High Bloods, John Farris (Tor)

It's the near future, and LA is overrun with werewolves. An International Lycan Control force is set up to keep tabs on the "high bloods," those that can keep their werewolfish nature under control. But then something goes terribly wrong, and the book becomes a hard boiled crime novel. With werewolves.

Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace)

Notorious future-forward sci-fi author Charles Stross has collected the strands of some of his short fiction into this compilation. Stories feature everything from relocating the cold war in deep space to a Lovecraftian take on the Iran-Contra scandal. The collection showcases Stross's short works that have never found their way into any of his longer pieces.

Songs of the Dying Earth, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Subterranean)

Dozois and Martin have gathered a crop of modern sci fi writers to write their own stories exploring Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" universe. The "Dying Earth" series is a cornerstone of its very own sub-genre of dystopian sci fi, and these stories give some other writers a chance to lend their voice to this seminal canon.

Metatropolis,edited by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

Five sci fi writers collaborated on their own urban future, and then each took a turn writing stories set in their collectively imagined universe. The result is a portrait of a possible future of cities. From the io9 review:

These feel like cities where anything can happen, from getting your skull cracked to discovering your life purpose. And most important of all, when I was done reading about this future dys/utopia, I wanted to spend a lot more time there.

The Osiris Ritual, George Mann (Snowbooks)

George Mann's well-received "The Affinity Bridge" created a steam-punk Victorian London landscape for his intrepid mystery solvers. Now his steam-punk Sherlock Holmes is back to solve another mystery, interacting with some distinct characters along the way. This one is for fans of clockwork robots, airships, and good old fashion mysteries.

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Neil Gaiman (DC)

This hardcover volume collects a few of Gaiman's Batman pieces, focusing on his canon-spanning final story, "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" This story stretches from one end of the Bat's career to the other, offering a new angle on the Batman mythos.

Purple and Black, K.J. Parker (Subterranean)

"Purple and Black" is an epistolary novel, or one told only in letters. In this case, the letters are between a reluctant intellectual emperor and his best friend on the front lines of combat. The result is an exploration of the duty of leadership, of war, and of friendship. It's also printed in two colors, purple for the official empire business between the two friends, and black for the less formal, more personal letters.

The Stars Blue Yonder, Sandra McDonald (Tor)

A military commander dies, but then comes back to life on a mission to save all of humanity. This mission takes him all over space and time, where he meets his yet-non-existent grandchildren and his descendants from thousands of years in the future. He also manages to thoroughly confuse his grieving wife with resurrection and stories of far-flung time travel. The two work together to save everything they've ever known.

Bar None, Tim Lebbon (Night Shade)

After the world ends, a group of tenacious survivors hole up in a giant home in Wales, but supplies start to get thin, and they learn from a supernatural stranger of a haven a few days away. It's the Bar None, and it's maybe the last bar on Earth. The survivors then decide to do probably what anyone would do in their situation: against all odds, braving corpse-strewn countryside, they try to track down a cold beer. From the io9 review:

In the end this is a deeply sentimental and intimate look at memory, loss, and those perfect days barbecuing and tossing a few back with good friends. And flesh-eating monsters.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, Stephen Hunt (Tor)

Amelia Harsh, a sort of steam-punk female Indiana Jones, and a cast of adventurers sets out in an ancient U-boat to discover the sunken "perfect society" of Camlantis. Also on board are a band of female mercenaries, escapees from an underwater prison, and an insane guide. Sounds good to me.

Blood Red Sphere, Lawrence Barker (Swimming Kangaroo)

A recovering "cactus juice" addict passes his days scavenging ancient artifacts from the surface of mars and selling them. Then one such object, the "blood red sphere," attracts attention from pretty much everyone on Mars and the rest of the solar system. It's like the "Maltese Falcon" on Mars, which is something I can definitely get behind.

The House of Lost Souls, F.G. Cottam (Thomas Dunne)

After a psychic trauma visits itself on four students (causing one to commit suicide), a journalist investigates a home haunted by madness and strange occult happenings. The novel touches on many different eras of the house's history, eventually leading to a confrontation between our protagonist and an ancient evil.

Yesterday we reported on a bit of a controversy around F&SF launching a paid workshop whose participants get the inside track for publication in the magazine. And now F&SF has posted the editorial explaining about the workshop online, including some more details:

I don't know why we never tried this before, but F&SF is going to begin hosting a writing workshop.

