SEPTEMBER 10-16, 2014: One of the quietest weeks in overall numbers in a good while nonetheless has very, very much to recommend it, with US audio releases for the latest novels from Lauren Beukes and Jo Walton, an eagerly-awaited Finnish speculative fiction, and Jay Lake’s posthumous final collection Last Plane to Heaven. Also out this week: John Shirley’s historical fiction Wyatt in Wichita well ahead of the planned print/ebook release, Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy concludes with Edge of Eternity, Kelly Barnhill’s The Witch’s Boy, Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, a fantastic Skyboat Media production of Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, and Jonathan Kellerman (with son Jesse) revisits the legendary golem of Prague with The Golem of Hollywood. Seen but not heard selections include the Nick Mamatas-edited Phantasm Japan anthology, Helen Marshall’s collection Gifts for the One Who Comes After, Beth Cato’s The Clockwork Dagger, and (both already out in audio mid-week) Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle and Cry Father by Benjamin Whitmer. Meanwhile, in podcast land, the Baen Free Radio Hour has just included part 1 of a 4-part radioplay miniseries for which I had a small part: “a full-cast, lushly produced audio drama adaptation” of the novella “Islands” by Eric Flint, set in the world of the Belisarius series by Eric Flint and David Drake. Enjoy!

PICKS OF THE WEEK:

Broken Monsters by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland and Hachette Audio, Sep 16, 2014) — “A criminal mastermind creates violent tableaus in abandoned Detroit warehouses in Lauren Beukes’s new genre-bending novel of suspense. Detective Gabriella Versado has seen a lot of bodies. But this one is unique even by Detroit’s standards: half boy, half deer, somehow fused together. As stranger and more disturbing bodies are discovered, how can the city hold on to a reality that is already tearing at its seams?” — subject of a fantastic blurb from Stephen King, once again Beukes gets a multi-cast narration courtesy of Christine Lakin, Terra Deva, Sunil Mohatra, Robert Morgan Fisher, and J. D. Jackson. The book is reviewed quite positively at io9 where she hosted a Q&A session as well. NPR’s review is “out of the park” level praise, and for my money Beukes is literally tearing it up with her books: Moxyland, Zoo City, and The Shining Girls kept raising the bar. Taking on urban decay in Detroit, with a supernatural horror twist? Yup. As my tastes bend ever further towards crime and realistic fiction, Beukes’ oeuvre is a step back into my (and her) more fantastical roots, and I’m really excited about getting deeper into this one. Get: [Downpour | Audible | IndieBound | Kobo | Kindle]

Speaking of excitement, as I loved her multiple-award-winning 2011 novel Among Others I was already looking forward to Jo Walton’s My Real Children when it was published in print/ebook earlier this year, and after reading Lev Grossman’s review (“My Real Children has as much in common with an Alice Munro story as it does with, say, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. It explores issues of choice and chance and destiny and responsibility with the narrative tools that only science fiction affords, but it’s also a deeply poignant, richly imagined book about women’s lives in 20th- and 21st-century England, and, in a broader sense, about the lives of all those who are pushed to the margins of history: the disabled, the disenfranchised, the queer, the lower middle class.”) I have been hoping to see it come to audio. Well, here it is, narrated by Alison Larkin for Audible. “It’s 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. ‘Confused today,’ read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know – what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don’t seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev. Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War – those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles? Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton’s My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan’s lives… and of how every life means the entire world.​” More: A lengthy excerpt and a very positive review from Cory Doctorow are available at BoingBoing. Get: [Audible | Kobo | Indiebound| Amazon | Kindle]

The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen, narrated by Kate Rawson for Audible comes well ahead of the January 2015 US ebook release, giving US listeners a head start on this intriguing Finnish speculative fiction of a highly contagious book virus, a literary society, and a Snow Queen-like disappearing author, first published late last year in the UK. “Only very special people are chosen by children’s author Laura White to join ‘The Society’, an elite group of writers in the small town of Rabbit Back. Now a 10th member has been selected: Ella, literature teacher and possessor of beautifully curving lips. But soon Ella discovers that the Society is not what it seems. What is its mysterious ritual, ‘The Game’? What explains the strange disappearance that occurs at Laura’s winter party, in a whirlwind of snow? Why are the words inside books starting to rearrange themselves?”

Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection by the late Jay Lake, narrated by Robin Miles, Victor Bevine, Jay Snyder, and Katherine Kellgren for Audible is “the final and definitive short story collection of award-winning SF author Jay Lake, author of Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura. Long before he was a novelist, SF writer Jay Lake was an acclaimed writer of short stories. In Last Plane to Heaven, Lake has assembled 32 of the best of them. Aliens and angels fill these pages, from the title story, a hard-edged and breathtaking look at how a real alien visitor might be received, to the savage truth of ‘The Cancer Catechisms.’ Here are more than 30 short stories written by a master of the form, science fiction and fantasy both.” The book is also out in hardcover and ebook [Kobo | Kindle] from Tor.

ALSO OUT THIS WEEK:

SEEN BUT NOT HEARD:

COMING SOON:

OCTOBER 2014:

NOVEMBER and DECEMBER 2014:

UNDATED or 2015: