To sci-fi fans, Sergei Lukyanenko is best known as the author of the Night Watch series (Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch, Last Watch, and New Watch) and the movies they inspired (Night Watch, Day Watch). But he’s actually one of the most popular modern writers in Russia. With his 1999 novel The Genome coming to the U.S. for the first time (paperback, digital), I spoke with him about the roots of this sci-fi detective novel.
Considering that it was only supposed to be a five year mission, it’s kind of amazing that Star Trek is still going strong more than forty-five years later. And not just in the movies. Pocket Book publishes more than a dozen new Trek novels and ebook novellas every year. But in talking to Greg Cox, who wrote the new Star Trek: The Original Series: Foul Deeds Will Rise (paperback, digital), and David Mack, author of Star Trek: Section 31: Disavowed (paperback, digital), about their new Trek novels, it’s clear there’s plenty of places for these characters to boldly go.
You might think that writing a book based on a video game just requires that you play the game a lot. Which is why no one is ever going to ask you to write a book based on game. Instead, they’ll probably ask John Shirley, who’s written a number of game-related novels, including the new Halo one, Halo Broken Circle (paperback, digital)…and not just because his research process involved more than a few rounds of “Team Slayer.”
With zombies in space, some people reading Timothy Johnson’s debut novel Carrier (Permuted Press: paperback, digital) might think, “Oh, so it’s like those Dead Space games.” But in talking to Johnson about the book, it’s clear that while he may have played those games, he was actually more inspired by movies…that also inspire those games.
Funko have announced that they will release the fourth series of POP! Action Figures based on characters from Game Of Thrones in December.
When it comes to comic book heroes, Wonder Woman is as iconic as Superman, Spider-Man, and Batman. But while most superheroes were made by comic book guys, Wonder Woman was created by a psychologist who also invented the lie detector.
This, however, is not the most interesting thing you’ll learn in The Secret History Of Wonder Woman (Knopf: hardcover, digital), an insightful and engaging tome by Harvard history professor Jill Lepore.
With the release of Hawk (Tor: hardcover, digital), fantasy writer Steven Brust has completed the fourteenth novel in his proposed nineteen book “Vlad Taltos” cycle. But in talking to him about it, it seems no one’s more excited to see what happens in it than Brust himself (and not, I’m happy to say, in a self-centered kind of way, either).
By calling his new book We Are Not Good People, you might think writer Jeff Somers has penned a confessional tome by a politician, professional athlete, or a guy in Coldplay. But in talking to Somers about this fantasy novel (Gallery Books: paperback, digital), it’s clear that there’s something more magical at work than just some guy admitting his sins.
Though they’re stylistically dissimilar, I’ve long thought that Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Doomed) was kind of like fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Breakfast Of Champions, Slaughterhouse-Five) in that both had distinctive and unique writing styles that made both of their writings great reading regardless of what they wrote about.
But it’s hard not to think that Vonnegut wouldn’t have written a book as explicit and sexually subversive as Palahniuk’s new novel, Beautiful You (Doubleday: hardcover, digital).