Teen girls are now required to appear at the Annual Ball, where the men of the kingdom select wives based on a girl's display of finery. It's 200 years after Cinderella found her prince, but the fairy tale is over. Girls team up to overthrow the kingdom in this unique and powerful retelling of Cinderella from a stunning new voice that's perfect for fans of Dhonielle Clayton and Melissa Albert. This time, over a few beer- and coffee-fueled chat sessions, Travis unravels a tale about his current case too tall for even an SF author to believe: a Gaudeamus machine that bends physics in order to make possible both teleportation and time travel, and how it gets stolen-twice a grad student-cum-prostitute who deals in telepathy-inducing drugs that let her "download" top-secret documents from her client's brains, a romp through Colorado and New Mexico during which each episode and character is more bizarre than the last and the internet meme that seems to tie it all together. so imagine what renowned science fiction writer John Barnes might do when he finds himself in one of the wildest, most rollicking hard-SF adventures to hit print in years.īarnes' college friend Travis Bismark always brought back plenty of great stories from his job as an industrial spy. But every once in awhile, strange things are bound to erupt around those most equipped to document them. The life of an award-winning novelist probably bears more resemblance to "normal" than most fans would want to believe. Shatter the line between fiction and fantasy. Is she a reincarnation of her ancestor? And will she turn out as unangelic in adulthood as that distant ancestor turned out before her? And in "The Bell in the Fog" (reminiscent of The Turn of the Screw, and dedicated to Henry James) the supernatural and psychological combine to brilliant effect: an angelic child bears a striking resemblance to an old portrait. Elsewhere, "The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number", "The Tragedy of a Snob," and "A Monarch of a Small Survey" the psychological takes precedence over the supernatural. "The Striding Place" was rejected by one editor as 'far too gruesome', but was in Atherton's view 'the best short story I ever wrote'. She eloped at the age of nineteen, took up writing against her husband's wishes, and after his death became a protegee of Ambrose Bierce, whose influence can be seen here in those stories, "The Dead and the Countess," "Death and the Woman" and "The Striding Place," which have an overtly supernatural element. Gertrude Atherton was born in San Francisco in 1857, and died in 1948. What we get instead is a loosely-connected series of stories in which surprise is the major element, a world where not all ghosts are bad, where it is not always clear whether they are ghosts, and where being dead may for some be better than being alive. The parallel is not exact: Dexter, with his clairvoyant powers, is a more useful (and intelligent) ally than Watson, and Vance for the most part does not 'solve' mysteries the way Holmes does. The friendship between Aylmer Vance and Dexter is not unlike that between Sherlock Holmes and Watson, and the two investigators approach the world of the supernatural in the same fearless and enquiring spirit in which Conan Doyle's heroes approach the world of crime. The Aylmer Vance stories date from the Edwardian period, and there are echoes in them of the Sherlock Holmes adventures which had proved so popular in the preceding decade. What I Assume You Shall Assume by Ken Liu.Madam Damnable's Sewing Circle by Elizabeth Bear.Alvin and the Apple Tree by Orson Scott Card.Bookkeeper, Narrator, Gunslinger by Charles Yu. Stingers and Strangers by Seanan McGuire.The Hell-Bound Stagecoach by Mike Resnick.Hellfire on the High Frontier by David Farland.The Old Slow Man and His Gold Gun From Space by Ben H.Buckell, David Farland, Alan Dean Foster, Jeffrey Ford, Laura Anne Gilman, Rajan Khanna, Mike Resnick, Beth Revis, Fred Van Lente, Walter Jon Williams, Ben H. Included are Orson Scott Card's first "Alvin Maker" story in a decade, and an original adventure by Fred Van Lente, writer of Cowboys & Aliens. Here are twenty-three original tales-stories of the Old West infused with elements of the fantastic-produced specifically for this volume by many of today's finest writers. A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fictionįrom a kill-or-be-killed gunfight with a vampire to an encounter in a steampunk bordello, the weird western is a dark, gritty tale where the protagonist might be playing poker with a sorcerous deck of cards, or facing an alien on the streets of a dusty frontier town.200 Significant SF Books by Women, 1984-2001.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |