Gill, who's executive editor at Harper Collins imprints Morrow/Avon/Eos, writes over at Harper Library:

Urban fantasy (and its cousin paranormal romance) is the easiest gateway to the genre-since it takes place in a world that is very much our own, only with magic. Not coincidentally, it's also the hottest thing going, between the phenomenon that is Stephenie Meyers' Twilight saga to the incredibly popular True Blood tv series. Urban fantasies are an easy way for readers to try the genre, and there are a lot of great ones out there.

With urban fantasy consuming an ever-greater market share, it's hard to argue with Gill's point. But it makes us wonder if science fiction isn't suffering partly because it lacks such an easy, newbie-friendly first hit. Or rather, that stuff exists, but it's not necessarily leading people to science fiction.

You have adventure stories set in the present day, but with fantastical gadgets, but those are generally marketed as "techno-thrillers" rather than SF. And when a science fiction giant like William Gibson does novels that are set in the present or very near future, featuring unusual technology, they're frequently marketed as mainstream fiction rather than SF. Meanwhile, writers like Charles Stross are proclaiming that you literally cannot write near-future science-fiction at all, because the future is so unpredictable, and many of the genre's most celebrated works take place thousands, or even millions, of years from now.

Do we need someone to invent the genre of "urban science fiction" to reach out to people who want to read SF stories set in the present day, in a familiar setting? Or just a return to "five minutes into the future" as a standard setting for stories?

Top image: cover to Jim Butcher's Proven Guilty.

The blend of urban fantasy and detective fiction seems like a sure-fire win. We can seen the modern roots of both in none other than Edgar Allen Poe. There are early examples of the Occult Detective such as Professor Flaxman-Low or the hard to find Victor Iff stories by Aleister Crowley. The type shows up often in TV, comics, and books; the scruffy-looking rugged individualist — a wizard for hire, freelance exorcist, or just a jumped-up London street punk with a pack of Silk Cuts and a noggin full of of Arcane Lore.

I've often been let down by these paranormal investigators in novels. Glenn Cook, Jim Butcher, and Simon R. Green have written very popular series of this type but the appeal is of a the tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top variety. It can be fun, addictive but really just popcorn fare. Only Mike Carey's Felix Castor series has ever made me go, "wow, this is some good writing!" Even with some "surprise" twists that I could see coming in the first third of the book, Carey approaches the story like a hard-boiled thriller of the first water, not a parody. While not yet of this calibre, John Levitt's Dog Days series combines a gritty street sense with a realistic use of magic — for a given value of reality, of course.

As we learned from this year's World Fantasy Con, a world where the supernatural is real and commonplace is going to be very different from the one we know. It's ridiculous to assume that, oh let's say St. Louis, would be recognizable with demons and vampires running around openly. There may be subcultures that think they are underground and hidden (BDSM, Goths, Accordion Players) but the truth is the general population is just trying hard to ignore them. I just don't buy that actual wizards and the like could remain hidden from the rest of society. A common conceit in these contemporary urban fantasy worlds is that all the magical types have agreed to keep their presence hidden from mere mortals. This is because, umm... peasants with pitchforks and torches will tax them out of existence? I'm a bit fuzzy on that part. To keep everybody in line there's usually some ancient organization imaginatively called the Watchers, or The Council of Elders.

In Levitt's series people magical abilities ("practitioners" in North America, the Brits still use the term "sorcerers") have always been around but in very small numbers. They are by and large all loners not big on hierarchical structures and content to remain hidden from view. In each city or region there is always one practitioner with more talent and ambition than the others who enforces the general agreement to not freak out the squares. In San Francisco this self-appointed chief is Victor, supercilious with a vast fortune of mysterious origin. He reminds me a bit like a more generous version of the second eponymous character in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Victor is willing to let the others play magician but ready to destroy anyone who uses magic for personal gain or threatens to reveal the game to the mundane world. To that effect he hires other talented practitioners to sniff out troublemakers and ride herd on the local magic community.

Our protagonist Mason (everyone has just one name because they're cool like that) was one of Victor's enforcer but left to pursue a career in music. Fortunately Mason is a very talented guitarist and makes a comfortable if bohemian living playing in local jazz clubs. Poor but without Victor breathing down his neck, he's glad to tool around in his beat-up old van, drifting in and out of disastrous romances, and hanging out with Lou, his dog, sort of. Lou looks like a miniature Doberman Pinscher with undocked ears and tail. In reality he is an ifrit, magical creature that acts as a familiar for a select lucky few practitioners. Mason and others with ifrits are source of jealousy in their community but no one knows where these creatures come from or why they only choose certain people. Lou may be smarter and stronger than a real dog with preternatural senses but he still has a dog's brain or lack there of. This loveable scamp sniffs butts, burrows through trash cans for the choice meals, and is terribly concerned about the threat squirrels pose to modern society. I am happy to report that the magic dog does not talk. That would have been unbearable.

I find choice of the term Ifrit for Louie and his ilk to be odd. They usually appear as smallish animalsl suitable for perching on laps or shoulders, but have been glimpsed in what may be their true form. Is there a connection between them and the beings "of smokeless fire" from Arabic legend? Other strange creatures occasionally turn up. Some are former practitioners who have become too strong and begin to resembling trolls or werewolves of legend. Japanese hungry ghosts or demons out of medieval grimores can also be summoned for nefarious purposes. There's even a Wendigo that's more Algernon Blackwood than Ojibwa legend and becomes something like a very disturbing Huggy Bear from Starsky & Hutch. Even scholars like Mason's friend and mentor, Eli, cannot explain what these entities really are, manifestations of the practitioners' will clothed in cultural archetypes or visitors from Another Place entirely.

Actually it's odd that as old as the magic practitioner community is, they're fuzzy about where magic comes from and why it even works— the characters address this openly and I can't decide if this is a bug or a feature. Levitt has been dancing around the question of ifrits and other mysteries in the last three books. He might be making it up as he goes along but there seems to be some sort of plan. I always enjoy his writing enough to let him lead me on for another book.

Of course in each book Some Danger will threaten San Francisco's loose-knit practitioner community. Mason with Lou by his side, like a knight errant of old, plunge into the fray to find What the Hell is Going On and save his friends. Despite their differences snooty Victor is happy to use Mason to flush out the danger and refers to shiftless young man as "his investigator". This is not due to Mason's keen analytical mind, he's the first to admit he's not the swiftest on the uptake. What Victor values is the lad's unique expression of magical talent. A gift that appears related to his musical ability – Improvisation.

Even powerful practitioners rely on carefully prepared materials, complicated chants, or herbal concoctions. A small minority follow the Black Arts and use all the sinister drama of pentagrams, black candles, and blood sacrifice. Other than being more dickish than average these Black Practioners seem to be an unfairly maligned bunch. There's something about ritual that makes it easier for practitioners to focus their will and power. Mason doesn't need that, he can borrow what he needs from his immediate surroundings. On the fly he blends the qualities of moonlight, the solidity of a brick wall and an abandoned umbrella to fashion a protective spell. He can borrow flight from a flock of pigeons or the absorbency of a thick carpet for a stealthy approach. This makes Mason a the go-to guy in sudden and unfamiliar circumstances. I think Victor also values Mason as Cannon Fodder but hey, that's what makes a great administrator.

The passages describing this type of magic have a fluid creativity that's a lot harder than it looks. Levitt uses this same grace and authority writing about Mason's music; whether the deep internal process of doing a solo on stage or the serious business of hanging out in bars and jamming. I recognized a lot of familiar scenes setting up gigs, moving gear, and joking with the band (Hey, What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? A drummer!). It should be of no surprise to find that author John Levitt is also an accomplished jazz guitarist who spends part of his year in San Francisco. I've seen him play and he's got some serious chops. I also am very impressed with his descriptions of my hometown. He may possibly write the most authentic modern San Francisco I've ever read in genre fiction. Many others (Sorry, Chris Moore) come close but rely on too many postcard shots. Levitt with economy and an unflinching eye, portrays the look and shifting character of our many different neighborhoods.

So yeah, write what you know. Levitt also knows gritty street scenes and has a keen grasp of the Crime Novel and that is very evident in the Dog Days series . He wrote two thrillers, Carnivores and Ten of Swords, about a decade back as J.R. Levitt. He also served eight years with the Salt Lake City Police Department. Cops have the best stories, every day they meet a wide variety of interesting people having the worst day of their lives. You could see how this would drive many officers crazy or turn to writing. Levitt told me that he feels Urban Fantasy owes more to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler than to J.R.R. Tolkien or E.R. Eddison. He loves this sub genre and is currently at work on the fourth Dog Days book. I'm looking forward to seeing the mysteries about Mason and Lou's magical world answered but I want more from John Levitt. I'd love to see him drop this series and try something with a little more bite. This was a fine read, much more satisfying than the guilty pleasure popcorn of the Dresden Files or the Nightside books but still a bit too... cute. The Crime Thriller and Detective Novel are very well suited for the trapping of the fantastic and I believe readers are hungry for something meatier than the usual fare. Just tossing out a bone here. Fetch!

Unleashed may be purchased here or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to all the magic doggies of San Francisco as Chris Hsiang, he has bacon.