We're fortunate to have the great Gardner Dozois running the show. I'm sure most of our readers know Gardner already, but just in case, he's the author of dozens of short stories (his most recent F&SF story is "Counterfactual," which appeared in our June 2006 issue) and he edited Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1984 to 2004. He also has decades of experience with writing workshops and is widely considered one of the best story doctors in the field.

All F&SF readers should benefit from Gardner's workshop work, because he's going to have the option of selecting stories from the workshop for publication in F&SF. We're currently planning to run Gardner Dozois selections three times a year. (Writers, fret not: I won't be reading the workshop stories myself, so you can still submit your stories to F&SF regardless of what anyone in the workshop makes of the story.)

The workshop will be administered by Lisa Rogers, a former editor for Gollancz and Little, Brown.

Initially, the workshop will be available online only and the site will have a private message board to go with the critiquing.

Until the workshop is firing on all cylinders, we're limiting the membership to 100 people. You can find the membership prices and other information at www.FandSFworkshop.com.

Frankly, I'm very excited about the prospects for this new project and I think all of our readers will benefit from it.

We talked to Van Gelder, who says "the workshop isn't even ready to launch, so any angst about our policies seems very premature to me." And he says that the current plan is for the workshop to provide three stories a year to the magazine, but "we'll see how it goes." It's up to Gardner Dozois when he selects stories for the magazine, and any stories that end up in print will be highlighted as Dozois' selections.

We asked Van Gelder how many stories from previously unpublished authors F&SF currently publishes. He says:

You're welcome to go through back issues and check. My sense is that we average 2-6 stories a year, but I haven't actually tried to verify that. In fact, I'd be curious to see the actual numbers. One reason I thought of launching the workshop was because it seemed like we were running fewer stories by newbies in recent years.

I looked back through eight recent issues of F&SF, and pretty much every story seemed to be from a veteran author. One issue did include a story by John Langan, who seems to have gotten his start in F&SF back in 2007 or thereabouts. One of those eight issues was the all-star anniversary issue, however. In a few cases, an author's bio noted that his/her first publication had been in FS&F — but that first publication had taken place back in the 1980s in a lot of cases.

Also, we asked Van Gelder if he thought F&SF would end up publishing fewer stories by unpublished authors that didn't come from the workshop, since the workshop is expected to provide three new authors per year already. He replies:

No, I don't. If the workshop goes well, I'd expect to see the number increase.

He says the overall goal of the workshop is to get more good stories, regardless of the writer's experience — but one of the major driving forces is a desire to reach out to new writers. He points to other recent moves, like F&SF offering an extra $100 to the next "newbie woman writer" to publish a story in the magazine.

Once again, we're sorry we didn't seek comment from F&SF before posting our previous entry about this workshop.

To my mind, though, Van Gelder is just making explicit what everyone has always known about workshops: they're a way of meeting editors and making connections. David Marusek, to choose a random example, has told many times the story of his first story sale to Asimov's at Clarion West, and how it launched his career. Having read magazine fiction slush before, I don't know that there's a brilliant or equitable way to help new writers bypass it. At the same time, being so blatant about saying "Attend our workshop and you'll get the inside track to publication in our magazine" does feel a bit skeevy. I think the litmus test is whether the increased chance of publication is the main attraction, or just a fringe benefit on top of all the instruction you'll be getting, and that's hard to judge without knowing more.

What do you think?

Update: I've heard from the F&SF folks, and I'm hoping to post their side of this story soon. I apologize for not contacting them before running this piece, since it would have been better to include their viewpoint along with the original report.

[Innsmouth Free Press via Sean Wallace via Jay Lake on Twitter]

The Enchantment Emporium, Tanya Huff (DAW)

In this urban fantasy, Allie Gale's grandma disappears, leaving behind a strange shop that sells magical supplies to the local witch population. When Allie takes it over, she's suddenly involved in a mysterious struggle within the Canadian magic community. If you ever wanted to speculate about the witch population of modern Toronto, this is your book.

Naamah's Kiss, Jacqueline Carey (Grand Central Publishing)

From the io9 review:

This is a novel of pure adventure, with a kick ass heroine who gets to fight, do magic, and get laid just like the swashbuckling heroes of old. It's a perfect beach read. And the best part is the Jacqueline Carey is extremely clever – don't let her fool you with all that romantic frippery. She manages to slip a lot of interesting, subversive messages into this swords-and-sorcery tale.

