Knights of the Cornerstone, by James P. Blaylock (Ace Books)
A classic work of urban fantasy about what happens when a writer goes to visit his family in California and discovers that a modern-day branch of the Knights Templar has set up shop in their town. He quickly becomes embroiled in a plot to protect the "Veil of Veronica," a holy relic that the "Knights of the Cornerstone" (AKA Templar dudes) want to keep out of the hands of the bad guys. Blaylock is an inventive writer who often blurs history into the present, and he'll certainly do justice to a tale of the mysterious Knights Templar. It makes perfect whimsical sense that after hundreds of years of hiding out they would come to sunny California to work their magic.

The Vorkosigan Companion, by Lillian S. Carl (Baen Books)
For anyone who loves Lois McMaster Bujold's space opera Vorkosigan Saga, this collection promises:

A goldmine of information, background details, and little-known facts about the Vorkosigan saga. Included are an all-new interview with Bujold as well as essays by her on crafting the Vorkosigan universe, articles on the biology, technology and sociology of the planet Barrayar, appreciations of the individual novels by experts, maps, a complete timeline of the series, and more.

Bujold is working on a new Vorkosigan novel, too, so you'll want to read this to get ready.

Wild Cards: Busted Flush, edited by George R. R. Martin (Tor Books)
This is book 19 set in the postapocalyptic shared universe of Wild Cards, where most of humanity has been wiped out by an alien virus - and the rest of the population has morphed into crazed zombies and a few superheroes. Busted Flush is a follow-on to series reboot book Inside Straight, which io9 pal Austin Grossman hailed as a work of "unsentimental realism." Expect more twisty plots and bad craziness in this novel, including zombie attacks in Florida and shenanigans among superheroes at the U.N.

The Engine's Child, by Holly Phillips (Del Rey)
A work of dark political fantasy, The Engine's Child is definitely a standout this month, especially if you like challenging, broody tales of urban life like China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Set on a water world, it's the tale of a woman struggling to escape a past of poverty (both literal and cultural), and how she becomes embroiled in several subversive plots in her city. Writing in Library Journal, Meredith Schwartz says:

This richly complex tale from the author of The Burning Girl deftly encapsulates an entire culture's frictions and fractures in the loyalties of one young woman. Moth seeks to climb out of the Tidal slums where she'd been abandoned without betraying her Tidal friends, her secret mother, her lover, or her bond with the invisible powers of her world. Beneath the surface of a seemingly stable, if compressed, island civilization, connections and tensions link the Society of Doors, an outlaw organization looking to return to the heaven of the past; Lady Vashmarna's scientific idealists seeking to expand limited resources; a ruler clinging to the failing status quo, and the Tidal have-nots coping with an explosive brew of fear, faith, and rumor. Sharp-edged personalities and complicated personal relationship among the characters prevent Phillips's tale from degenerating into allegory.

We'll have a full review of this book for you on io9 later this month.

Fathom, by Cherie Priest (Tor Books)
A fantasy tale set over the course of the twentieth century, Fathom is the story of a young woman who witnesses a terrible murder - and then is sucked into a strange war between various old gods. Surreal, packed with pirates and harbingers of the apocalypse, this is a dark swashbuckler for fans of witchcraft in old cities.

Kilimanjaro: A Fable of Utopia, by Mike Resnick (Subterranean Press)
Resnick, Hugo-winning author of The Other Teddy Roosevelts, is back with another weird allegory. From the publisher:

The Kikuyu tribe of East Africa attempted to create a Utopia on the terraformed planetoid Kirinyaga, which was named for the mountain where their god lives. Things went wrong. Now, a century later, the Maasai tribe has studied Kirinyaga's history, has analyzed their
mistakes, and is ready to create a Maasai Utopia on the planetoid Kilimanjaro, named for the mountain where their god lives. This is the story of that experiment.

No word on an exact release date, though the publisher promises it will be this month.

Tales of Beedle the Bard, by JK Rowling (Childrens High Level Group Charity)
A collection of five fairy tales from the author of the Harry Potter juggernaut, this book was originally released as a limited-edition collectors item last year. This year it comes out in a format that most people can afford, with additional "commentary" on the stories from the scholar Dumbledore himself. Sales of the book benefit the Childrens High Level Group charity, which will be a delight to Harry Potter fans who are fiending for an escape from the Mundane world.

