years into the posthuman future, Zendegi finds Egan focusing on Earth in the near-term. Here's the scoop, from the publisher:

Nasim is a young computer scientist, hoping to work on the Human Connectome Project: a plan to map every neural connection in the human brain. But funding for the project is cancelled, and Nasim ends up devoting her career to Zendegi, a computerised virtual world used by millions of people. Fifteen years later, a revived Connectome Project has published a map of the brain. Zendegi is facing fierce competition from its rivals, and Nasim decides to exploit the map to fill the virtual world with better Proxies: the bit-players that bring its crowd scenes to life. As controversy rages over the nature and rights of the Proxies, a friend with terminal cancer begs Nasim to make a Proxy of him, so some part of him will survive to help raise his orphaned son. But Zendegi is about to become a battlefield.

Interestingly, if you consider this novel beside Ken MacLeod's The Restoration Game and Cory Doctorow's For the Win, it would seem that one of the themes emerging in SF for 2010 is the virtual developing world.

Trade of Queens, by Charles Stross (Tor)
The sixth (and probably final) novel in Stross' celebrated Merchant Princes series, which has been praised by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman for its economic imaginativeness, Trade of Queens promises a "series level climax," according to early readers. This series, set in two parallel Earths connected by a very strange trade route, is a swashbuckling tale of early capitalist accumulation. You won't want to miss its thrilling conclusion!

Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness (Walker)
Ness' beautiful young adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go introduced us to a world where women are scarce and dogs communicate telepathically with their human companions. With Monsters of Men, he completes the trilogy that Knife began. Here's a taste of the book description to tantalize you:

"War," says the Mayor."At last." Three armies have marched on New Prentisstown, each one intent on destroying the others. And Todd and Viola are caught in the middle of it all. As the battles commence, can they hope to stop all-out war? Can there ever be peace when they're so hopelessly outnumbered? And if, as they have been told, "War makes monsters of men", what terrible choices await them? And what of the third voice that watches them, one bent on revenge...

Expect nothing short of amazing from this conclusion to the Chaos Walking series.

Lightborn, by Tricia Sullivan (Orbit)
Here's a description:

Lightborn, better known as 'shine', is a mind-altering technology that has revolutionised the modern world. It is the ultimate in education, self-improvement and entertainment - beamed directly into the brain of anyone who can meet the asking price. But in the city of Los Sombres, renegade shine has attacked the adult population, resulting in social chaos and widespread insanity in everyone past the age of puberty. The only solution has been to turn off the Field and isolate the city. Trapped within the quarantine perimeter, fourteen-year-old Xavier just wants to find the drug that can keep his own physical maturity at bay until the army shuts down the shine. That's how he meets Roksana, mysteriously impervious to shine and devoted to helping the stricken. As the military invades street by street, Xavier and Roksana discover that there could be hope for Los Sombres - but only if Xavier will allow a lightborn cure to enter his mind. What he doesn't know is that the shine in question has a mind of its own.

A post-apocalyptic pharmaceutical dystopia? Yes, we are there. Also, bonus points for X-Men reference.

New Model Army, by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
Roberts is a darling of the literary scifi scene, and his new novel sounds like it will be intriguing and thought-provoking, as well as a good satire. Set in a near-future England, the novel is about a civil war that rips the UK apart. But it's also about social media technologies, because the group that unseats the British army is the world's first "truly democratic army," assembled via new grassroots communications technologies. I'm always interested to see critical explorations of where the so-called liberating power of social networking might take us. And I want to see where Roberts goes with this one.

Death of the Author, by Scarlett Thomas (Houghton Mifflin)
I fell in love with Thomas after reading The End of Mr. Y, her novel about enchanted books, body-hopping, the nature of belief, and hundreds of mice. Like Roberts, Thomas is known for her philosophically-minded writing, which she leavens with extremely weird plot developments that will keep you reading. Not much is known about her new novel, other than that the title is borrowed from an essay by Roland Barthes about how a truly good critic shouldn't care what the author's intent was in writing a story. Often, the best interpretations ignore what the author intended entirely, which is why Barthes argues that the author is for all intents and purposes dead. Given Thomas' love of post-structuralist types like Barthes, I predict a bizarro slant on this idea, which will hopefully involve some angry dead authors begging to differ.

