But whatever may happen in the new year, there are many books we know will be published and can’t wait to read and that’s definitely a good reason to look optimistically into the future! Dispersed among sections, some members of the Otherland crew share what books they are especially looking forward to in the new year!
What we are very happy and excited about is that we could in 2019 welcome Lindsay Taylor and Clarence Haynes in our newsletter reviewer team! They are both avid SF/F readers and book clubbers and will continue to regularly share their invaluable opinions and assessments on latest English publications.
Speaking about the book club... There has been some sorting out, so to say, of our appointments. We will continue to hold our main book club meetings on the second Friday of each month, as always. The thematically specialized Speculative Theory Book Club, Mythic Fiction Book Club and Horror Special Book Club though will take place in rotating order every three months and in January we start with the Speculative Theory Book Club. That way, there will be a wider range of events you can choose from.
The next book-club date is for the Speculative Theory Book Club on January 24, where we will take a luciferian marxist look at apocalyptic movies with Evan Calder Williams’ Combined and Uneven Apocalypse.
The book clubs always start at 7.30 pm at the Otherland Bookstore. There are snacks and drinks you don't have to pay for, we're happy for every contribution, though. You don't need to sign up to join us, but please read the book if you want to discuss it.
Next Otherland Speculative Fiction Book Club discussions:
January 24 - Combined and Uneven Apocalypse by Evan Calder Williams
February 14 - Neuromancer by William Gibson
February 28 - Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
March 13 - Armed in Her Fashion by Kate Heartfield
March 27 - At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson
April 17 - Jhereg by Steven Brust
Enjoy our recommendations, see you around!
SF
What Marc is looking for in 2020:
The book I am most looking forward to is Perhaps the Stars, the concluding volume of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series. Unfortunately it looks like that book will be delayed until 2021, so I'll have to tide over with William Gibson's Agency (out in January), Steven Brust's The Baron Of Magister Valley (a continuation of his Adrilanka series, out in July) and M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again (out in June). I suspect I'll survive ;-).
The Deep by Rivers Solomon
saga press Euro 22,00
Solomon's novella is based on the song "The Deep" (itself nominated for a Hugo last year) by the experimental hip hop group Clipping., which in turn is a retelling of the myth of Drexciya (by the homonymous electro band). In this myth, a mermaid society arises in the Atlantic, as the unborn babies of African women thrown overboard by slavers transform, and emerge from their wombs adapted to a life underwater.
Out of this concept, Solomon crafts an ode to remembrance, becoming and communion, with a fascinating main character caught between self-realisation, duty, and simple decency. And when the dive is over, it was not too short at all, but perfect.
[Marc]
Meet Me in the Future by Kameron Hurley
tachyon Euro 23,00
Kameron Hurley, known for several works of fiction as well as the essay collection Geek Feminist Revolution returned this year with a book of 16 mostly previously published stories, Meet Me in the Future. Journeying to different societies marked by conflict and alienation, Hurley continues to cement her reputation as a visionary, focusing on propulsive sci-fi/fantasy mixed with progressive, out-of-the-box ideas around gender, desire and identity. Among the standouts: “Elephants and Corpses”, featuring a mercenary whose soul is able to swap bodies with those who have recently departed, with the character appearing years later in “The Fisherman and the Pig.” In “When We Fall,” a lonely shipyards worker who’s almost crushed to death finds loving connection and freedom with a warship’s avatar. Contours of societies touched by secrets and suppression are seen in “The Red Secretary” and “The Sinners and the Sea,” while “The Plague Givers” offers a wider range of genders amidst lethal, body altering sorcery. Hurley proves that writing can tend to affairs of the heart in unsentimental terms with acute observations of the external. A highly recommended read. [Clarence]
Testaments by Margaret Atwood
nan a. talese Euro 26,00
In no way is this a worthy sequel to the Handmaid's Tale novel. In fact, calling The Testaments a poorly executed TV series tie-in would still be flattering it. Atwood remains eminently competent at stringing well-crafted sentences together, and so breezing through the book is not necessarily a chore. But the characters are unbelievable and flat, and the benefit of giving us three different viewpoints is largely negated by all of them sounding alike. The plotlines are often ridiculous. The setting feels less coherent with every new detail we learn about it. From the tone of the story it might be intended to provide a hopeful outlook on the terrors of Gilead for younger readers, a sort of “this too will pass”, in a current political climate that makes the ideas of Gilead seem all too real. But this only works if one can identify with the characters and their situation, and here Atwood throws away much that was impactful about Offred’s tale. For me this was an extremely disappointing book and I have no idea how it managed to win the Booker prize.
[Marc]
Interference by Sue Burke
tor Euro 36,50
This is the second (and therefore concluding) part of Sue Burke's Semiosis duology. Whereas the first book chronicled life in the Pax colony by jumping ahead from generation to generation, Interference's main plot events take place within a few weeks. If you've read Semiosis and are wondering whether it's worthwhile to go on I can assure you that it is. Interference retains most of the predecessor's strengths while keeping the story more focussed. For those of you who haven't read Semiosis, you probably should :-), and there will be spoilers below.
The main two plot devices of this books are changes that take place early on in the novel: a new expedition arrives from Earth, on it people of different political factions, each with their own agenda. Simultaneously, the colony discovers an area of land with creatures and plants that behave strangely and threateningly. The combination of these two changes throws up stresses within the Pax society (which now contains members of three different species) which need to be negotiated and resolved in the unique ways of Pax society. If they can be.
Personally I think that the Semiosis duology is a perfect synthesis between old-school hard science fiction and the more recent approach of putting a spotlight on social and interpersonal issues. There are tons of believable and fascinating natural science in there, but at the same time the novel’s exploration of inter- and intra-species cooperation and competition make it a thoroughly modern work. Together this makes for a timeless series. I am sad to see it end so soon (I could have read a few more novels set on Pax), but looking forward to anything Sue Burke will put out in the future. [Marc]
F
The Secret Commonwealth - The Book of Dust Vol. 2 by Philip Pullman
knopf Euro 20,90
After nearly two decades, Lyra Silvertongue is back, and she’s battling her toughest foe yet: clinical depression. Fans of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy remember Lyra as a feisty girl of around thirteen – fearless, determined, and quite capable of befriending polar bear warrior-kings and traveling to the land of the dead and back. Last year’s La Belle Sauvage, the first in Pullman’s new Book of Dust trilogy, touched on Lyra’s past but centered mostly on a new character, Malcom Polstead. Now in the second installment, The Secret Commonwealth, readers meet Lyra again as a woman of twenty, though the only thing she shares with her former self is her Oxford address. After the adventures of her youth, Lyra has settled into the relatively banal life of a student at the fictional Radcliffe College, and it seems for her much of the magic has gone out from the world. This is to the dismay of her daemon Pantalaimon, a physical manifestation of her soul who – in addition to having an animal form – has his own voice and personality. Daemons have long captured the imaginations of Pullman’s readers. After all, who wouldn’t want to have a talking animal companion with whom you could share all your thoughts and feelings? Daemons can’t be separated from their humans farther than a few feet, so people in Lyra’s world are never really alone. But from the beginning of The Secret Commonwealth, we see that something is very wrong with the relationship between Lyra and Pan. The two of them can’t stop fighting, and it leaves Lyra feeling sad and unsure – a shadow of the defiant, adventurous youth she once was.Like many young girls who read His Dark Materials in childhood, I adored Lyra. She was one of the few female characters in I encountered Young Adult fiction who was allowed to be heroic without always being good. In books aimed towards children, morals can be patronizingly simple: heroes win because they always do the right thing, and female characters in particular tended to be frustratingly noble. But Lyra, growing up unsupervised and half-feral on the streets of Oxford, spits, fights, and most importantly, lies. Throughout her adventures, Lyra’s gift for deception was her greatest asset. Though her cause was always worthy, she operated in a grey zone, relentlessly deceiving whomever she had to if it meant protecting those she loved.
But as she grows older, Lyra is losing her sense of imagination, and with it, her capability to spin fantastic tales at the drop of a hat. She’s become susceptible to dogmatic ideologies which try to paint the world as categorically black and white. This angers her daemon, who reacts with shocking cruelty. As painful as this is for fans of Lyra and Pan, it’s also refreshing. Like Lyra, readers of His Dark Materials have grown up, and found the world to be a lot less magical than they had hoped. Though it’s jarring to see Lyra at war with half of herself, it’s also heartbreakingly familiar. Self-hatred and self-doubt are not uncommon emotions for a twenty-year-old, and for the millennials who first encountered Lyra in their youth, depression rates are at an all-time high – making it only too likely they’ll be able to relate her struggle. Far from being disappointing to see my childhood heroine in such fragile condition, it’s heartening to know that even a will as iron as Lyra’s has its moments of weakness. Ultimately, The Secret Commonwealth brought Lyra back to me in exactly the way I needed her. Just like Lyra searching for her lost imagination, I got to rediscover something I thought I had left behind in their childhood, and I couldn’t be happier to have it back.