Clone Wars: Wild Space, by Karen Miller (Del Rey)
The second Clone Wars novel, sequel to Karen Traviss' Clone Wars.

Muse of Fire, by Dan Simmons (Subterranean Press)
In the far future, Earth has become a mausoleum. A small band of remaining humans travels across the galaxy, performing Shakespeare plays for audiences of aliens. Gradually it comes to seem as if their performances may be the one thing that will tempt these powerful aliens into saving humanity from its inevitable extinction. This is the book version of Simmons' previously-published novella.

Contagious, by Scott Sigler (Crown)
A possibly-intelligent supervirus is making its deadly way across America, turning the infected into homicidal crazies. In a race against time to stop it are a half-mad football player who can somehow sense when the disease has infected people, along with a CIA agent and epidemiologist who must face weirder and weirder enemies as they watch their country falling into total insanity.

Neal Asher, The Gabble and Other Stories
Asher's monster-packed, politically-savvy novels mostly take place in "the Polity," his interstellar civilization. He's dealt with everything from time travel to AI in books like Gridlinked and Line War, and this new short story collection promises to bring you a satisfying dose of Polity monsters and machinations.

Peter S. Beagle, We Never Talk About My Brother
One of the best works of urban fantasy I've ever read, The Folk of the Air, is by Beagle, though he's probably best known for The Last Unicorn. This collection of short stories from Tachyon is full of previously-published and new stuff from a writer whose work is always bittersweet, wry, and memorable. Describing the stories in the collection, the publisher writes:

The Angel of Death enjoys newfound celebrity while moonlighting as an anchorman on the network news; King Pelles the Sure, the shortsighted ruler of a gentle realm, betrays himself in dreaming of a "manageable war"; an American librarian discovers that, much to his surprise and sadness, he is also the last living Frenchman; and rivals in a supernatural battle forgo pistols at dawn, choosing instead to duel with dramatic recitations of terrible poetry.

UPDATE: This book's release has been delayed until March.

Elizabeth Bear, All the Windwracked Stars
Author of scifi classics like Carnival, here Bear turns again to industrial fantasy, combining Norse paganism with cybernetics in a strange tale of postapocalyptic cities, vengeance, angels, and a two-headed horse. If the phrase "norsepunk" gets your steam engines hot, then this novel will put all your gauges into the red zone.

James P. Blaylock, The Adventures of Langdon St. Ives
A series of rip-roaring novellas from artful anachronist Blaylock, author of The Man in the Moon. I've been waiting a while to delve into this book, which represents the collected adventures of St. Ives, a Victorian-era mad scientist. According to Publishers Weekly:

In "The Ape-Box Affair," St. Ives attempts to launch an orangutan named Newton into outer space, but the ship crashes in a pond in St. James Park, terrifying the people of London into believing that they've been invaded by aliens. In Philip K. Dick Award–winner "Homunculus," St. Ives battles the evil, hunchbacked genius Dr. Ignacio Narbondo, who attempts to awaken the dead, while in "Lord Kelvin's Machine," a grief-beset St. Ives must counter Narbondo's threat to throw the Earth in front of a passing comet.

M.M. Buckner, Watermind
This action-packed novel about a grad student who discovers a new lifeform in a toxic sludge pile promises to be smart, weird, and fun as hell. There's a blend of interesting characters and rip-roaring monster weirdness. Our hero, an MIT dropout, is struggling to deal with her emotionally distant family and an underground journalist lover while also racing across the country to stop the strange new toxic life from getting out of control. Highly recommended!

Jeffrey A. Carver, Sunborn
The fourth book in Carver's space opera Chaos Chronicles, Sunborn is an interstellar murder mystery.

Jeffrey Ford, The Drowned Life
A collection of surreal, melancholy stories dealing with everything from worlds of the drifting dead to drunken tree parties. Ford is the author of the superlative, creepy Well-Built City trilogy and his writing is both powerful and disturbing in the best possible way.

Jack McDevitt, The Devil's Eye
The fourth Alex Benedict novel, this space opera is a madcap mystery involving memory-erasure, novel-writing, and a kidnapping that threatens the future of an entire planet.

