While fantasy, as a genre, has clearly been influenced by Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not often that fantasy writers say their style was impacted by role-playing games. But in talking to David Mealing about Soul Of The World (paperback, digital), the first book in his series The Ascension Cycle, he explained that, “Pen & paper RPGs taught me just about everything I know when it comes to storytelling.”
Given that she spends her days editing other people’s words as an assistant editor for Riverhead Books, you might think the last thing Danya Kukafka would want to do is write a novel of her own. But Kukafka doesn’t follow your…rules. Which is why she’s written Girl In Snow (hardcover, digital), a novel that author Paula Hawkins (The Girl On The Train) calls, “…a perfectly-paced and tautly-plotted thriller.”
Given that he has a hard sci-fi writer best known for his robot revolt novels Robopocalypse and Robogenesis, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Daniel H Wilson’s new novel has mechanical men rising up against their human overlords. But while there are robots in his new novel The Clockwork Dynasty (hardcover, digital), it seems Wilson has employed a different genre to tell this new story about metal people.
In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, sales of such dystopian novels as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and George Orwell’s 1984 spiked. Though if you’ve already read them, but still need something dark to sooth your soul, I present Tropic Of Kansas (paperback, digital, audiobook), a new dystopia sci-fi novel by writer Christopher Brown.
A few years ago, in the science section of The New York Times, a physicist explained that the transporters from Star Trek were technically impossible. But while this is an assertion that writer Tal M Klein agrees with, that didn’t stop him from putting a teleportation devices in the center of his new sci-fi novel, The Punch Escrow (paperback, digital). Though as he admitted during the following interview, it was actually someone else’s negative feelings about transporters that led him to write this novel.
In 2015, when I interviewed writer Adam Christopher about what was then his new novel Made To Kill, he described that novel as “a hardboiled science fiction mystery, written in the style of Raymond Chandler.” Now he’s continuing the adventures of his robot hitman Ray Electromatic in both a new nove, Killing Is My Business (hardcover, digital) and a new novella, Standard Hollywood Depravity (paperback, digital), the latter of which came out a few months ago.
Given how they both have penchants for dark, smoky rooms and equally dour moods, it’s not surprising that people who enjoy urban fantasy novels would like noir one as well, and vice versa. It is in the intersection that we find Michael F Haspil, the writer of the new noir-ish urban fantasy novel Graveyard Shift (hardcover, digital). Or should that be urban fantasy-esque noir novel?
In her new sci-fi novel Bannerless (paperback, digital), writer Carrie Vaughn — who’s best known for the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series — delivers what she calls calls a post-apocalyptic murder mystery. But in talking to her about it, it’s clear you shouldn’t think of this as Mad Max meets The Maltese Falcon.
It’s not uncommon for a writer to turn a short story or novella into a novel when they realize there’s more to the story. It’s what sci-fi writer Hugh Howey did with his post-apocalyptic tales Wool, Shift, and Sand, the latter of which was recently reissued in paperback after years of only being available digitally. Here he talks about the story’s origins, as well as his upcoming short story collection, Machine Learning: New And Collected Stories (hardcover, digital).