[Lindsay]
The Secret Chapter by Genevive Cogman
pan Euro 10,95
Finally we are on the road again with Irene and Kai. This time we will not be observing truce negotiations in an alternate Paris. But Irene and Kai are tasked with art robbery in order to exchange the mentioned painting for a book that might just save a world. When have books ever not saved the world? This time Kai and Irene need to work together with other fae and dragons and arrange themselves in the middle of a very distrusting alliance. I didn’t quite finish it yet, but I can’t wait to do so!
[Charleen]
Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
gollancz Euro 17,00
For fans of YA Fantasy, Leigh Bardugo is already a household name. With Ninth House, her rather startling -- yet thoroughly enjoyable -- debut in the adult market, she’s well on her way to conquering a whole new demographic. Readers familiar with the author’s “Grishaverse” novels, which include the Shadow and Bone trilogy and the Six of Crows duology, might initially be taken aback by just how dark her new book is. Bardugo has never been one to shy away from uncomfortable topics, but in Ninth House she holds nothing back, offering a whole new side to her writing. Set at Bardugo’s alma mater, Yale University, Ninth House centers on Galaxy “Alex” Stern, a young woman with the ability to see the dead. Alex is a high school dropout and recovering drug addict -- not the typical Ivy League freshman. But she’s offered a full ride on the condition that she uses her uncanny ability to help police Yale’s secret societies, which use ancient magic to to enact rituals for money and power.
Bardugo has a talent for constructing both worlds and characters that feel simultaneously unique and authentic. The idiosyncrasies of her characters never feel forced; she develops them slowly, peeling back layers evenly throughout the chapters, allowing them to grow into three-dimensional characters for whom the reader can feel genuine affection. The suspicious, world-weary Alex is a perfect example. Though her survival instincts make her deceitful and secretive, she still craves things like the affection of her roommates or the normalcy of a summer internship. As she navigates a situation for which she feels painfully underqualified, Alex must learn how to tell the difference between friends and enemies, and how to let those true allies help her along the way.
In an interview for Bustle, Bardugo admitted she wants the book to “f*ck you up a little,” and she certainly delivers on her promise. Parts of the book are deeply unsettling, including graphic scenes of sexual assault. But violence against women is just one element of various structural power imbalances which Ninth House highlights. Due to her class, gender, and race, Alex is constantly being gaslighted by those who control revered institutions like Yale -- namely anyone white, rich, or male. Alex arrives at the university believing that her invitation to be there has guaranteed her a measure of safety, and that the façade of respectability belies honesty. But she quickly finds out that her place is not only dependent on her ability to see the dead, but her ability to toe the line. The inevitable rude awakening she encounters is a perfect example of the lengths the powerful will go to in order to maintain the status quo, and what justice looks like when the watch dogs are dependent on those they’re supposed to be watching.
[Lindsay]
H
2019 was THE year of horror films. If it wasn’t the emergence of visionary new directors who actually have a story to tell, it definitely was the return of Stephen King to movies that marked 2019 as a year of horror fiction. What many people missed though, is that there is a myriad of mind blowingly gifted authors who slowly have been working their way up to the top and have announced new exciting books for 2020 - C A N ‘ T W A I T! In April 2020 Grady Hendrix strikes back with The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - why does our book club never do fun stuff like that??? In mythic fiction, we discovered Silvia Moreno-Garcia, even though she has been around for years, doing lovecraftian stuff, and in the new year she comes running and thundering with the very intriguing title Mexican Gothic! I was all smitten with Canadian author J.F. Dubeau’s A God in the Shed when it was published two years ago - a nauseatingly thrilling story of a small town battling an ancient evil - and he comes back with the sequel, Song of the Sandman in June. In May, Josh Malerman publishes Mallorie, a sequel to the acclaimed Birdbox. Paul Tremblay has surprised us with a short story collection in 2019, but now returns to familiar ground with his next novel The Survivor Song.