The "Urban Fantasy As Alternate History" panel at WFC 2009 made a compelling case that you can't introduce magical elements to a present-day world, or to the history of a present-day world, without all of the social institutions being rearranged. Besides Willingham and Grimwood, the panel included Paul Park, L.E. Modesitt, and Michael Swanwick. Among other things:

• If magic was real, it would be illegal. Or else, it would be regulated and taxed.
• If ghosts were real, as in Modesitt's novels, all sorts of institutions would change — women who died in childbirth would hang around, and the birth rate would probably go down.
• There would be civil rights movements for ghosts and the undead — and if they could vote, they would probably a majority.
• There would be whole new careers and economic sectors associated with magical and fantastical creatures.

Most of all, people in these "urban fantasy" worlds would take for granted many things that would shock us utterly. Says Willingham, "In my world, vampires are real, and they're just part of society." Adds Swanwick: "Gorillas used to be cryptobiology," until they became commonly known.

"There's kind of poignancy in the prosaic state," says Park.

Swanwick praised Rachel Pollack's Unquenchable Fire, in which shamanistic magic has pervaded "our" world, and now daily mouse sacrifices are required to keep your electricity on, and there are parades with bare-breasted cheerleaders with blood running down their faces. "It's prosaic and ordinary to everyone else, but absolutely strange to us, the reader."

Anticipate lots of weird legal questions if the supernatural became part of everday life — like, if a vampire "turns" you, is that murder? Or maybe a jury would rule that the vampire is actually giving the "victim" a gift: eternal life. Or maybe it's theft, because the vampire is robbing you of the promise of death. If you believe in Christianity, is the vampire robbing you of the possibility of salvation in the afterlife? Is a newly turned vampire a new person, with no existing property rights, or does he/she keep all the property from his/her life? The lawyers, as they say, would have a field day.

"Legal fictions are every bit as fantastic as magic, and yet they wield the same power," says Swanwick.

Madness of Flowers starts off right on the heels of the action in 2006's Trial of Flowers. I can describe some of the events and characters, but that cannot prepare you for the hallucinogenic weirdness to be found here. The City Imperishable was once the capital of a mighty empire, and remains a center of commerce and industry. Steam engines and primitive telephony exist alongside spooky noumenal powers. These supernatural phenomena are deeply intertwined with the eternal rhythms of life, barely comprehended and even less easily controlled.

A thousand years ago the Empire's last ruler, aptly named the Imperator Terminus, marched out the City gates to the North with an army. He rode not to conquer but to remove an eldritch threat from within. He was never seen again, but The City Imperishable continued. In the last volume, power-hungry politicians sought to restore the lost Empire, awakening Old Gods that nearly destroyed them all. The central protagonists of the Trial of Flowers sacrificed themselves to retake the City. In the end the day was won but at the price of some gruesome transformations. At least one of them was killed, and this still depresses him terribly.

Now the new Lord Mayor Imago, recovering from radical elective surgery, must rebuild. He immediately faces threats to his new administration. The nomadic desert Tokhari warriors, led by their shaman Sandwalkers, were Imago's tenuous allies in the recent unpleasantness. Now many of them are still encamped outside the city walls idly polishing weapons. A company of foreign mercenaries called The Winter Boys keeps peace on the streets dressed in jesters' motley riding battle-trained giraffes. Their leader, the roguish Captain Enero, seems friendly enough, but he has other allegiances and the civic coffers can buy his service for only so long. Imago's political rivals are already busy building a coalition to take his Chain of Office.

At the mouth of the River Saltus, a pirate fleet has seized Port Defiance, blockading all maritime traffic to The City Imperishable. The Mayor's agent, the Slashed Dwarf Oneisphorous-former progressive agitator, was already on assignment in the moss-shrouded town to convince his fellow expatriate Dwarfs to return upriver. Now he must organize a resistance movement. Most of the locals aren't interested, but perhaps he can find help among the native minority, the Angoulême. The traders and jade miners of the Port dismiss these simple swamp people as backward savages, but Oneisphorous is told that they are the remnants of a long forgotten civilization with powerful Gods, or Loa, who still direct their lives and posess their bodies.

Meanwhile back in The City a new diversion is setting the streets abuzz with curiosity. A mysterious woman mountebank and her giant dancing ice bear have been enthralling the citizenry with songs and stories of the Imperator Terminus. She claims to have found the lost emperor's final resting place in the frozen North. If his sarcophagus and treasures are brought back home The City Imperishable will be restored to its former glory. What the Hells? They barely survive the last time something like this was tried, the ruins are still smouldering! But too late, the mob has spoken and Imago is pressured to send an expedition to the far North, the literal edge of reality. To give them an edge, he sends Bijaz, conservative Sewn Dwarf and major pervert. He recently became a conduit for divine powers he barely controls or understands. Gems, flowers, and ice generate spontaneously from his stubby hands. He derisively refers to himself as "farting butterflies". If the name Bijaz sounds familiar, it was used for dwarf characters in both Frank Herbert's Dune Messiah and the Viriconium stories of New Wave pioneer and New Weird influence, M. John Harrison.

The Dwarfs are perhaps Lake's most memorable inhabitants of The City Imperishable. They are normal human beings, not a separate species or race into swinging axes, big beards, and songs about gold. Dwarf children are raised in confining metal Boxes that stunt the growth of their limbs. Years creak by, spent in constant pain, while they're trained to excel in feats of calculation and memory like truncated Mentats. Upon matriculation a dwarf submits to having his or her lips sewn partially shut. They don the traditional muslin wraps and serve The City as civil servants and commercial clerks. In recent generations some Dwarfs have rejected this cruel caste tradition whose origins are largely forgotten. They have Slashed their stitches and speak out for equality, some of the more radical among them even suggesting the abolition of the Boxing. Sewn Dwarfs like Bijaz consider the Slashed to be dangerous blasphemers but lately the two sides have begun to work together. Bijaz is not completely comfortable with his own upbringing. His suppressed frustration and self-hatred has manifested in deviant sexual appetites that completely ignore the idea of informed consent. The phrase "twisted little fuck" leaps to mind, and he's one of the good guys — for a given value of good. Although he now resists these darker impulses, Bijaz continues to get his freak on in this novel as do other characters. It gets pretty kinky at times, but I see the sex as a rituals to gain some sense of control or strength in a world that makes no sense at all, so no different than here, really.

A Dwarf of more heroic stature is Saltfingers the dunny diver, "stranger than a hen with three beaks", and the most knowledgeable and bravest of The City's sewer workers. These brave underground heroes patrol the unimaginably ancient tunnels keeping shit going. Armed with guns that socket into steam lines they battle cthonic horrors and placate sleeping forgotten gods. The dunny divers are minor but memorable players, made me think of Thomas Pynchon. Also of interest is the Tribade, a matriarchal society that combines elements of the Girl Scouts, the Mafia, and the Bene Gesserit run by the woman known as Biggest Sister. These are just a few of the people in the neighborhoods of The City Imperishable, the people that you meet each day.

Madness of Flowers is an excellent example of Fritz Leiber's concept of megapolisomancy, the shaping or generation of supernatural forces by a city. Imagine its humble origins, perhaps a collection of a few crude huts. Every day a goatherd drives his flock to cross a stream at the same shallow point. This daily action becomes ritual, the well-worn path becomes a road; first dirt then cobblestones and later tarmac. The stream has long since been buried and only a handful of historians care about the meaning of the name Gotford Street but The City remembers. The patterns of commerce and information combine with the web of water works and streets. From the Hermetic rites of Ancient Greece to the Mississippi Delta of Robert Johnson, we have known a deal with the Other Side can be made at the crossroads. What happens to a grid of hundreds of crossroads? All the actions of the population are part of the spell, from a muttered prayer for a parking space to a spontaneous street riot. The gods or paramentals are just pieces of the whole, as are the shopkeepers, buskers and pigeons. The magic in this sort of system is just as wild and unpredictable as the frenzy of the Maenads of being ridden by the Loas.

This is my kind of Urban Fantasy. Putting mythic traditions in a contemporary city is fine, there are great examples from Crowley to DeLint and Gaiman. But I enjoy Jay Lake's wild world-building from the bedrock up, which is so much more imaginative. It's a bit like getting walloped with a pillowcase filled with lasagna, a shocking but tasty experience that will certainly make a lasting impression. He is on par with New Weird fantasists Miéville, Swainston, and VanderMeer, and also two of my favorites: Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.

Trial of Flowers and Madness of Flowers are similar to Lake's last novel Green. The two series and the many attendant short stories may be in the same world although given its infinite scale (more plane than planet) I think Green's stomping grounds of Copper Downs are probably an astronomical distance from The City Imperishable. These books also differ from Green with a much broader scope using multiple storylines and viewpoints. You get the feeling that all the different characters are just part the massive complex organisim that is The City Imperishable. They can never hope to harness all its power, only adapt and survive. As their municipal motto goes, no matter what happens — Civitas Est — The City Is.

Madness of Flowers is available in stores now or can be ordered here, here, or at Borders.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to all Dwarfs, Slashed and Sewn alike, as Chris Hsiang. Little man, you've had a busy day.

Oh, and there are spoilers in this review, mostly for the first third of the book.

