[[[Mars, Inc.: The Billionaire’s Club]]] by Ben Bova. Baen, $25.00, 368pp, hc, 9781451639346. Science fiction. On-sale date: 3 December 2013.

A new novel from Ben Bova, creator of the New York Times best-selling Grand Tour science fiction series. Bova is a six time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society.  Here, Bova returns to his most popular and best-selling subject: the quest for Mars! How do you get to the Red Planet? Not via a benighted government program trapped in red tape and bound by budget constrictions, that’s for sure. No, what it will take is a helping of adventure, science, corporate powerplays, a generous dollop of seduction—both in and out of the boardroom—and money, money, money!

Art Thrasher knows this. He is a man with a driving vision: send humans to Mars. The government has utterly failed, but Thrasher has got the plan to accomplish such a feat: form a “club” of billionaires to chip in one billion a year until the dream is accomplished. But these are men and women who are tough cookies, addicted to a profitable bottom-line, and disdainful of pie-in-the-sky dreamers who want to use their cash to make somebody else’s dreams come true.

But Thrasher is different from the other dreamers in an important regard: he’s a billionaire himself, and the president of a successful company. But it’s going to take all his wiles as a captain of industry and master manipulator of business and capital to overcome setbacks and sabotage—and get a rocket full of scientist, engineers, visionaries, and dreamers on their way to the Red Planet.

The man for the job has arrived. Art Thrasher is prepared to do whatever it takes to humans on Mars—or die trying!

 

[[[Carniepunk]]]. Gallery, $16.00, 440pp, tp, 9781476714158. Urban fantasy anthology.

Packed with New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, Carniepunk is a star-studded urban fantasy anthology featuring stories that explore the creepy, mysterious, and magical world of traveling carnivals.

Come one, come all! The Carniepunk Midway promises you every thrill and chill a traveling carnival can provide. But fear not! Urban fantasy’s biggest stars are here to guide you through this strange and dangerous world….

The traveling carnival is a leftover of a bygone era, a curiosity lurking on the outskirts of town. It is a place of contradictions — the bright lights mask the peeling paint. It is a place of illusion — is that woman’s beard real? How can she live locked in that watery box?

And while many are tricked by sleight of hand, there are hints of something truly magical going on. One must remain alert and learn quickly the unwritten rules of this dark show. To beat the carnival, one had better have either a whole lot of luck or a whole lot of guns — or maybe some magic of one’s own.

Rachel Caine’s vampires aren’t child’s play, as a naive teen discovers when her heart leads her far, far astray in “The Cold Girl.” With “Parlor Tricks,” Jennifer Estep pits Gin Blanco, the Elemental Assassin, against the Wheel of Death and some dangerously creepy clowns. Seanan McGuire narrates a poignant, ethereal tale of a mysterious carnival that returns to a dangerous town after twenty years in “Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea.” Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid and his wisecracking Irish wolfhound discover in “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street” that the impossibly wholesome sounding Kansas Wheat Festival is actually not a healthy place to hang out. With an eerie, unpredictable twist, Rob Thurman reveals the fate of a psychopath stalking two young carnies in “Painted Love.”

Featuring stories grotesque and comical, outrageous and action-packed, Carniepunk is the first anthology to channel the energy and attitude of urban fantasy into the bizarre world of creaking machinery, twisted myths, and vivid new magic.

 

[[[The Troop]]] by Nick Cutter. Gallery, $26.00, 368pp, hc, 9781476717715. Horror. On-sale date: 7 January 2014.

Nick Cutter’s The Troop begins like a campfire story: Five boys and their scoutmaster head into the woods… but it ends in madness, murder, and worse.

Once a year, scoutmaster Tim Riggs leads a troop of boys into the Canadian wilderness for a three-day camping trip. But this  year everything changes when an unexpected intruder stumbles upon their campsite — shockingly thin, disturbingly pale, and voraciously hungry — exposing Tim and the boys to a bioengineered horror that’s straight out of their worst nightmares. Stranded on an island with no communication to the outside world, the troop must face a harrowing struggle for survival that will pit them against the elements, the infected… and one another.

The Troop will take you straight into the heart of darkness and close to the edge of sanity.

Nick Cutter is a pseudonym for an acclaimed author of novels and short stories who lives in Toronto, Canada.

 

[[[Scare Scape]]] by Sam Fisher, illustrated by Sam Bosma. Scholastic, $16.99, 352pp, hc, 9780545521604. Middle grades action/adventure. On-sale date: September 2013.