Thanks to Niall Harrison for some great suggestions!

If 2012 is as successful as those Hollywood Insiders expect it to be - and with a $23.7 million Friday opening, that looks to be a sure thing right now - then the obvious follow-up isn't the 2013 television series that director Roland Emmerich has been talking about, but a prequel: 2011... explaining not only what happened in the year before the end of the world, but just how how the Monolith-led transformation of Jupiter in 2010 led into the whole thing. That's right: We're talking crossover territory, and who better to take us there than Nicolas Cage?

This is what we're suggesting: While Danny Glover's President and Oliver Platt's chief of staff are hurredly making plans to survive the oncoming apocalypse that they've secretly discovered (as per 2012), a maverick government scientists played by Cage is studying the data captured the spaceship Alexei Leonov (in 2010) and comes up with a plan to contact the aliens behind the Monoliths to try and convince them to cool the Earth from the core temperature-induced collapse we've been promised. Part of this involves going public with that whole "end of the world" thing, which means that before too long, Cage and his family (including surly son Shia LeBeouf) are on the run, being chased by US government agents ordered to keep him quiet at all costs.

While on the run, Cage meets up with 2010's Roy Scheider - or a CGI-animated version thereof, using motion capture technology of John Turturro, just because - who was there when Jupiter got turned into a second sun by the Monoliths at the end of the very-confusing-when-I-was-a-kid second Clarke movie, who is suitably shocked that the government is keeping this whole end of the world thing under wraps, and helps him contact the aliens through some ridiculous-yet-exciting sequence that doesn't really matter in the long run, before dying to add pathos to (a) Cage's mission, and (b) seeing Roy Scheider live again, even if it's only as a CGI character probably animated by Robert Zemeckis, let's face it. Then! Dave Bowman - again, computer generated to look like Keir Dullea, but this time, it's a motion captured performance by Ewan McGregor - appears to Cage and gives him temporary superpowers to fight off the government agents, leading to a series of Matrix-esque action sequences that don't seem dated at all, before listening to Cage try to emote while pleading for the survival of the planet.

Moved by Cage's nervous, jerky-headed plea, Bowman explains that the mysterious aliens can, in fact, save the Earth, but in order to do so, they'll have to abandon Jupiter and come and hide inside the Earth in order to do so. Acting as the ambassador for all of humanity, Cage says that that sounds like a great idea and thanks a lot, and so we're treated to an overblown moment where thousands of Monoliths emerge from the star that was Jupiter, fly towards Earth - Cut to scenes of men in front of radar screens freaking out about all the UFOs flying towards the planet, but just before they call the President, the space radar goes quiet because all the Monoliths have gone into stealth mode - and then float gently to the ground, and then through the ground, before we get a cameo of 2012's Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) looking at a computer saying "The core temperature has dropped! Now there's a chance we just might survive this damn thing!" to someone on the phone, with the additional "And that's how the end of the world didn't actually end the world, and how there aren't two suns in 2012!" being optional depending on how much the audience needs spoonfeeding.

As Dave Bowman disappears, US agents catch up with Cage and his family, killing Cage and causing Shia to not only realize that he loves his dad after all, but also swear to carry on his father's work of talking to aliens and saving the world through diplomacy, car chases and being a maverick. The movie ends with a title card of "ONE YEAR LATER" and shows Shia - with a beard, to show that it is "later" - wandering around the ruins of whatever major city is deemed appropriate, tears in his eyes and looking at the sky, telling his father that he loves him.