Rosemary And Rue is the first book in the October Daye series, about a half-fairy, half-human detective who solves crimes at the intersection between the magic and mundane. At least, that's what happens in this first book, which involves shape shifters, sea witches, the king of cats, and a gun that shoots iron bullets (which are deadly to fairies.) McGuire's version of San Francisco, with fairie kingdoms hidden all over the Bay area and pixies hiding in Golden Gate Park, is genuinely enchanting, especially when she's bringing out the downsides of magic being everywhere. At one point, our hero, October, visits the court of the Faerie Queen, who transforms her T-shirt and jeans into a ballgown — and then doesn't change them back, forcing October to slog through mud and crime scenes wearing an impractical gown that gets increasingly muddy.

We were talking about noir fantasy a while back, and Rosemary And Rue isn't really that noir — it's more like classic urban fantasy with a murder mystery. It's not quite paranoid, dark or morally gray enough to be noir, and McGuire's characters are mostly fundamentally nice, with a few nasty quirks here and there.

Rosemary And Rue starts out with a bang, one of the best openings to a novel I've read in ages: October "Toby" Daye is working as a private detective on a case for her lead, Sylvester Torquill, whose wife and daughter have been kidnapped. Toby is tailing a suspect, Sylvester's brother Simon, and she calls her human husband and mostly human daughter to let them know she'll be late coming home. And then she follows Simon into a trap — with help from a sinister ally, he turns October into a fish, and traps her in the koi pond in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden. She stays there for the next fourteen years, until the spell finally wears off and she changes back.

Toby's husband and daughter want nothing to do with her because they think she abandoned them. And she's ashamed of her failure, so she can't go back to her friends in Faerie. Instead, she takes a job on the graveyard shift at the Safeway (when her magic can conceal her fairy features most easily) and keeps to herself. Until one of her closest friends in Faerie gets murdered and puts a binding on October — either she finds out who the killer was and brings them to justice, or she'll die too. Solving the murder, of course, means returning to the world of the fae, which is full of dark corners and deadly surprises.

The great strength of Rosemary And Rue is in its worldbuilding: Faerie San Francisco feels like a real city, and it's not hard to imagine that mythical creatures and magical glamours lurk in every alley in SOMA and behind every tree in Golden Gate Park, and super-powerful mystical forces are living in rent-controlled apartments in the Tenderloin. Every relationship in Faerie turns out to be fraught with obligations — everybody owes debts to each other, which are viewed as the worst kinds of encumbrances, and there's a taboo on saying "thank you," lest you inadvertently take on another constricting debt.

The other great thing about Rosemary And Rue is that October is a great fantasy heroine, from her contentious relationship with her cats to her many tormented Loves That Can Never Be. She's caught between her fairie and human heritage, and can never really be at home in either culture. Plus — and this is the closest the novel comes to being noir-tinged — half-blooded fairy hybrids, like October, face discrimination and mistreatment at the hands of a magical world that views them as inferior, or even worse, as a abominations. The novel is full of these cast-off, mistreated and misbegotten "changelings," and October is the biggest underdog of them all — despite having been knighted for past gallantry, that we only dimly hear about.

After exploring McGuire's fairy city for one dark murder mystery, I'm on board for more, and looking forward to seeing how October's tangled web of allegiances and obligations plays out over the course of the next few books.

Now for the bad news: Rosemary And Rue has a couple of serious flaws, on top of occasionally cheesy writing. First of all, it works much better as an urban fantasy tale than as a murder mystery: October is a terrible detective, who mostly stumbles around making a target of herself until the bad guys finally take a shot at her. She doesn't do all that great a job of collecting leads, frequently ignores the most obvious line of investigation, and needs others to point out the obvious to her. And there's really only ever one suspect in the murder who makes sense, so it's not much of a shock when it turns out to be that person.

And the other major problem is that McGuire tries so hard to make Rosemary the first book in a series, it falls a bit flat at times as a stand-alone novel. The book has an enormous, sprawling supporting cast, and October has a lengthy, involved backstory with every single one of them. There were a few moments where I thought I must have missed a page, because the narrator starts talking about a character whom she's got a history with — and then I realized the book hadn't mentioned this character before. Long after you think you've met all of October's old frenemies, the book keeps bringing in new characters who aren't new to October. And this usually means the story has to grind to a halt for a few pages, while October spoonfeeds us more stuff that happened before the book began. At times, this feels like the tenth book in a series, rather than the first. There are almost no characters in the book whom October doesn't already know.

Despite both of those issues — which feel a bit like "first novel" pains — I'm still a huge fan of the universe McGuire has created, and eager to become more acquainted with her city of fairies, rose goblins and kelpies.

Thanks to S.J. Edwards, Elizabeth Bear, DJ Chaotica, Larry-Bob Roberts, Zack Stentz, Daphne Gottlieb, Paul McEnery, James McGirk, Jessy Randall, Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Susie Kay, Kat Page and David Fraser for the suggestions!

The Mayor In City Of Ember
He's the textbook example of a corrupt mayor who's only interested in saving his own skin. He knows the underground city of Ember is on its way out, and soon it'll be uninhabitable due to power failures and dwindling supplies. But instead of trying to cope with the problem, the mayor tries to hoard as much stuff for himself as possible, in a secret room — and puts together meaningless commissions to study the problem. Here he is in this video, eating sardines in the grossest possible manner.

Lando Calrissian in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Okay, so Lando is the kind of scoundrel we love to watch. And he's a perfect counterpart for Han Solo. But would you really want him in charge of your city? His Cloud City of Bespin seems like a pretty corrupt, messed-up place. And then he goes inviting Darth Vader and his crew there, which is not good city planning at all. And then after Vader has demolished half the city in his battle with Luke Skywalker, Lando takes off and leaves his city behind. Call that leadership?

Aunty Entity in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
She does keep the city of Bartertown humming along — except when she gets stuck into an idiotic power struggle with Master/Blaster, and everything grinds to a halt. Plus she rules with an iron fist, and forces people to fight to the death in a deadly arena. That's not the kind of leadership our post-apocalyptic cities need!

Mayor in RoboCop 2
He makes deals with drug dealers and criminals. And then he mismanages the city's finances and winds up handing the entire city over to the evil OCP. This clip pretty much says it all. And when he's in a tight corner, he just loses his shit.

Mayor Wilkins, in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, season 3
Your average terrible mayor may let the city fall apart, or make deals with drug lords, or bulldoze your house for no reason. But a really awful mayor, like Wilkins, makes cozy arrangements with vampires and tries to kill off the town's only protector. And then tries to turn into a demon so he can eat the high-school graduating class. Now that's bad leadership.

Vilos Cohaagen, in Total Recall.
He's an evil administrator of the Mars settlement, keeping the mutants down and ruling with an iron grip. He uses mind-control and brainwashing to keep his minions in line. And worst of all, he won't give the people air. WTF, Cohaagen?

Mayor Bentham Rudgutter, in Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
He's always described as sitting "regally on his throne," or sitting "behind his desk with an air of utter command." He rules over New Crobuson, with its corruption and oppression — and he's not averse to making deals with the city's crime syndicates as well as its demons. He systematically rounds up dissidents and has them tortured, and he's not above imposing martial law if the situation gets out of hand.

Father in Equilibrium
Father rules over the city-state of Libria and outlaws all human emotion, even the love of a small puppy. To this end, he keeps the people doped up on a drug called Prozium, and keeps everyone under constant surveillance. (Similar to other figureheads like Big Brother in 1984, or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World — except that Father just rules over one city.) The only good thing "Father" has going for him is his kick-ass gun-centric martial art, gun-kata. Woo hoo!

Judge Cal, In Judge Dredd
This character, closely based on the Roman emperor Caligula, seized power after he had the Chief Judge of Mega-City One assassinated. In Mega-City One, the Chief Judge has absolute authority — an arrangement that's caused some problems on several occasions. So Judge Cal goes completely nuts, making it a crime to criticize him and appointing a goldfish as his deputy. He even shoots Judge Dredd! Dude!

Mayor Prentiss in The Knife Of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness.
Prentisstown is not a nice place to begin with — there are no women, and the males can all hear each other's thoughts all the time, whether they want to or not. But Mayor Prentiss makes matters worse, by figuring out a way to control men's minds. He declares himself President and invades the neighboring settlement of Haven, where there are some women. And that's just the beginning of his reign of terror. Runner up: The mayors in Truancy by Isamu Fukui.

History and the Unknowable

For every piece of city magic, there is some kind of real-world analogue. Take, for example, the urban vampire. She eats aspiring actresses in the show Angel; he stalks prey through every city in Europe and America in Anne Rice's vampire book series. They run their own goth clubs in the Underworld movies, and manage to find really nice Bristol flats in UK serial Being Human. Even Dracula wanted to move to London from the lonely Carpathians.

Why are vampires' mythical, bloodstained faces hidden in trashed alleyway shadows in your city? Because most cities aren't just packed with people. They are layered with history - sometimes many thousands of years of it. Even in relatively new cities like San Francisco or Toronto, several dead generations have walked the streets before you. They've lived in your houses, and gone to your favorite shops.

Like vampires, these unknowable phantoms of history are hidden. But their influence lingers in the present. When you go into the buildings they built, buy their used clothing at the Goodwill, and eat in the dining rooms where they once did, you brush shoulders with the dead.