The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

The women of a Victorian brothel are hired to cater to the needs of a party of businessmen holding an auction for a mysterious piece. They find themselves quickly involved in intrigue and espionage, in a story with flecks of steampunk and classic mystery. We reviewed it (along with a couple of other Baker books) here.

Wild Thyme, Green Magic, Jack Vance (Subterranean)

This career-spanning collection of stories from Jack Vance includes a wide variety of genres, including a few science fiction stories about other worlds. Vance's ability to build worlds has been praised by Frank Herbert, Poul Anderson and Robert Silverberg.

Fragment, Warren Fahy (Delacorte)

A reality show crew on a ship stumble on an island ecosystem inhabited by parallel-evolved monsters. From the io9 review:

If you like monsters and mad science - and who doesn't? - this is the perfect book to take on your vacation or on that long plane ride to a remote island. However, if you're looking for characters who move outside of two dimensions, you might want to give this one a pass.

The Year's Best Science Fiction 26, edited by Gardner Dozois (Griffin)

I'm a sucker for well-complied science fiction anthologies, and this one appears to be no exception. Including 30 stories from masters and new writers alike, this collection also has an extended list of honorable mentions. It looks like a pretty hefty resource for the short story geek.

Green, Jay Lake (Tor)

A fantasy / steampunky tale of international espionage and mythology. From the io9 review:

At times unsettling but always compelling, Green abounds with intrigue and adventure. A feminist fable lovingly written with a father's hope and concern for his daughter's future, Green is the story of a strong-willed young woman trying to find her place in a world that would rather ignore her. Green will not be ignored.

A Monster's Notes, Laurie Sheck (Knopf)

This novel turns inside out one of the oldest science fiction stories. The story imagines Frankenstein's monster not as Mary Shelley's creation, but as her companion, consoling her in a time of sorrow. He discusses with her all of the facets of humanity, trying to understand human connection in a world where he doesn't belong. It's a tale of speculative alternate history, couched in a story of compassion and companionship.

Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles WIlson (Tor)

A speculative future of post-oil America. From the io9 review:

Peak oil has left the world a churchy, early-industrial shambles in Robert Charles Wilson's new novel Julian Comstock. An engaging cross between post-apocalyptic series Jericho and Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, it may be the best science fiction novel of the year so far.

Haze, L.E. Modesitt Jr. (Tor)

An agent of the now-Chinese-run Earth investigates a planet surrounded by a haze of nano-satellites. He finds an eerily familiar world of superior technology.

House of Suns, Alastair Reynolds (Ace)

This book came out a little while back in the rest of the world, but this month marks its publication in the United States. It's a space opera of post-humanity and colonization, with the added twist of relativistic travel. As a result, this novel chronicles a mystery distorted by time. It's certainly nice to see a space epic that explores some of the complexity of actual interstellar travel. We reviewed it here.

The Strain, Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan (William Morrow)

Master of Horror Guillermo del Toro brings vampires back from their whiney post-Buffy image. From the io9 review:

The Strain is a breakneck thrill ride chronicling only the first four days of the vampire plague that may destroy civilization. The cinematic quality really comes though, making the book feel more like a action blockbuster than a thought-provoking horror novel.

Warren Ellis searched through the new edition of Gardner Dozois' latest Year's Best Science Fiction volume, and found the latest ill tidings for the big science fiction print mags. Analog Science Fiction And Fact lost 1,400 readers, or about 5.1 percent, falling to just under 26,000 copies of each issue in circulation. Asimov's Science Fiction and The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction both saw drops of 2.7 percent each, to around 17,000 copies and 16,044 copies respectively.

These are actually fairly gentle declines, compared to previous years. According to Ellis, Asimov's lost 5.2 percent of its circulation in 2007, 13.6 percent in 2006 and 23 percent in 2005. The last time we reported on circulation numbers, F&SF had seen an 11.2 percent drop, to around 16,489. (That was only six months ago though.)

As we pointed out last time, back in 2004, F&SF had a paid circulation of around 20,000 copies, while Asimov's was at around 30,000 copies and Analog was at around 40,000 copies.

So it's not just an ongoing attrition — there was a fairly steep dive, which has now leveled off somewhat. Does this mean we've hit a kind of floor, for now anyway? Are there roughly 16,000 die-hard science fiction fans who will always buy F&SF and Asimov's, no matter what? And another 10,000 who'll also pick up Analog? Or is this just a brief plateau before the next dive?