I'm telling you, Hollywood: This is the movie that everyone wants to see. Sure, some may dismiss it as shameless fanboy continuity pandering between two movies that are actually unconnected in all but their titles, but to them, I say: Nic Cage, Shia LeBeouf and the CGI reanimation of Roy Scheider. I'll take my 10% in gold bars whenever you're ready, thanks very much.

Sounds true. The shiny blue eye is right there, and 2010 is exactly the sort of we're-all-space-brothers movie that would inspire engineers hoping to take over the Earth. I mean, trying to make the Earth a nicer place.

If you don't buy the SAL 9000 idea, then Blogoscoped has an even better one. They think the logo is a mashup of everything in the universe, including the 1980s toy Simon and the Firefox logo. I think they forgot beach ball and the alien ball from Phantasm that lodges itself in your head and sucks all your blood out.

I like it when Google lodges in my brain and sucks all my data out. Don't you?

There's the cool monolith, there's the scary reboot of HAL, and there's tension between the Russian and U.S. crews as the two countries inch towards war in Honduras. But then, just as war is declared, a whole bunch of monoliths start making Jupiter collapse (ooohhh, special effects budget in full effect!). So the two crews run away from the esploding Jupiter as fast as they can and . . . well, this happens. Check out the clip. I have literally never seen a more asstacular ending in my life. Are those words literally floating in the sky? Ohh, and the cheesy voiceover. So wonderfully awful! Plus the last line — "I think we will be friends." Really? Not if the aliens watch this movie, we won't. [2010 via IMDB]

While he'll long be remembered for his role as Captain Bridger on SeaQuest DSV (which he actually asked to be let out of after season two), he had his first starring spot with dolphins in 2010: The Year We Make Contact, a film that was much easier to digest than Kubrick's original. Find out all the little details you've been dying to know about this scifi blasphemy after the jump.

2010 may not have used the gorgeous scenes of space flight that Kubrick's classic had, but it also didn't suffer from some of the colossal wankage like the technicolor spacetrip that goes on for far too long near the end of the film as Bowman enters the monolith. Sure it bent the laws of physics and would make scientists go mental, but it had a plot that was simpler to digest, paid a proper amount of attention to the previous film (even if you did want to punch Lithgow's character in the back of the head), and it even had Helen Mirren in it as a Russian cosmonaut. While it's sure to raise the ire of Kubrick lovers around the world, I simply enjoyed 2010 more than 2001. The scene where Scheider describes how the ships will link up using a pen in zero gravity will stay with me, long after Sheriff Brody fades away.

More random trivia about 2010:

• Kubrick didn't want a sequel to be made (and neither did Arthur C. Clarke... at first) so he had all of the sets and models from 2001 destroyed. Everything had to be recreated from scratch. What a grump.
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• At one point early in the film, Scheider's character Heywood Floyd is shown computing details about the trip on an Apple IIc, while working on the beach.
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• The dolphin set was built in Culver City, California at the MGM studios (it ain't there today, folks) and the two dolphins were named Captain Crunch and Lelani.
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• HAL's inventor Dr. Chandra (in the book, full name Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, imagine filling out applications with that moniker) is finally seen in this film and is played by the wonderfully nebbishy Bob Balaban. He's someone who you could believe would only have computers for friends.
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• HAL's female counterpart SAL is voiced by Candice Bergen, although her name is given as Olga Mallsnerd, which was an amalgam of Louis Malle (her husband at the time) and Mortimer Snerd (one of her dad Edgar Bergin's ventriloquist characters).
  