Emergent Formations and Conspiracies

Cities are also packed with strange secret societies and conspiracies. Fritz Lieber's novel of city magic, Our Lady of Darkness, is a classic in this regard. He invents the term megapolisomancy - the magic of big cities - to describe a strange hex that has been cast on the entire city of San Francisco. A mystical triangle emerges when the Transamerica Pyramid is erected, forming the dark symbol with the toothy peak at Corona Heights and the apartment of a sorcerer. Cities that turn into mystical symbols occur in Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell, where London has been laid out in a secret pentagram. In both stories, secret societies are responsible for both creating and reading these symbols, in order to gain power or destroy other people.

In "The Horror At Red Hook," H.P. Lovecraft imagines that the city of New York sits atop a vast underground series of rivers and caverns where foreigners consort with devils and threaten the whole stucture of civilization.

These conspiracies hold a fantastical mirror up to a true characteristic of urban life: Emergent formations. Out of many chaotic parts, neighborhoods and subcultures form in cities - seemingly without any design or plan. More frightening than a conspiracy is a coherence that comes out of nothing except random parts connecting. Immigrant neighborhoods come into being without design; corporations ooze into other corporations; riots erupt; artist subcultures take over buildings intended for general use. Indeed, in Our Lady of Darkness, the Transamerica Pyramid has replaced one such building subculture - a true urban historical fact that bleeds easily into city magic.

Surveillance and Doubling

Cities are covered in a million eyes - and they all watch each other. Windows look into windows; crowds are a morass of furtive glances; and surveillance cameras adorn every surface. We pretend we have privacy in cities, but always doubt it. There is something uncanny about this feeling. You split into two selves: The self you perceive yourself to be, and the self you perceive other people are always watching. Who are you? Are you what the elevator camera sees, or the person you see in the (possibly two-way) mirror?

If there are two versions of you, it makes sense that there is a secret other city beneath the surface of the one you inhabit. Or perhaps existing in the same space as your city, as the characters discover in China Mieville's haunting noir fantasy novel The City & The City. Or perhaps your city is riddled with passageways to another one, which you can enter only through mirrors. This is one of the many intriguing details in Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, where the newly-revived field of sorcery has revealed that magicians can get around England using a series of roads reached via mirrors. The roads themselves seem to lead through a vast and abandoned city.

And in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, another city lurks literally beneath London's feet – a city of magic and monsters, whose citizens share with London only a series of landmarks: the Tube stops. Even the Harry Potter series plays with this idea, creating an invisible train platform in King's Cross station that can only be reached by people with magic.

Population Density and Hallucination

Cities can be so vast that walking through them is akin to hallucinating. The road we just went down seems to have disappeared. There are three streets with almost exactly the same name, running parallel to one another. People in strange costumes are congregating on a street corner for no reason. Elsewhere, a sea of people in matching business suits fill the streets with a freakishly uniform charcoal grey.

The constantly-morphing city in Dark City, where our hero without memories awakens to discover himself the victim of a vast conspiracy, is a literal version of the everyday surrealism of city life. And so is the urban landscape in City of Lost Children, a steamy, mechanical world where a monster who cannot dream tries to extract the dreams of children. In Wicked City, the world of magics that spreads across comic books and an amazing live-action movie, is the ultimate hallucination. People merge into buildings – at one point, a demon turns into an elevator, and then a motorcycle.

The very fabric of our bodies becomes permeable in the hallucinatory city. Something about the incredible population density in cities makes this possible. We are surrounded by human-made objects as we wander the forests of buildings. Human dreams spray across the walls in the forms of murals, art, advertisements. We exist in the dreamscape of our own species. It is not a natural place. It is the place we built out of our own fantasies.

After having just tracked the most popular fantasy book cover art elements, Holman has turned his eye to urban fantasy's rise among speculative book genres. Using sales data from Nielsen/Bookscan, Holman shows that urban fantasy accounts for only 14 percent of the genre's titles — but it claimed 45 percent of SF/F bestsellers.

This chart shows the rise of urban fantasy among fantasy (not SF/fantasy) bestsellers in the last several years:

So if a large number of urban fantasy books are outselling all other science fiction and fantasy books, but publishers are still putting out relatively few urban fantasy books, it doesn't take a marketing whiz to see what comes next. Says Holman:

The rise of urban fantasy has without any doubt been the biggest category shift within the SFF market of the last 10 years in the US...

How does this affect SFF publishers? Naturally, publishers respond to trends (and publishers tend to spend more time and energy trying to follow trends than setting them). If, for example, higher sales can be expected from an urban fantasy debut than a hard-SF debut, more publishers will be more inclined to publish more urban fantasy debuts than hard-SF debuts. More authors being published in one category will generally mean fewer authors being published in another. Particularly when the alpha category starts to dominate bestseller charts...

It's up to individual publishers, of course, to determine the balance of their lists, and thankfully we don't all end up with the same strategy. However, publishers are still likely to reconfigure to some extent when there is a significant category shift in the market. For example, editors with expertise in the urban fantasy field are likely to be in higher demand (others less so). Why hire an editor with a brilliant publishing instinct for hard SF if hard SF only makes up 2% of the publisher's business?

Holman concludes that urban fantasy may not always be on top, and there may be another seismic shift down the line. And his company, Orbit, has made a strategic decision to focus on other types of science fiction and fantasy in addition to urban fantasy. He winds up hopeful that the rise of swords-and-skyscrapers lit is indicative of a surge of interest in speculative fiction generally. Here's hoping that these books are reaching a new audience, and might serve as a "gateway drug" to other kinds of stories that use our world as a departure point for journeys into the fantastical and the bizarre.

Bigger versions of the charts are at the link. [Tim Holman via MediaBistro]

Sandman Slim follows the adventures of Jimmy, aka Stark, aka Sandman Slim, who was dragged down to Hell as a cocky teenager and somehow survived for eleven years, before busting out. The only person he cared about is dead, and he's out for revenge — and he doesn't really care what he has to break to get it. Along the way, he gets dragged deeper and deeper into the politics of the L.A. magic scene, the ongoing feud between Hell's generals, the schemes of angels, Homeland Security, and the decadent plans of L.A.'s filthy rich magic users.

As someone who's read every novel by Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler, Richard Stark/Donald Westlake and Ross McDonald at least once, I found the frothiness and nihilism of the novel instantly appealing. Here's one especially Spillane-esque section, from towards the end of the book:

There's only one problem with L.A.

It exists.

L.A. is what happens when a bunch of Lovecraftian elder gods and porn starlets spend a weekend locked up in the Chateau Marmont snorting lines of crank off Jim Morrison's bones. If the Viagra and illegal Traci Lords videos don't get you going, then the Japanese tentacle porn will...

L.A. is all assholes and angels, bloodsuckers and trust-fund satanists, black magic and movie moguls with more bodies buried under the house than John Wayne Gacy.

There are more surveillance camersa and razor wire here than around the pope. L.A. is one traffic jam from going completely Hiroshima.

God, I love this town.

In another section, Stark visits a house full of rich magician assholes and scenesters, and describes them using timeless phrases like "They shit cancer."

Another crucial ingredient in the noir formula, a massive cast of corrupt day-players, each with his/her own agenda and hypocrisies, also manifests pretty well in the book. It takes place in a universe that will seem familiar to anyone who's watched Supernatural or read any of a dozen other dark urban fantasy novels set in a vaguely Judeo-Christian universe. Angels are dicks, demons are pretty nasty, and the world is full of monsters of various stripes — including humans, who are usually just out for their own gain.

But Kadrey also laces his novel's set-up with a fair amount of wish-fulfillment: Besides having survived a long stint in Hell and returned to talk about it, Stark is also almost impossible to kill thanks to a Nietzschean "whatever doesn't kill me" type thing. Early on in the book, he gets shot multiple times, and the bullets only cause him a bit of discomfort. He's got a magic knife that can cut anything and start any car, and a magic key that can transport him anywhere, including Heaven or Hell. And a Veritas, a kind of magic eight-ball that answers questions truthfully, but snarkily. Oh, and he knows special Hell magic that nobody else on Earth knows. So he gets to have the perfect heroic combination — he's miserable and filled with self-loathing and bitterness, but he also has a toychest full of awesomeness that most people would kill their extended family for.

In other words, it's the perfect escapist storyline — for some reason, escapism actually works better with a permanently grim and/or depressed hero. Just look at Batman.

Oh, the other thing about Sandman Slim is that it's frequently side-splittingly funny. Stark has sworn to kill all of the people who sent him to Hell and had a hand in killing his girlfriend. But the first co-conspirator he catches up with is Kasabian, who was sort of a pathetic lapdog back then and has now been consigned to running a video store in a crappy neighborhood. Kasabian shoots Stark, who decapitates him in turn. But Kasabian doesn't die (magic knife, remember) and Kasabian's disembodied head sits on a shelf for much of the rest of the novel, commenting on the action and begging for cigarettes. The whole book is like that — gruesome slapstick mixed with down-and-dirty Hammett-esque mayhem and double-dealing.

The whole thing reminded me somewhat of a slightly darker, cleverer version of Monster by A. Lee Martinez, the last book about a semi-human monster who defends the world from other monsters that I read. Where Sandman Slim has a jump on Monster is in its hero, who is both more tormented and more sympathetic than Monster's sad-sack protagonist.