I'm actually fairly pessimistic: moves like F&SF going bimonthly are bound to decrease the visibility of these magazines on the newsstand, and a lot of the most exciting short fiction in print seems to be cropping up in themed anthologies lately. The newsstand digest format, itself, feels a bit like a relic, and magazine distribution is only going to get more and more brutal, as a business. I'm not sure what a magazine would have to do to get 40,000 copies in circulation, these days, but I suspect it would involve new distribution channels, like comic-book stores and coffee shops. [Warren Ellis]

You'd never have enough computing resources to make it work

In Rudy Rucker's novel Postsingular (available as a free download), nanomachines (called "nants") turn the world in to a virtual simulation, called "Vearth." And it turns out that Vearth is kind of a sucky copy of the "real" Earth, because it takes up too much bandwidth to create a decent version. "The water, clouds and fire were never quite right. In any case, the nants didn't always try that hard; they often settled for shortcuts as crude as representing a tree by a cookie-cutter flat polygon."

And then the Big Pig, the super-intelligence that runs the simulation, comes up with an economy, where if you pay a monthly fee, you get rendered at a higher resolution. There's only so much room to live in Vearth's highest resolution and best-simulated zones, so most people have to live in tiny apartments or in worse areas. And then a rival programmer named Gustav rises up, offering equal computational resources for all — unfortunately, those computational resources are limited at best, so Gustav's whole world looks like an old-school arcade video game.

As virtual people are having more and more virtual "children," who were never "real" humans to begin with, overcrowding becomes a serious problem and people compete for bandwidth. "Vearth could only support so many virtual agents. With the birth rate going up, the older and weaker sims were being culled out." Eventually, there are terrorists and computer viruses that wipe out tons of people. And the Big Pig realizes that people can get along without their subconscious minds, so it takes those away.

Cut-and-paste characters

In a similar vein, Jim Munroe's classic novel Everyone In Silico (available as a free download) takes place in a near future where a corporation starts porting people to a virtual version of San Francisco, called Frisco. It's beautiful and immaculate there, but a lot of the people are just cookie-cutter copies of the same icon. One character visits a temple in Frisco:

Another monk, this one refilling the holy water, gave him an identical disapproving eyebrow. This time he didn't bother apologizing, just found a pew near the back and sat down.

You'd think that since they've bothered to make a temple for themselves, they'd make a couple of different types of monks instead of cutting and pasting....

Another cut-and-paste monk walked by, holding a small flame cupped in his hand, and Paul's ire was whipped up again. We had an infinitely varied environment on Earth, and we painted over it to draw our little stick figures....

"What do you think when you see that?" Paul said, pointing at the two monks, one at the altar and one cleaning stained glass.

"That whoever was doing skins was fucking lazy," Jeremy said, returning an eyeball back under his sunglasses. "But that's the way it is here, man. It's not just the skins," he said, spitting teeth as he said it. "It's the architecture too. And the security. That's why there's so many holes for rats like us."

Paul looked at him, expecting he'd have changed his zombie face for a rat one, but he was back to normal. "Just laziness, huh?"

"Well," Jeremy sighed. "OK," he started, wearily accepting Paul's seriousness. "It's like this. I've got a friend who does skins for environmental characters. He gets shit-all for it, and they're always on him - they want, like, 75 a day - so he can't spend time on the details. So he churns them out. He's made some wicked squidmen for an Atlantis environment, though."

It would be too predictable, with no danger or discovery

Robert J. Sawyer's paleontologist character in Calculating God learns that every intelligent species either blows itself up or decides to "transcend," uploading its consciousness into cyberspace. The idea of giving up corporeal existence doesn't appeal to him, because it would be like giving up your humanity: no more skinned knees or broken hearts. But the clincher is that it's too predictable. "Virtual reality was nothing but air guitar writ large," Sawyer writes. You could go on a simulated dig, and even discover fossils there — but they'd only be there because you wanted them to be there, and they wouldn't advance our understanding of evolution or the universe at all.

As Sawyer explains in Factoring Humanity:

The problem with virtual-reality simulations was just that: they were simulations... There was a fundamental difference between skiiing in Banff and skiing in your living room; part of the thrill was the possibility you might break a leg, part of the experience was the full bladder that couldn't be easily voided, part of the fun was the real sunburn that one got during a day on the slopes, even in the middle of winter.