Scare Scape, Sam Fisher’s middle-grade debut is a spooky and funny story about new beginnings, facing fears, and sibling rivalry.

Morton is a huge fan of the comic book Scare Scape, so he isn’t easily frightened: he’s not afraid of the dark, or grossed-out by bugs and slugs. But when Morton and his siblings, James and Melissa, find an old stone statue buried in the yard of their new house, they discover that sometimes — in real life — there is good reason to be afraid…

Toxic vapor worms, shark hounds, king-crab spiders, and two-headed mutant rodents are just a few of the beasts featured in Scare Scape. They are vicious. They are terrifying. They are — luckily — totally made up. Right?

 

[[[Codex Born]]] by Jim C. Hines. (Magic Ex Libris: Book Two), DAW, $24.95, 320pp, hc, 9780756408169. Fantasy.

Hugo Award-winning author Jim C. Hines began the story of Isaac last summer in Libriomancer, the first book in the Magic Ex Libris series. Readers and critics alike loved Hines’ new take on the urban fantasy genre calling it “incredibly readable… action packed” (Wired.com) and an “instant fan favorite” (Publishers Weekly). Now Isaac is back in the second installment, Codex Born.

Libriomancer Isaac Greenwood, psychiatrist Nidhi Shah, and their dryad bodyguard Lena are called in to investigate the slaughter of two teenage werewolves. But Lena — created from the pages of the pulp fantasy novel to be the ultimate fantasy woman — has unique powers that Isaac’s enemies hope to use for themselves.

 

[[[The Secret of Abdu El Yezdi: A Burton & Swinburne Adventure]]] by Mark Hodder. Pyr, $18.00, 395pp, tp, 9781616147778. Steampunk.

The Beast is coming. History will be remade.

Since the assassination of Queen Victoria in 1840, a cabal of prominent men — including King George V, HRH Prince Albert, Benjamin Disraeli, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel — has received guidance from the Afterlife. The spirit of a dead mystic, Abdu El Yezdi, has helped them to steer the empire into a period of unprecedented peace and creativity.

But on the eve of a groundbreaking alliance with the newly formed Greater German Confederation, scientists, surgeons, and engineers are being abducted — including Brunel! The government, in search of answers, turns to the Afterlife, only to find that Abdu El Yezdi is now refusing to speak with the living.

Enter the newly-knighted Sir Richard Francis Burton, fresh from his discovery of the source of the Nile. Appointed the king’s agent, he must trace the missing luminaries and solve the mystery of Abdu El Yezdi’s silence.

But the Beast has been summoned. How can the famous explorer fulfill his mission when his friends and loved ones are being picked off, one by one, by what appears to be a supernatural entity — by, perhaps, Abdu El Yezdi himself?

 

[[[The Darwin Elevator]]] by Jason M. Hough. (Book One of The Dire Earth Cycle), Del Rey, $9.99, 480pp, pb, 9780345537126. Science fiction.

The Darwin Elevator is the exciting first installment in The Dire Earth Cycle by Jason M. Hough. This incredible debut blends the best of John Scalzi with Joss Whedon’s Firefly and is sure to take the Sci-Fi community by storm. Once you finish you won’t have to wait long to stay in the story as The Exodus Towers and The Plague Force will be released back to back in August and September.

In the mid-23rd century the Earth has fallen victim to a deadly alien plague that has transformed most of the population into mindless, savage creatures. Darwin, Australia stands alone as the last city on the planet capable of protecting humans from turning due to a space elevator — created by the architects of this apocalypse, the Builders — that emits a plague-suppressing aura. But when the Elevator starts to malfunction it falls on a ragtag group of immunes to figure out why.

Skyler Luiken is one of the less than .001% of the population that was born with immunity to the alien plague. Along with his crew of fellow immunes they scavenge the Earth to find necessary — and unnecessary — products for the remaining humans in Darwin. Due to their unique ability to leave the safety of the Elevator’s aura it falls on them to solve the mystery of the failing alien technology and save the ragged remnants of humanity.

 

[[[The L. Ron Hubbard Series: Writer: The Shaping of Popular Fiction]]] by L. Ron Hubbard. Bridge, $50.00, 294pp, hc, 9781403198884. Nonfiction.

Come to know the literary legend that is L. Ron Hubbard—a leading light of American Pulp Fiction, a screenwriter in the Golden Age of Hollywood and a creative visionary who authored some of the world’s most enduring masterpieces. Here is both the story and back-story of a man who remains among the most widely read writers of all time.

 

[[[Kill City Blues]]] by Richard Kadrey. (a Sandman Slim novel), Harper Voyager, $24.99, 384pp, hc, 9780062094599. Dark fantasy.

San Francisco-based Richard Kadrey has burst onto the horror/fantasy scene as the profane poet of the punk rock apocalypse — part Stephen King, part Jim Butcher, part Bad Religion, all kick-ass original — and Kill City Blues more than proves his readiness to go from cult hero to genre superstar.

In Kadrey’s 2012 hit Devil Said Bang, anti-hero James Stark (a.k.a. Sandman Slim) had landed the mother of all job promotions: Bumped up from being the Devil’s #1 hitman to filling the fiery seat of Lucifer himself.

Unfortunately running the show in Hell proved to be an infernal headache, so now the sarcastic half-angle half-demon is back in L.A., crashing at the famously debauched Chateau Marmont hotel, scarfing too many sinfully unhealthy donuts, and doing his best to lay low.

But as usual, trouble finds him in no time. The Qomrama Om Ya, or “8 Ball” — a weapon of unimaginable power — has gone missing. More than a few powerful mortals and immortals want to get their hands on it, and the word on the street is that Stark either has it or knows where it is — even if neither is precisely true.

After fighting his way out of some hairy situations, Stark realizes that if the beings who want the 8 Ball actually get it, the world will be in very deep trouble — not to mention, he’ll never have the peace and quiet he craves to watch his massive DVD collection for days at a time and stuff his face with take-out in his Chateau penthouse.

So he hits the boulevards and avenues of the City of Angels, following the trail to Kill City — an abandoned multi-level Santa Monica shopping mall inhabited by a soul-chilling panoply of undead Lurkers and Sub Rosa families who guard their territory fiercely. Watching his back are Candy Jade, a lethal demon who is also Stark’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, Brigitte Bardo, an ex-porn star and zombie-huntress extraordinaire, and a couple of other battle-tested companions whose survival abilities will be pushed to the limit in the depths of Kill City, where lies the only chance of preventing something worse than an apocalypse.

This has already been a big year for Richard Kadrey. He has been tapped as a guest of honor at San Diego Comic-Con, he will be prominently featured at ALA’s 2013 conference, and he’s branching into young adult fiction with his upcoming novel Dead Set (on sale November 2013), which he describes as “a punk Wizard of Oz with dead people instead of munchkins.”

But for his many current fans and the many more about to realize Kadrey is the realest of the real deals, Kill City Blues is the fiction event of the summer.

 

[[[The Queen’s Adept]]] by Rodolfo Martinez. Sportula, $15.00, 376pp, tp, 9788493988579. Science fiction.

The People’s Covenant and God’s Hammer have raged a Cold War that has lasted for over twenty years. A war without armies, where battles are fought in the dark and information is the most dangerous weapon.

In this world — which sometimes seems the Middle Ages, sometimes the Renaissance and sometimes the Nineteenth Century — lives Yaxtor Brandan, empirical adept at the service of the Queen of Albone. A relentless, amoral and unscrupulous character, Yaxtor fights to recover his own past as he tries to prevent a new player in the espionage game to end the world, as he knows it.

 

[[[Fiend]]] by Peter Stenson. Crown, $22.00, 296pp, hc, 9780770436315. Horror.

There’s more than one kind of monster.

When Chase Daniels first sees the little girl in umbrella-print socks tearing open the rottweiler, he’s not too concerned. As a longtime meth addict, he’s no stranger to horrifying, drug-fueled hallucinations.

But as he and his fellow junkies soon discover, the little girl is no illusion. The end of the world really has arrived.

The funny thing is, Chase’s life was over long before the apocalypse got here, his existence already reduced to a stinking basement apartment and a filthy mattress and an endless grind of buying and selling and using. He’s lied and cheated and stolen and broken his parents’ hearts a thousand times. And he threw away his only shot at sobriety a long time ago, when he chose the embrace of the drug over the woman he still loves.

And if your life’s already shattered beyond any normal hopes of redemption… well, maybe the end of the world is an opportunity. Maybe it’s a last chance for Chase to hit restart and become the man he once dreamed of being. Soon he’s fighting to reconnect with his lost love and dreaming of becoming her hero among civilization’s ruins.

But is salvation just another pipe dream?