Sandman Slim's main drawback is its plot, which doesn't bear much examination — about halfway, or maybe two thirds of the way, through the book, the exposition starts getting thicker and thicker, and various characters pop up to explain stuff, and then other characters jump in to explain those explanations. Soon enough, the simple tale of a horrendously scarred bastard who crawled out of Hell to kill a bunch of people who deserved it gets more and more muddled with a lot of other stuff. It sort of overpowers the fun revenge rampage you've been primed for since the start of the book — but the good news is, there's still plenty of death, destruction and despair to go around, and the book's final big action set pieces are a lot of fun. It's easy to see why people were talking about it at Comic Con.

All in all, Sandman Slim brings a pleasingly loathesome L.A. vibe to its tale of Hell's inmate's progress. As you'd hope for a novel in the "urban fantasy" genre, the city itself is one of the novel's main characters, teeming with crack dealers and Brad Pitt lookalikes and neo-Nazis — oh, and angels and demons and assorted other nasties. If you've been hoping someone would bring the full-strength SoCal toxic waste to the urban fantasy game, then Sandman Slim is your poison.

Allegedly, this book actually came out in June or July, even though my review copy says August. Which is why we only just got around to reviewing it. Anyway, it's out now: [Amazon]

Midnight, Mass consisted of one short-lived comic series, followed by a miniseries, about Adam and Julia Kadmon, who solve supernatural mysteries. They come from a long line of monster hunters, and there's lots of amazing backstory about the Kadmon family. But best of all, the Kadmons' relationship feels like a real marriage, and they lack the insipid Moonlighting-esque banter you tend to see in so many male-female investigator teams. (Here's hoping it stays that way in the TV series.) They live in the town of Midnight, Massachusetts (hence the name) which has an evil forest that nobody ever comes out of alive. And monsters are everywhere, but we start to see the monsters as real people, who wish they could live among humans and have normal lives — except the Kadmons won't let them.

The comic was written by John Rozum, whose other great contribution to comics was Xombi, the Milestone series about a man who can't die (thanks to nanotechnology) and finds himself entering a bizarre supernatural world as a result.

Apparently the TV show will be called simply Midnight, and it's being produced by Gretchen Berg and Aaron Harberts, of Pushing Daisies.

As Rozum points out on his blog, this is actually the second attempt at a Midnight, Mass TV series. Mostly, I'm hoping that this new TV series means we might get more issues of the comic at some point — and trade paperback collections of the first two series would be nice, as well. I read the comics when they came out, and I have a sinking feeling I'm missing some issues. As it is, Midnight, Mass doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, which seems unfair. Oh, and TV industry? Please try not to do to Midnight, Mass what you just did to fellow Vertigo classic Human Target. [THR]

After the death of her mother, Antimony "Annie" Carver is unceremoniously dumped at Gunnerkrigg Court, the same boarding school her parents attended in their youth. Aside from the uniforms, Gunnerkrigg doesn't resemble a school as much as a sprawling, spooky industrial complex, which sits at the edge of an unnamed city just across the river from a forbidden forest.

Annie encounters no students in her first days of Gunnerkrigg (outside class, presumably), but she does quickly find that she's acquired a second shadow, a sentient, playful creature that needs Annie's help to get across the bridge and back into the forbidden forest. After finding a box of spare robot parts in a closet, Annie is well on her way to helping the shadow home.

It's a simple first adventure that sets in motion the ever-deepening mysteries of Gunnerkrigg Court. Annie eventually meets Kat, a science and engineering whiz kid whose parents are on the Gunnerkrigg faculty, who becomes her partner in exploring the twisting passages and dark secrets of their school. Along the way, they encounter a friendly ghost in need of scaring lessons, a black-eyed student with apparently demonic powers, a pair of vain girls who once were fairies, the trickster god Coyote, and a body-stealing creature who has a history with Annie's mother.

But there's a tension between all the magic — or the "etheric sciences" as they are called — and Gunnerkrigg's high technology mission. The Court itself plays host to technological wonders: an artificial environment, a virtual reality simulator that casts students in a black-and-white alien adventure pulp, and incredibly sophisticated robots who are inexorably to a portrait of a mysterious young woman. And Annie finds herself caught up in the politics of these two worlds, neither of which she fully trusts or understands.

Siddell mixes gothic imagery with an often playful, almost childish style that keeps the series light, even as we understand that Annie is dealing with very serious, very powerful forces. And he understands fully understands the genre he has chosen, tempering his arcs about lost souls and demonic hallucinations with science fairs, teenage crushes, and inverted Aesopian tales.

Annie herself is patient and thoughtful character, one who often perseveres by keeping a level and an open mind, and by being almost unfailingly polite. In less adept hands, this would be a recipe for a Mary Sue, but much of the humor comes from the other character's inability to phase her and her absurdly rational interactions with those around her. And Siddell has increasingly fleshed out the cast of students, teachers, and mystical and mechanical beings whose lives intersect with Annie's, keeping the interactions bright and enriching his world.

It's ultimately a strange menagerie of ingredients that fill Gunnerkrigg Court's pot: science fiction and fantasy (with healthy doses of Egyptian, European, and American mythology), thick-lined manga and gothic elegance, self-aware silliness and the epic sublime. And by all rights, it should come out to a jumbled mess. But Siddell has struck a delightful balance that makes his comic at once an engrossing mystery and great playful fun.

[Gunnerkrigg Court]

Ever since I was four years old, in 1972— before the merger of punk to steam, I wanted to be Captain Nemo. After devouring Verne and Wells, I discovered the Oswald Bastable trilogy by Michael Moorcock. Philip José Farmer further fueled my feverish pubescent imagination with such works as The Wind Whales of Ishmael and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. I discovered there's more to science fiction than spaceships and robots in the future.

K. W. Jeter is usually credited with coining the phrase "steampunk" back in the early 80s. He, along with Tim Powers and James Blaylock, created dark versions of the Victorian Era, stocked with accelerated technology re-dressed in period appropriate materials with occasional supernatural elements. Morlock Nights, The Anubis Gates, and The Digging Leviathan all echoed the literature and feel of 19th Century and commented on society struggling to keep up with rapidly changing technology. With less doom and gloom than than its gleaming, black, low-slung sibling — cyberpunk — these speculations still offered cynical social commentary. The Good Old Days weren't all that great, and throwing a lot of shiny gizmos around will never fix the societal ills that confound us in any era.

I wasn't really aware of this trend in fiction until '91 when William Gibson and Bruce Sterling introduced the wider reading public to steampunk in The Difference Engine. Then, as Snow Crash did to Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson one-upped Messers Gibson and Sterling with The Diamond Age. It's just my humble opinion; this is a smarter and by far more entertaining novel. Stephenson turned the expected convention around, injecting Victorian styles and sensibilities into a future that enjoys nearly miraculous technologies. His novel examines the infamous repressive morality of that era as much as it explores the possibilities of nanotech. Michael Swanwick took a similar route with a far more playful tone in the ripping adventures of Darger and Surplus. I strongly recommend these ribald short stories — there is an excellent recent Swanwick collection from Subterranean Press and another, The Dog Said Bow-Wow, from Tachyon.

Also of note is Paul Di Filippo's weird and wonderful Steampunk Trilogy (1995). The first tale concerns a gentleman inventor and his remarkable amphibian prodigy involved in a royal scandal. "Victoria" fits most preconceptions of what a steampunk story is about: advanced retro-science and aristocratic adventures. The other two are more atypical but I adore Di Filippo's customary pop culture references and mashups at play in the 19th Century. Famed naturalist and racist asshole Louis Aggasiz visits the sleepy little fishing hamlet of Innsmouth? Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman explore the astral plane with Madame Blatavasky — and Allen Ginsberg has a cameo? Zany, clever stuff.

Even though steampunk lit has been around for a few decades now, it's increased rapidly in popularity the past few years. It has inspired other media as well as design and fashion to an eye-rolling degree. There are more steampunk novels than ever, although too many or not enough for some people. Here I'd like to share my thoughts on four of these with you, Gentle Reader.

The Affinity Bridge by George Mann (Tor, on shelves now)
In 1901, Sir Maurice Newbury and his new assistant Miss Veronica Hobbes are employed at the Anthropology department of the British Museum. They also serve as special agents of the Crown, investigating extraordinary threats against the Empire.

Sir Maurice scoffs at spiritualism and superstition, even though some of his c ases have involved the supernatural. He bows before the altar of Rationality and is enthralled by the mighty airships, graceful clockwork androids, and the other mechanical wonders of his age. Miss Hobbes finds her employer's enthusiasm for noisy odoriferous machines childish. She prefers horse-drawn carriages and Georgian architecture to the chaos and ornate fripperies of the current mode. Still she is a thoroughly modern woman championing forward-thinking social causes. Both of them keep shameful secrets and hidden agendas from each other, will their new partnership survive?

Newbury and Hobbes are assisting with Scotland Yard to investigate a series of strangulations in Whitechapel that may have a supernatural cause. Before they can pursue any new leads, Sir Maurice is called away for a special audience with the Queen. She is not amused.

Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria is kept alive by huge wheezing machines (in our world she died in the first month of the 20th Century). The frightening cyborg monarch orders Newbury off all other cases to investigate the fiery crash of an airship that killed all those aboard. The automaton that piloted the craft is missing but, most seriously in her Royal eyes, one of her family, a Dutch prince was aboard. The investigation leads to Chapman & Villiers, Britain's largest airship company and the inventors of the wondrous automatons, which may not be as foolproof or harmless as advertised. .