I personally have discovered the hugely talented, but unfortunately lesser known authors T.E. Grau, John Hornor Jacobs, Brian Evenson and John Langan in the past years and will be eagerly looking out for their new work. Wish you all a horrific year!
Full Throttle by Joe Hill
harperluxe Euro 17,95
Again and again I find that with the Kings (Stephen and now his son Joe Hill) even the introductions (which I usually skip) are worth my time. Quite unbelievable, but Joe says that in his early writing efforts he had his doubts about being able to write about midlife-crises and such without having been anywhere near the experience – we’re lucky that he overcame those doubts, because in the stories of Full Throttle, he puts himself rather convincingly into the minds of big-game hunters, ex-soldiers and fundamentalists and we, the readers, are thus blessed with a wide variety of themes and genres. Somewhere in the middle of the book I thought ‘oh great “Late Returns” (about a solution for the fear of having to die in the middle of a good book) is definitely going to be my favourite’! But!! But: ‘All I Care About Is You’ (wherein a girl‘s wishes for her sixteenth birthday in the year 2070 come true with the help of the clockwork-robot Chip – compelling, strange, sparkling and with a real heart-break ending) and ‘Mums’ (a mother and her small boy try to flee from their lives as members of a separatist household and fail – Mum turns up dead soon after and I don’t know what is more horrible: growing up in this world of lies where women are little more than slaves and building bombs is on the homeschool-curriculum or what happens after little Jack plants the seeds of Mums on his mother’s grave, muhahaaaa – you decide!) - those stories still lay before me! If that isn’t enough, there’s also a dinosaur, the son of the devil, zombies and the grass of terror…I enjoyed how Joe Hill experiments with form, writing a story in steps or twitter-messages, and was amazed how his unique style makes it so easy to dive deeply into stories that have only a limited amount of pages. Whole-heartedly recommended!!![Caro]
Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff
tinder press Euro 19,00
In her debut, Davis-Goff deals with the ever so present and, let’s face it, washed out trope of the zombie apocalypse. This is ideal for diehard fans of dystopian road stories set in Ireland, adorned with super fast zombies lurking around in packs. If you are looking for more, look further... much much further. [İnci]
Earwig by Brian Catling
coronet books Euro 29,00
At the Otherland, you either love or hate Brian Catling. I belong to the former, the ones who rushed through the Vorrh trilogy and were left sad and crushed when this strange trilogy finished. All the happier I was when I found out that a new book, Earwig, was being published this year: a novella about a certain Herr Aalbert Scellinc, former soldier with extraordinary hearing ability, who acquires a job of taking care of a strange young girl Mia, whose teeth are of ice and need replacing after they melt. After Herr Aalbert takes a night off for himself and visits the infamous bar “Au Métro”, their lives slowly start taking a different turn.
Fans of The Vorrh will be happy to recognise familiar patterns in Earwig - Catling’s obsession with peculiar inventions, a fascination with body dysmorphia and dubious doctors, a somewhat unlikeable protagonist, slight undertones of horror and an immaculate literary style - that together with a good portion of symbolism create a short but à point, unsettling and, in the end, heartbreaking story.
[İnci]
Song for the Unravelling of the World by Brian Evenson
coffee house Euro 19,00
If you enjoy New Weird that leans a little too far into the dread of body horror and you have a healthy obsession with skin - whether it is about putting it on or off, adjusting its fitting or it simply leaking off - Song of the Unravelling of the World is your book.
Wanting to just take a quick peek to get an impression of Everson’s writing, I ended up glued to the pages of this book until I was fast finished, so it is safe to say that this collection of 22 unsettling and nauseating, but also subliminally amusing stories has wholly charmed me.
Maybe because of the breadth of the spectrum of herein featured genre tropes - cosmic horror, body horror, Weird, psychological horror, mystery, you name it- or maybe simply because Evenson is a hell of an author, each story bore something deeply familiar to me. It is always unfair to compare, and yet I often found myself thinking about other horror works while reading Song for the Unravelling of the World - Event Horizon in “Lord of the Vats”; early King short stories in “Glasses” or “The Hole”; a sense of almost-dread reminiscent of watching Lost Highway for the first time or any Lynch for that matter - and I loved it! By the aforementioned names I dropped you have probably already guessed that Evenson’s writing is absolutely very visual and every story could easily be translated into very good indie shorts/movies. Sounds like you? Song for the Unravelling of the World now finally stocked in Otherland for anyone who likes their horror with a literary touch!
[İnci]
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