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• The phrase "My god, it's full of stars!" was extremely important to the sequel, but it was never said in 2001 the movie. Only in the book. Yet it's presented as a quote from Dave Bowman.
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• Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick both appear in this film. Clarke as the U.S. president, and Kubrick as the Soviet Premier on the cover of TIME magazine.
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• Clarke also appears as a man on a bench outside the White House. Although presumably he's not just the president here, idly passing time by feeding the pigeons during a national crisis.
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• A book was published when the film came out called The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010. It contained emails between Arthur C. Clarke and director Peter Hyams, but they end in preproduction, before Clarke had read the script, and only Roy Scheider had been cast, in order to give the publishers sufficient lead time. I'm not sure how long it took to publish a book in 1984, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't from preproduction until the release date of a feature film.
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• Tony Banks, the keyboard player for Genesis, composed the score for the film. However it was later tossed out and completely redone by David Shore. Genesis aficionados around the world would deliver the eyes of Phil Collins for a copy of the mystery score.
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• Clarke put a character named Tanya Kirbuk in the novel as an homage to Stanley Kubrick, who may or may not have loved having Russian characters endowed with a butchered version of his last name.

• David Hasselhoff: While the Hoff hasn't been attached to this planned revamp, his name is associated with it as much as William Shatner's is with Star Trek. He's enjoyed his run of popularity from soap star, to Michael Knight, to his role as Mitch Buchannon on Baywatch. He even managed to turn the lifeguard pseudo-drama into a cash cow for himself by getting it into first-run syndication, but you'd have to hit turbo boost many times to jump over his ego and the potential camp factor.
• Knight Rider 2000: This 1991 TV movie had high hopes to revitalize the series and bring Michael Knight and K.I.T.T. back onto American televisions. Here's a reader's digest version of the movie: A new Knight Industries has been working on a new supercar, this time a fire engine red sporty number. However, the new artificial intelligence is bitchy, and doesn't work well with Michael Knight, who has been brought in as a test driver. Michael finds out that the original K.I.T.T. has been sold for scrap, and they set to work finding the lost pieces of his cybernetic soul. They get everything back together except for one chip, and install the spit and baling wire gizmo into Michael's 1957 Chevy. On their first crime-busting trial run, K.I.T.T. accidentally shoots a tranq dart into James Doohan's neck as he withdraws money from an ATM. Yes, James Doohan plays James Doohan in the movie, and when he gets shot, he hallucinates and thinks he's actually Scotty from Star Trek. No, we aren't making this up. They track down the final chip, which happens to have been implanted in policewoman Shawn McCormick's head after a near-fatal shooting. K.I.T.T. is able to link with the chip wirelessly, and the three of them form a team. Ugh.
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• Knight Rider 2010: Yes, they went back to the well again in 1994 in yet another TV movie, this time without David Hasselhoff or William Daniels as the erudite voice of the car. It's set in a sort of Mad Max dystopian future, and the car is now a heavily modified armored 1969 Ford Mustang. Driver Jake McQueen finds out that the evil corporation trying to hire him to work on video games has evil ambitions, and partners with employee Hannah Tyree to take them down. She accidentally downloads her personality into a computer device called PRISM, dies, yet lives on as the voice and spirit of Jake's new car. Double ugh.
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• Team Knight Rider: Just when you thought it was safe, yet another Knight Rider appeared on TV. This 1997 series featured not one, but five talking vehicles with five new leads. Two motorcycles, a truck, an SUV, and a sportscar made up this new cadre of crimefighters. The show actually made it to series, and ran for 22 episodes before getting canceled due to low ratings. It was also a weekly advertisement for Ford, as all of the vehicles (except the motorbikes) were built Ford tough.
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• This Ain't Transformers: NBC is fast-tracking this project because of the huge numbers that Transformers pulled in over the summer, and the current script has K.I.T.T. able to morph into different types of cars, including an even sportier looking model, and a pink Barbie-mobile. A car that turns into another car? How exciting. Plus NBC has already been down the morphing-car road in 1994 with Viper.
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• The Stalled Movie Version: Hollywood has been trying since 2002 to get a film version of Knight Rider rolling, and attempts were made to cast both Ben Affleck and Orlando Bloom as the new Michael Knight. Currently the film rights are sitting at Miramax, with David Hasselhoff attached to at least have a cameo appearance in the film. There's a reason people keep turning this role down: to paraphrase Tina Turner, "We Don't Need Another Knight Rider."
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