Oh and by the way, there is also a plague of Revenants (to his credit, Mann does not use the Z-word). A virus, brought by soldiers returning from India, is infecting the neighborhoods of the less fortunate creating shambling cannibals of the classic Romero type. Everyone feels just awful about these and some calculate most of the country's population will be infected. Then again it only appears to occur to the poor, so not much is being done to stop it.

The plot whirrs along with a brisk clockwork (hah!) predictability switching over at times to reveal some of the protagonists' eccentricities and mysterious pasts. The second half shifts into high gear with some truly exciting action scenes. For all their supposed intellectual prowess, Newbury and Hobbes seem to solve most things by hitting them. Most of the puzzle clicks together as expected but some bits are just ejected with the flimsiest explanation. I'm sorry to report this story was steampunk lite, thrills and spills with steam engines in the background. Victorian language and customs have been watered down. There is an obvious message about the loss of our humanity to an increasingly mechanized society and a vague conflict between Science and Superstition. Most of the intimations of magic and the supernatural hint at the direction further Newbury and Hobbes investigations will go. I dearly hope that The Affinity Bridge is not their most interesting case.

The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (Tor, on shelves now)
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt (Tor, on shelves now)
This follow up to last year's excellent The Court of the Air is a riot of twisted imagination and full steam ahead thrills. Hunt's richly textured worldbuilding compares favorably with China Miéville's New Crobuzon novels or Philip Pullman. These authors blend sorcery and science with steampunk trappings and have their own encyclopedia's worth of invented creatures, histories, and societies. Miéville has the more sober tone and keeps a firmer hand on the tiller of plot and pacing, wheras Hunt is just crazy in all the right ways. Sometimes he gets a little at sea: characters will be a bit inconsistent, and his climaxes are just way over the top. He also has similar convoluted wordplay to Miéville but with less purple prose and more groan-worthy puns. There is also dark political satire stretching to bizarre proportions (Marxist thought is not spared this treatment).

Most of Hunt's protagonists hail from the Kingdom of Jackals which resembles Great Britain. Centuries ago, the Jackals' version of the Cromwell's Civil War assured that Parliament would have the upper hand in the nation's affairs. The royal family are kept in breeding houses and the arms of each King or Queen get amputated upon coronation, so no more waving from the balcony. Parliament members make and pass laws the in traditional manner: bashing each other with stout "debating sticks" in ritual duels. This green and pleasant land of shopkeepers and shepherds enjoys stability through its monopoly of the celgas that keeps its aerostat navy aloft as well as the Court of the Air, the secret police that uses a combination of total aerial surveillance and leyline magic.

Jackal's enemies abroad include Quatérshift, in the throes of an Eternal Revolution bloodier than Robbespierre, Stalin, and Pol Pot combined. Even more frightening is the desert Caliphate of Cassarabia where the biomages breed all manner of monstrous creatures from the wombs of human slaves. They all share the planet (Earth in a far-flung future?) with people that resemble crustaceans or winged lizards. There are also the steammen, a race of mostly gentle clockwork robots with a religion that has elements of Santería and Zen.

There are also Plucky orphans, fey-blooded super-soldiers, science-pirates akin to Nemo, vigilantes with mystic weapons, lost cities, shouty dinosaurs, and an entire jungle ecology with a hive mind. Petroleum — like the controllable "electricity" — is long gone, Much industry is powered by steam or clockwork. "Expansion engines" (and firearms) run on the volatile sap of the Blow-Barrel tree. I've just given you a sliver of Hunt's creation, and hope this has piqued your interest. Look beyond all the fascinating and fantastical elements, and Hunt's work is about the pursuit of dreams in a world of clashing ideals and conquest. You can probably read Kingdom without reading The Court of the Air first, but I think you'll be hooked either way. Join the expedition of Professor Amelia Harsh (who literally has the arms of a gorilla) and her quest for The Kingdom Beyond the Waves.

Soulless by Gail Carriger (Orbit, Late Sept. 2009)
This comedy of manners and monsters is the first of the Parasol Protectorate series. I was a tad embarassed that I enjoyed this silly and original story so much. I mean, let us now judge the book by its cover – hmm, photo of a slinky young lady in period costume...oookaaay, her bumbershoot has arbitrary gears and a length of rubber hose attached to it for no discernible purpose, and the cover blurb speaks of vampires and werewolves, uh huh – Oh Sweet Buffy Sainte-Marie, this is a steampunk paranormal romance! Well yes, there are dirigibles over another Victorian London and our sassy heroine does have some decidedly racy scenes, when not facing the forces of darkness. Ms. Carriger has imbued this book with a delightful sense of humour and some very fresh changes. Her heroine, Alexia Tarabotti, is a very original creation quite separate from all those crossbow-wielding tattooed tarts one sees writhing on so many paperback covers these days. She also understands the Importance of Tea, and the problem of Silly Little Hats.

Alexia Tarabotti seems doomed to spend her life as a spinster. She is far too willful and too old (well into her third decade) and has a father who is both Italian and dead. He left her with an unfashionable complexion, an abundance of all manner of curious books, and very little social prospects. Unbeknown to her mother and other boring people, Alexia lacks something else— a soul. Oh she laughs and cries as the rest of us do, appreciates the arts, and I suspect could bust out in a funky gavotte. She just has no immortal soul. Supernaturals; ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and the like have a surplus of soul, thus accounting for the extra life and unkillability they enjoy. The extemely rare preternaturals are born without a soul. Upon the slightest physical contact with Miss Tarabotti, a supernatural becomes a mere mortal, the fangs retract, fur sheds, and death or injury become very real prospects. This can be a very handy talent should the local vampire forget his manners and attempt to dine without an invitation.

In this capacity, Alexia occasionally assists the Bureau of Unnatural Registry, that Branch of Her Majesty's Civil Service that polices vampires and werewolves. Supernaturals revealed them selves to the world at large during the Civil War. They had grown weary of skulking in the shadows, fleeing the inevitable torches and pitchforks. Now they are integrated into high-society and have helped build the British Empire and no longer threaten innocent mortals. Still, there are little misunderstandings, and that's where the BUR comes in. It is led by the very dashing Scottish peer and Alpha of London's werewolf pack, Lord Conall Maccon. Miss Tarabotti is often offended by his brusque, crude manner, no doubt stemming from his exotic and savage nature. Oh, and he turns into a wolf once a month. How bothersome, and yet the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Lord Conall and Miss Tarabotti must investigate the sudden appearance of unregistered vampires and the appearance of known supernatural citizens. They employ cutting-edge science and the most scathing banter they can muster. Gail Carriger has employed some very original thinking to the alternate-history-with-monsters game. She also lampoons the vicious world of Victorian society where an arch remark or fumbled introduction could reduce one to a state akin to walking death. Soulless is a character-driven romp with great worldbuilding and delicious rapier wit that recalls Austen and P.G. Wodehouse. Mystery and bloodshed abound, tea will be served,and there will be treacle tart!

Not Less Than Gods by Kage Baker
(Deluxe Hardcover, Subterranean Press, Dec. 2009 Trade Hardcover, Tor, March 2010)
I am a big Kage Baker fan and have raved about her books before. This one won't be coming out until after Kwaanza, and I'll do a more in-depth review then. I'll just say it involves the early life and career of that Victorian superspy, Edward Alton Bell-Faifax, whom some of you may know from The Company novels. Bell-Fairfax is a Hero in the most Classic sense, fated for greatness and all the tragedy that entails. There's globe-trotting espionage and scads of amazing secret gadgetry: novelty-hat cameras, radio transmitters, a kung-fu robot, radar-equipped speedboats, a rifle that shoots ice bullets, bullet-proof carriges with "internal-combustion engines", and so much more! "But wait, will there be goggles? We want the goggles, Grey!" Do you? Well how about telescopic infrared goggles? For Everybody! GOGGLES YAY!!

Do please pardon me. The important thing to remember is that Kage Baker really brings 1849 alive with a wealth of details and pitch perfect dialogue. This woman truly understands language in a way only someone deeply involved in the Theater can. She often works as a professional historical reenactor and has taught Elizabethean English as a Second Language. She takes a rather dim view of people who show up at RenFaire dressed as their WoW character and ask where the frozen yogurt stand is.

I have a similar problem with these Josiah-come-latelys who glue-gun clock parts to their bolo ties and spout things like, "I say, old bean, zeppelins are absolutely smashing!" in a bad Cockney accent. I spoke to one gentleman deeply committed to the Steampunk Lifestyle and he admitted that he never read any of the novels I discussed in the top half of this post. For him it all began and ended with that TV series starring Robert Conrad, which admittedly predates those novels. When asked why he found steampunk so fulfilling he rhapsodized about the DIY aesthetique his community enjoys,"I stitched this waistcoat and suit myself!" and the sense of boundless optimisim the psuedo-era held (holds?). To paraphrase; "People could become whatever they wanted despite their gender, race, or class!". This is stunningly ironic from someone emulating a period known for a rigid social hierarchy and the beginning of mass-produced consumer goods. Of course it's all fantasy, there never were clockwork automatons or airship fleets ushering in a Utopia of muttonchops and bustles. I just wish some of these fashion victims put a little more depth and research in to their statement. Read a damn book already.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the Gentlemen's Speculative Society as Christopher Hsiang, Esq. He is very much looking forward to the 20th Century again.