Alan Steele, The Last Science Fiction Writer
This is Steele's fifth collection of short stories. According to Publishers Weekly, in this book:

Adventurers who look outward are rewarded with learning where they truly belong, be they canines transplanted off Earth (The War of Dogs and Boids), prospectless teens who stumble across a time-travel repair mission (Escape from Earth) or a virtual author breaking free of marketing straitjackets (The Last Science Fiction Writer).

If you want to know about more amazing books coming out this month or two months from now, always remember to check Locus magazine's upcoming books listings.

If you're looking for a good collection of short stories, you might want to dive into acclaimed author Michael Swanwick's latest collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick (Subterranean). Guaranteed literary weirdness from this two-time Nebula winner. Zombies are getting allegorical and literal on your ass in John Joseph Adams' latest anthology, The Living Dead (Nightshade), which includes a ton of great stuff which you can sample here. Also don't miss Pyr's latest scifi collection, Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders.

Here are some more notable scifi books coming your way in October.

Eric Brown, Necropath (Solaris)
Set on a spaceport called Bengal Station that dominates the airspace between India and Burma, this is part of a series about the cultures of a future Earth that is still divided between rich and poor, East and West. A telepathic investigator stumbles on a drug-fueled cult on the space station, and find himself caught up in conflicting loyalties and a hellish romance.

Tobias Buckell, Tides from the New Worlds (Wyrm)
A limited-edition collection of short stories from the guy who brought you ninjas vs. space zombies on a floating city in the awesome novel Sly Mongoose.

Thomas M. Disch, Wall of America (Tachyon)
This is Disch's last collection of short stories, written shortly before he committed suicide in July. This is a wide-ranging, dark, and satirical collection

Michael Flynn, The January Dancer (Tor)
In this politico-economic space opera, a ship emergency lands on an unknown planet, only to find a shape-shifting stone that belonged to what may be a pre-human civilization. Now Captain Amos January must deal with all the conflicting political (and criminal) forces who want the "Dancer" stone. Flynn is also the author of the critically-acclaimed Eifelheim.

Peter F. Hamilton, The Temporal Void (Del Rey)
A sequel to Hamilton's The Dreaming Void, this novel continues the tale of a massive structure (the Void) at the center of the Milky Way that is slowly devouring everything in its path. Posthumans in this far future have started to believe that the Void might be a kind of salvation, a new home. Amid much intragalactic power-playing, one group has planned an expedition to the Void to find out more. Get ready for some serious Void action.

Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters (Viking)
The author of critically-acclaimed short story collection Magic for Beginners, Link is back with another collection that's sure to be weird, pleasing, and mind-blowing. Known for her so-surreal-it's-real literary style, Link has the ability to suck you into a character instantly, only to destroy all your preconceptions about her or him later. This collection ranges from fantasy tales to stories of alien invasion. I can guarantee they'll be unlike anything else you'll read this month — or this year.

Paul McAuley, The Quiet War (Gollancz)
One of this month's standouts will surely be McAuley's fascinating 23rd century tale of a post-environmental collapse Earth, ruled by a few wealthy families who force millions to labor on their gigantic geoengineering projects that will "restore Earth to an Eden-like state" without industry. Meanwhile, "Outers" who live on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are building weird new posthuman cultures devoted to science, genetic engineering, and social experimentation. The two branches of humanity are about to collide, as the Outers start to colonize more parts of the solar system.

Philip Reeve, Mothstorm (Bloomsbury)
This looks to be another delightfully silly and action-packed kids book from the author who brought you Starcross. A terrifying mothy peril that lurks in a cloud is closing in on the solar system, and our young hero Art and his family must save the Empire — again.

Brian Francis Slattery, Liberation (Tor)
This trippy, intensely political novel about a dystopian future where slavery has been restored to the United States is both satirical and disturbing. We reviewed it here. Definitely one of the month's standouts if you're a fan of idea-driven adventures.

Jo Walton, Half a Crown (Tor)
This is the conclusion to Walton's trilogy about detectives working at Scotland Yard in an England that reached "accomodations" with the Nazis during World War II. Now it's two decades since the accomodations, and our detective hero is hiding both his gay relationship and a covert operation to smuggle Jews out of the country. Everything will come to a head at a violent political rally, where a young fascist woman might hold the key to unlocking the authoritarian regime.

Top image from Buckell's collection, Tides from the New Worlds.

Want to know what else is coming out in October? Always check the Locus Magazine monthly updates.