Gentle Giant and Chronicle Books have announced that they will release special editions of Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader And Son and Darth Vader’s Little Princess — which will include exclusive sculptures and versions of the books — sometime before this summer.
Much like chocolate and peanut butter or Anthrax and Public Enemy, the idea of mixing of cyberpunk atmospheres and pulp crime aesthetics probably seemed weird before someone tried to do it (that someone being Philip K. Dick with his novella “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?”). But we’re glad someone did since it’s led us to Shovel Ready, a new novel by Adam Sternbergh (Crown Publishing). In it, a hit man in the not-so-distant future is hired to whack an evangelist’s daughter, and, suffice it to say, it does not go well for our “hero.”
When you think about it, I mean really think about it, the best thing to be in a zombie apocalypse isn’t a cop or a army guy or a sword-swinging lady with cool hair. It’s a superhero. Well, one with superpowers, that is, not just some rich dude with parental abandonment issues. At least that what I’ve gleaned from the Ex- novels by Peter Clines, who explains what inspired these novels as well as both the zombies and superheroes in them.
The Guinness World Records people — not to be confused with the Guinness Delicious Beer people — have announced that the Guinness World Records 2014 Gamers Edition has been released.
As anyone who saw the misfiring movie Parker can attest, adapting the crime novels Donald Westlake wrote under the pseudonym Richard Stark is no easy task. But as he showed with his previous graphic novel adaptations of Stark’s Parker books, writer / artist Darwyn Cooke has a real sense of what makes the character, and his misadventures, so unique and engaging. One that serves well for him in Richard Stark’s Parker: Book Four: Slayground (hardcover, paperback, Kindle), the latest illustrated take on Stark’s master thief.
Be it in movies, games, or books, zombies are either fast or they’re slow, and never shall the twain meet. But in 2010’s Rise Again, writer Ben Tripp dared to suggest that one might actually evolve into the other (and we all know how some people feel about evolution). Now Tripp has released a sequel, Rise Again Below Zero (Gallery Books), in which he suggests that the living impaired may evolve even further.
It’s funny, but in a way, Richard A. Knack’s novel World Of Warcraft: Dawn Of The Aspects (paperback) may be his most Warcraft-ian book to date. And we’re talking about a guy who’s written nearly a dozen of them. But it’s not because of the story he tells in it, but rather because it was originally released in installments on the Internet like DLC.
With all five parts now being collected in a single volume from Gallery Books, Knaak made himself available to talk about how this book came to be, how playing the game inspires him, and his other non-Warcraft fantasy novels.
With his 1987’s novel Infernal Devices, writer K.W. Jeter presented a unique and (ultimately) influential work of steampunk fiction. Now — after twenty-five years and as many other books — he’s following it up with Fiendish Schemes (Tor Books), a sequel of sorts that catches us up with the original book’s main character, George Dower.
In J.W. Rinzler’s The Making Of Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (hardcover, Kindle), we learn, in great detail, how the titular sci-fi movie was made, complete with behind-the-scenes photos, numerous new interviews, original concept drawings, script pages, and other bits of movie minutiae. But if you think this makes the book just for film students or people who have to know every single trivial detail about this film, you couldn’t be more wrong.