Steamy Photograph by Kyle Cassidy, Models: Liza James and Jared Axelrod

Here's the drama: A lot of people are upset, and rightly so, that the first African American Disney Princess will spend the majority of the film as a green frog. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at the seemingly diverse animated cast on this deck of cards that was being handed out at Comic Con:

But any feelings of multicultural warm-fuzzies were pretty much shot to hell after I played the Princess-centered little computer game on the movie's website. Needless to say the premise left me a bit, stunned. The main character, Tiana, is sent on a mission to retrieve the rich white girl's tiara, so she can borrow it, but along the way she's asked to fetch some hot sauce for the gumbo before she has permission to get to the rich girl's bedroom. For a movie in which every move is being scrutinized by the media, why go there? It's, well, disappointing and almost too easy, so I will say no more. Tell me I'm being hyper sensitive but I was pretty shocked one of the first errands they send the black Princess on is to basically wait on a white lady. Shouldn't someone be checking this?

Trailer

As if Nature was finally fed up with those meddlesome bald apes, a plague of plagues sweeps across the globe. Ebola, Marburg, Bird Flu, Swine Flu, Panda Flu, Siberian Tarantella, and Restless Spine Syndrome*; a simultaneous outbreak of every deadly disease wipes out nearly every human being in a matter of weeks. Five survivors, strangers to each other, have found shelter in a stately manor home just outside a Welsh city. They gather all the food they can and avail themselves to the Manor's extensive cellar of fine wines and ales. It's a wake for the whole world as they toast the past, try to make sense of their continued existence, and figure out what the hell to do next. All the while the five keep a certain distance from each other and avoid looking to the horizon where dark and uncanny shapes flap and circle in the beautiful blue new sky of an emptied world.

Six blurry months later the sound of a motorcycle tears through the silence. Astride it is a Mysterious Stranger who asks to be called Michael. With trepidation, the five welcome him to the manor and share with him a meal from their sumptuous if dwindling larder. That midnight Michael visits each of them individually, warning that things are just going to get worse. He urges that they trek down south to Cornwall and seek refuge with other survivors at a place called Bar None, the last pub on Earth. By dawn's break the enigmatic weirdo is gone and the five reluctantly agree to seek this possible sanctuary. After all, it's not like they have any better plans and besides, they are running out of booze.

Packing up all their supplies in two Range Rovers and Michael's abandoned bike they set off across a twisted landscape in search of...well, anything other than what they had. The Blighty they travel through is more unsettling than they ever imagined. Nature has been reclaiming its own as well, but not like they thought. Wolves, bears, and eagles seem to have returned to the Sceptered Isle. Trees are sprouting everywhere with an accelerated growth and in unrecognizable forms. There are other survivors, of a sort, as well. Here Lebbon plays with with certain tropes of the End of the World as We Know It. There's the Steely-Eyed Survivalists, Mohawked Cannibal Hordes, and of course those lovable Mutants – but all with a just enough of a twist. Of all post-apocalyptic fare, Bar None really reminded me of J.G. Ballard, especially works like The Drowned World or The Crystal World. The world is changing into something fierce and wonderful and it no longer has any room for folks like you or me.

All of this is told from the viewpoint of one of the five from the Manor, whose name we never know. His narrative is regularly interspersed with memories of his beloved wife Ashley, lost to the plagues. These scenes are entwined with reminisces of his other love, fine British ales like Greene King Abbot Ale, Marston's Old Empire, or Redruth Cornish Rebellion. Here, try a sip of this:

Theakston's Old Peculier, deep and dark and heavy, a smooth roasty beer with a hint of chocolate and an unmistakable vinous aftertaste, a complex beer, rich and powerful and as familiar to my tongue as the taste of Ashley's skin, the hint of her breath, the the tang of sweat on her neck as we made love.

A heady brew indeed. After one of these waxy rhapsodies our narrator rails against poncey wine aficionados and their overblown language. I guffawed at this Pot/Kettle hypocrisy but then had to stop in mid eye-roll. I am a whiskey lover. Although I consider myself egalitarian in my choice of rotgut , I must admit to snorting derisively when someone orders Jack Daniels. and have also known to utter nonsense like, "clear notes of maple and vanilla with a broad yet subtle fiery finish". Who am I to put down another's geekery, especially when lovingly crafted in prose. It is quite touching the way Lebbon weaves together all the senses into precious memorials of days and worlds gone forever.

Bar None is a very short novel, perfect for a lazy summer weekend with a "few" pints. As always, Lebbon's writing is lyrical, introspective and quite literary. The pacing is a bit languid, more Riddley Walker or The Quiet Earth than Mad Max. Don't fret, there is just enough action and some truly freaky horror to pique the interest of any genre lover, this ain't The Road by a long stretch. The premise is quirky and bizarre, but Lebbon never plays for cheap laughs. 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.

You can purchase Bar None now from Amazon,
or support your local independent bookseller.

*Okay, I made those last three diseases up.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the last drunks on Earth as Chris Hsiang. He enjoys a nice rye, neat with a water back.

It begins as a girl, born into poverty and ignorance, is sold into slavery by her own father. She's stolen away from the warm land of rice paddies and the timeless rhythms of peasant life that are all she's ever known, and put on a steamboat bound for distant Copper Downs, capital city of the Stone Coast. Copper Downs is a cold, bustling metropolis of commerce and power at the dawn of an Industrial Revolution, populated by even colder people, pale as corpses.

Her culture, her language — even her very name — are all stripped away. The girl is imprisoned in the Pomegranate Court at the House of the Factor, with only the Teaching Mistresses for company. They teach her all manner of domestic skills as well as a plethora of academic subjects, the arts, and the social graces expected of an aristocratic lady. Enduring abuse and humiliation, she must excel at her lessons in order to survive.

A decade passes and the girl approaches womanhood. Her master, the Factor, has deemed her suitable to be sold as a pretty bauble of some powerful lord, perhaps the Undying Duke himself. She is meant to be a "prettypet" to charm the aristocracy at gala balls and in the most exclusive parlors with her exotic beauty and witty conversation. The Factor dubs her "Emerald" and deems her worthy of sale. She rejects this name, calls herself "Green" instead, and swears to be no one's tool. She will be free, she will battle the unjust system that stole her from her native land. Green is twelve years old, pissed off, and has other plans, but so has Fate.

Eventually Green makes her way back to the land of her birth, Selistan (perhaps a pun on "Celestial Kingdom") only to find herself now a foreigner mistrusted by her own people. Impoverished in a society that treats women as chattel, she reluctantly finds sanctuary at the Temple of the Lily Goddess in the city of Kalimpura. This religious order takes inconvenient girl children or women too independent to fit into their assigned roles. At the Temple women can take roles generally reserved for men: law, accountancy, and Martial arts. The most promising fighters are chosen to join the Blades of the Lily, the city's brutal law enforcement.

Free to be themselves, these women rely on each other for strength, understanding, and love. Yes, there are sex scenes involving teenage lesbian warrior nuns that will raise eyebrows among some squeamish readers (like this reviewer). But like his infamous snuff-porn Dwarf Pits in Trial of Flowers (Night Shade Books, 2006,) Lake uses these brief, vivid passages to good effect serving the plot or developing a character; not to shock or titillate.

Although the very believable societies Lake imagines here are loosely based on the China and England of the 19th Century, this world is definitely in the realm of fantasy. Green is set on a flat (possibly endless) plain, with a procession of suns drifting across the sky. We already know Jay has a fondness for impossible cosmologies after visiting the 1:1 scale clockwork orrery Earth in Mainspring and Escapement (Tor, 2007 and 2008 respectively) or the infinite vertical cylinder in his short story "The Lollygang Save the World on Accident" (from Extraordinary Engines, Nick Gevers ed., Solaris, 2008). Another similarity to Trial of Flowers is Lake's treatment of the very real gods in Green's world. These deities are weird and powerful but usually treat with mortal concerns in subtle and inscrutable means. When the powerful try to use the gods to further their own goals, entire populations suffer. The lesson here: let sleeping gods lie; magic may seem like an easy solution, but people are better off relying on themselves.

Green has a mind as quick and sharp as a dagger and possesses an amazing arsenal of skills (she's a great cook, too). Given all these abilities she is still very much a child, alone in an unforgiving world. For all her rigorous education, she has negligible people skills. She feels driven to stop the oppression of women and children, but she has only vague plans involving stabbing and kicks to the head. Green must grow into the role she has chosen for herself. To survive, she must find the strength to endure the crap around her. To succeed, she must develop patience and wisdom to match her passion and intellect.

Jay Lake writes beautifully. His language hearkens back to a more formal age, without disguising the brutal truths of the world he has created. Green is split into three distinct acts with the action, pacing, and fantastical elements ever-increasing to an exciting climax of mythic proportion. Personally, I would have enjoyed more detail about the steam-driven and flywheel technology (to which there are only a few tantalizing references,) but that's how I roll. 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.

Green hits the shelves at your local independent bookstore this Wednesday.
Or go to Amazon.

Note: A version of this review appeared in last month's newsletter of Borderlands Books.
Commenter Grey_Area is known to the ninja furries as Christopher Hsiang. He is in awe of Mr. Lake who has possibly the largest collection of weaponized Hawaiian shirts in North America.