It could suck if you're not middle class

Veteran editor Gardner Dozois discusses the "virtual reality" future in his "Summation" in the 1997 volume of The Year's Best Science Fiction And Fantasy:

I'm not sure that I believe in this future, although no doubt bits and pieces of it will come to pass. For one thing, it seems like a very middle-class view of the future, ignoring — as, indeed, does most science fiction — the question of what all the poor people are going to be doing while everyone is leading this Maximum Urban Cocooned existence. Are all the poor people going to have Virtual Reality cocoons too? Who's picking up the garbage? Who's sweeping the streets? Who's fixing the plumbing? It's like a future where only the Eloi are around; no Morlocks. A mistake that much science fiction makes is to assume that social change affects everyone to the same degree at the same time — which isn't the way it usually works. There are people living within fifty miles of my apartment in Philadelphia who don't have electricity or indoor plumbing; there are people living within a thousand miles or so of here, in rural Mexico, say, who are living a hand-farming subsistence not really different than the one their ancestors were living hundreds or even thousands of years back...

The point being that the present is not at a uniform level of social development, so I doubt that the future is going to be like that either. I wonder, in fact, if, in the future, we're going to see people living at a Stone Age level — or living the way most of us in the West do now, for that matter — side by side with people living such a high-tech existence, at such a level of technological sophistication, that they're nearly incomprehensible to us. But the different levels of technological sophistication will be layered throughout society, like the layers in nougat, the whole spectrum from Stone Age to Incompehensibly Advanced Singularity Folk existing side by side at the same time; it won't be all one uniform layer, Virtual Reality Cocoons all the way down.

"It's actually harder to write science fiction, because you have to know more. I've never been a hard science fiction writer, but even writing a non-hard science fiction story you have to know a lot more about science and the world and how things work than you do to write a fantasy." — Veteran SF editor Gardner Dozois, interviewed in Locus.

I first met Gardner twenty-umpty-some years ago at a Philcon. He was sitting in a hallway, surrounded by fans, giving a dramatic reading of Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, in order to demonstrate that sections of it had the same cadence as Longfellow's "Hiawatha." (Go ahead, try it for yourself. Chapter XI: "Stand with me on man's old planet,/gazing north when sky has darkened . . . Here is life or here is dying;/only sin is lack of trying./Grab your picks and grab your shovels;/dig latrines and build your hovels - " And so on.) He was a one-man carnival.

DeNiro's review starts out by asserting that space opera hasn't crossed over to the mainstream as much as other subgenres of science fiction have. Cormac McCarthy may have made the post-apocalyptic dystopia story respectable with The Road, but nobody's writing literary epics about "hyperactive starships."

And then DeNiro launches into his actual critique of The New Space Opera: most of the stories are actually about posthuman characters who have been modified to survive in deep space. They've given up so much of their humanity to become spaceworthy, it's made them emotionally inacessible to readers. And they're tiny, against the massive scale of galaxy-wide intrigues and thousand-year wars. (I definitely found this to be a problem with some of the stories in the volume as well, when I read it last year.) Contrast this with old-school space opera, which was comfortable putting regular old humans in charge of its starships.

But the stories fail to engage with the fact of their characters' emotional dissociation as part of the narrative. And if you're going to write alienating mini-sagas about transhumanism, DeNiro suggests, you need masterful prose instead of the merely serviceable writing in this anthology. Most of all, the anthology promises "fun," but delivers careful, hide-bound stories instead. DeNiro does pick out a few exceptions, including James Patrick Kelly's "Dividing The Sustain" and Tony Daniel's "The Valley Of The Gardens."

DeNiro's bracing critique gave rise to an interesting roundtable discussion, which he participated in, over at SF Signal, which mostly dealt with the meta-question he raised: why hasn't space opera crossed over to the mainstream the way other SF sub-genres have? Authors from the anthology tried to answer, or refute, DeNiro's question.

Kage Baker asks why space opera needs to be relevant anyway. Paul McAuley attempts to claim that Doris Lessing's Canopus In Argos series was mainstream. (It's probably the least mainstream of all her works.) Tobias Buckell cites the popularity of Star Wars as proof that space opera really is mainstream. Anthology co-editor Jonathan Strahan argues that you shouldn't think of space-opera as entrenched within the science fiction field, but rather as at the center of the SF field. Gwyneth Jones says space-opera is more versatile than people give it credit for, and it's a good vehicle for asking questions about statecraft.

In the end, though, none of them addressed DeNiro's question of whether "new" space opera has to gain its newness by jettisoning the humanity of its characters. And whether that might be part of the reason why it's not relatable for readers who aren't die-hard science fiction fans. [Rain Taxi] and [SF Signal]