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.
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).
While some novels start out as short stories or novellas, the switch typically happens as these tales are being written. No one ever gets to read the original short story or novella, and a completed version of the story may not even exist in this form. But Nancy Kress’ new sci-fi series, which kicks off with the novel Tomorrow’s Kin (hardcover, digital), has taken a different path. It started off as a novella, Yesterday’s Kin, which not only came out three years ago, but it’s still available wherever you buy fine books. Or fun ones. Though in talking to Kress about this, she admitted that this wasn’t part of some master plan three years in the making.
Since there seems to be a new Star Wars book every week, you’d be excused if you mistook Nik Korpon’s new novel The Rebellion’s Last Traitor (paperback, digital) for being yet another story about Luke and Leia and The Force. But in talking to him about it, it’s clear that this dystopian crime novel is less inspired by Han Solo, and more by another Harrison Ford movie.
In science fiction, the big thing the last few years is for books not to be stand-alone novels, but the first in a series. But while most sci-fi writers conceive of their tales with this in mind, in talking to writer Yoon Ha Lee about Raven Stratagem (paperback, digital) — the second novel in his Machineries Of Empire trilogy — he revealed that his plans for this series were quite accidental.