In his seminal Perdido Street Station, Miéville introduced us to the bizarre metropolis of New Crobuzon, a rich tapestry alive with chimeric monsters, clockwork robots, warped magical science, and shadowy politics. These days, the New Weird Atlas is crowded with entries from dozens of authors, but few can match Miéville's gift at making even the most surreal cities appear lifelike. Now he again defies our expectations changing not just setting but his very writing style. The City & The City is a classic police procedural set in a world almost exactly like our own. The modern city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma might seem familiar to a traveler in Eastern Europe or Turkey, but they're just as weird as any old marching band of steam-driven gorilla crabs.

The streets of Besźel have seen better days. The old-fashioned architecture left quaint decades ago and now sits squarely in shabby — attractive only compared to the brutal concrete housing projects. The alleys are stalked by packs of actual wolves, scrawny critters fighting over trash. There are few jobs and less hope. The Besź citizens might describe themselves as saturnine or defeatist, but would probably settle for a corner of the mouth "feh".

An unidentified woman has been found brutally murdered at a skateboard park. Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad has been called in to investigate. Borlú has been around and around the block more times than he cares to remember. More reserved and a bit less corrupt than some of his policzai colleagues, he's a world-weary cop cut from the same cloth as Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander or perhaps Georges Simenon's Commissaire Maigret. We follow the investigation through Borlú's eyes, seeing the clues and his city as he does. The characters show only what moods and motivations they choose to reveal. Miéville totally nails the stripped-down voice of a great police procedural – "Just the facts, ma'am." – a far cry from the abundantly verdant prose of the Bas-Lag novels or King Rat. When the victim's identity is discovered, Borlú must continue his hunt for the girl's murderer in foreign Ul Qoma, Besźel's ancient rival and uneasy partner.

Okay, from here on out I get way SPOILERY about the two very odd cities but not the actual plot. If you hate it when the weird twist in worldbuilding is spoiled, just click away and buy the book, because it really is quite good.

Are all the babies gone? All right, let's proceed.

Where Besźel has sooty crumbling stonework, Ul Qoma boasts glittering skycrapers. This city has adapted handsomely to the modern world, attracting foreign investors and high-tech industry. This would be a surprise considering Ul Quoma's dalliance with Soviet-style communism in the last century. Before that, they backed the losing side in WWII. Once a devout kingdom worshiping something like Islam, they are now a secular Westernized state on the cutting edge of global society. That giant grumbling sound? It's from their neighbors in Besźel. Once he gets through the red tape, Inspector Borlú won't have far to travel – the two cities occupy the exact same geographical space.

This isn't like Budapest or Minneapolis/St. Paul, nor are they divided cities like Cold War Berlin or Jerusalem. Through some unexplained quirk of topology you can be in either Ul Qoma or Besźel and never notice the other except for overlapping areas called "crosshatching". Citizens of both cities are raised from birth to ignore or unsee elements from the alternate side. To travel through these crosshatched zones, or even acknowledge a person or shop sign, is strictly forbidden. Any transgressions are swiftly acted upon by a mysterious force or agency known only as Breach. The punishments cannot be appealed, and Breach does not bother to share its guidelines or agenda. To avoid trouble, certain colors, fashions, even gestures are accepted in one city but illegal in the other. Tourists must complete classes in recognizing crosshatches and un-seeing the other city. Driving in busy traffic must be a nightmarish test of self control.

This is an absurdist extension of what many of us city-dwellers already do. We daily ignore the more unpleasant truths on our streets and often unsee lots of cool stuff: "Feh, that's for the tourists" Yah, I can be a jaded schmuck sometimes. Miéville doesn't lean on this point and I may just reading something he never meant, into the novel. He can get very soapboxy (ahem, The Iron Council) . Not surprising considering his strong convictions. But The City & The City is fairly free of politics, and instead concentrates on the story.

As the murder investigation unfolds, Borlú runs afoul of different political fringe groups who desire to either destroy or unite with the opposite city. The ever present bureaucracy adds to the tangle of conspiracies and shoals of red herrings. The case also involves controversial research into the distant past when the two cities may have been one. The Besź and Ul Qomans have great difficulty with subjects like these. It's hard to have a conversation about things you are not allowed to think about. But Borlú forges ahead: a woman is dead and someone must pay. Everybody does what they must, or gets destroyed by a faceless system that answers to no one. Orwell and Kafka would love this.

Oh wow, that sounded pretty bleak, huh? The plot is grim, but I was charmed by the wealth of details of daily life and characters in the The City & The City. The pacing is deliberate but with a spare writing style, and at just over 300 pages this is a very brisk read. The crime novel feel is tone perfect, although Miéville might have focused on this aspect too much, sacrificing the fantastical elements. After all the imagination he used making Besźel; Ul Quoma, and Breach so different, he never attempts to explain how it all works. Personally I didn't mind this — trying too hard to describe the numinous can ruin credulity (see The Iron Council- time golems, really?). A writer without Miéville's considerable intelligence and talent would have made this a confusing mess.

Readers should shed their preconceptions and treat themselves to a highly original and gripping experience.The City & The City is still Urban Fantasy, yes, but don't look for elves on motorcycles or spell-casting cops. China Miéville has done something very different, new, and — oh yeah — weird.

The City & The City is available now from Amazon,
or from your local independent bookseller.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the old worker-priests as Christopher Hsiang. His passport to Besźel was revoked after that incident on the Street of Crocodiles.

Conjunctions #52, out now, has a theme of "Betwixt The Between: Impossible Realism," and here's the description:

Postfantasy fictions that begin with the premise that the unfamiliar or liminal really constitutes a solid ground on which to walk.

No, I don't know what that means either. I guess it's something to do with the idea that the standard fantasy trope - the dreamlike realm, in which the protagonist learns that everything is weirder and brighter than he/she realized - is actually more "solid" than reality. Or something. In any case, who really cares, when we're getting literary "postfantasy" from Joyce Carol Oates, io9 contributor Jeff Vandermeer, and Elizabeth Hand... plus a selection from China Miéville's new novel The City And The City? Can't wait to get my hands on this. [Conjunctions, Thanks Michelle!]

The discussion, over at Livejournal's Fangs, Fur & Fey community (for published urban fantasy authors), proves that there's no perfect approach. If you plan too much in advance, you risk getting trapped or bored - or your plans may have to change drastically as things turn out differently than you expected. But if you don't plan at all, you may wind up getting lost and wandering around for months or years. At the very least, it's a good idea to know how your book ends.

The general consensus is, it seems to vary from book to book. In one case, author Kelly Meding had an image stuck in her head of one of her characters trapped in a fire. Once she figured out that image and what it meant for the story, she had the idea, and some of the structure, of her novel's sequel. Another writer takes a big sheet of newsprint and draws boxes for each of the novel's chapters, sketching out what might happen in each chapter. Perhaps the best advice for thinking through what your novel will be about comes from Kristine Katherine Rusch: In a writing workshop, she told someone: "Tell yourself a story." And then it clicked.

Springboarding from this discussion thread, Bond tries to figure out what elements make a first novel a good candidate for a trilogy, or even an ongoing series. It comes down to compelling characters and vast world-building, of course. But she also thinks that the ending of each book in the series is crucial in building interest in the next installment. But most of all, the premise of the trilogy (or series) has to be a big enough idea, something people often overlook:

It has to be an idea that throws off lots of little ideas, giving lots of potential roads to travel down. One of the satisfying things I get out of the series I read is the sense of surprise at where the story goes, because the central idea is big enough to have more than one possible narrative in it. If that makes any sense whatsoever. I think this may also be one quality of stories that lend themselves to fan fiction—there are plenty of stories left in the world for fans to add.

In a separate blog post, Bond also asks the crucial question: will there really be chocolate, as we know it, in our spacefaring far future?

New York City has been taken over by sorcery, and io9 just happened to be there while all the mystical madness was going down. Upon hearing that Jerry Bruckheimer's rebooted live-action Sorcerer's Apprentice was filming, I scuttled all the way to the Brooklyn subway station, in hopes of glimpsing some magic in the making.

Just missing Bruckheimer - is that your muffin, Jerry? - I wandered around the set, hoping to catch a wave of Nicolas Cage's wand. (Cage plays the role of modern-day wizard.) And then I practically ran smack-dab into his young apprentice, Jay Baruchel, taking a break from the witchcraft. I approached the indie film star and told him I loved Fanboys.

"Oh, you saw it?" he smiled and I laughed, trying to suppress my dire need to tell him I'd never seen anyone look better in a Stormtrooper uniform. We chatted about The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and Baruchel confirmed that he'd be playing the apprentice in the new movie, set in modern day New York (all around it actually from the NYU campus as well as in Brooklyn).

It sounded like he was excited as I was to see it all come together. "I'm used to doing like, million dollar movies filmed in Vancouver, so this is really big for me, working with Nic Cage and everything. And the budget being, like, 100 times larger." Indeed, we noticed the muffins.

Sadly, my time with the modern day mouse was short, as he escorted back to the subway set. From between the subway bars, I watched Baruchel take on the role of the haphazard would-be wizard, running about on the platform and looking confused. All the extras were also donning modern streetwear, so no Dumbledorian robes and caps for this cast. But eventually the crew moved farther down away from eyesight but we'll keep a keen watch for more street magic from this crew.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice is set to come out on July, 16 2010.

Top image via Splash News.