Propelled by a blistering first-person voice and featuring a powerfully compelling antihero, Fiend is at once a riveting portrait of addiction, a pitch-black love story, and a meditation on hope, redemption, and delusion — not to mention one hell of a zombie novel.

 

[[[The War That Came Early: Coup d’Etat]]] by Harry Turtledove. Del Rey, $16.00, 435pp, tp, 9780345524669. Alternate history.

In 1941, a treaty between England and Germany unravels — and so does a different World War II. As the Germans, with England and France on their side, slam deep into Russia, Stalin’s terrible machine fights for its life. But the agreements of world leaders do not touch the hearts of soldiers. The war between Germany and Russia is rocked by men with the courage to aim their guns in a new direction.

England is the first to be shaken. Following the suspicious death of Winston Churchill, with his staunch anti-Nazi views, a small cabal begins to imagine the unthinkable in a nation long famous for respecting the rule of law. With civil liberties hanging by a thread, a conspiracy forms against the powers that be. What will this daring plan mean for the European war as a whole?

Meanwhile, in America, a woman who has met Hitler face-to-face urges her countrymen to wake up to his evil. For the time being, the United States is fighting only Japan — and the war is not going as well as Washington would like. Can Roosevelt keep his grip on the country’s imagination?

Coup d’Etat captures how war makes for the strangest of bedfellows. A freethinking Frenchman fights side by side with racist Nazis. A Czech finds himself on the dusty front lines of the Spanish Civil War, gunning for Germany’s Nationalist allies. A German bomber pilot courts a half-Polish, half-Jewish beauty in Bialystock. And the Jews in Germany, though trapped under Hitler’s fist, are as yet protected by his fear of looking bad before the world — and by an outspoken Catholic bishop.

With his spectacular command of character, coincidence, and military and political strategies, Harry Turtledove continues a passionate, unmatched saga of a World War II composed of different enemies, different allies — and hurtling toward a horrific moment. For a diabolical new weapon is about to be unleashed, not by the United States, but by Japan, in a tactic that will shock the world.

 

[[[The War That Came Early: Two Fronts]]] by Harry Turtledove. Del Rey, $28.00, 408pp, hc, 9780345524683. Alternate history.

In 1942, two nations switch sides — and World War II takes a horrifying new course.

In the real world, England and France allowed Adolf Hitler to gobble up the Sudetenland in 1938. Once Hitler finished dismembering Czechoslovakia, he was ready to go to war over Poland a year later. But Hitler had always been eager to seize Czechoslovakia, no matter the consequences. So what if England and France had stood up to the Nazis from the start, and not eleven months later? That is the question behind the War That Came Early series.

Four years later, the civil war in Spain drags on, even after General Franco’s death. The United States, still neutral in Europe, fights the Japanese in the Pacific. Russia and Germany go toe-to-toe in Eastern Europe — yet while Hitler stares east, not everything behind him is going as well as he would like. But nothing feeds ingenuity like the fear of losing. The Germans wheel out new tanks and planes, Japan deploys weapons of a very different sort against China, and the United States, England, and France do what they can do strengthen themselves against imminent danger.

Seen through the eyes of ordinary citizens caught in the maelstrom, this is a you-are-there chronicle of battle on land and sea and in the air. Here are terrifying bombing raids that shatter homes, businesses, and the rule of law. Here are commanders issuing orders that, once given, cannot be taken back. And here are the seeds of rebellion sown in blood-soaked soil.

In a war in which sides are switched and allies trust one another only slightly more than they trust their mortal enemies, Nazi Germany has yet to send its Jews to death camps, and dangerous new nationalist powers arise in Eastern Europe. From thrilling submarine battles to the horror of men fighting men and machines all through Europe, Two Fronts captures every aspect of a brilliantly reimagined conflict: the strategic, the political, and the personal force of leaders bending nations to their wills.

 

[[[Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction]]] edited by Mariano Villarreal. Sportula, $12.00, 258pp, tp, 9788494127489. Science fiction anthology.

Six top Spanish-language authors prove that science fiction remains sharp and visionary, with stories about the deepest anxieties, challenges, and problems of our societies. Their speculations and metaphors analyze and dissect a reality in continuous change.

“The Texture of Words” by Felicidad Martinez: women seek to lead despite being blind and dependent, while men fight constant wars.

“Deirdre” by Lola Robles: in the future, robotics can create made-to-order lovers.

“Greetings from a Zombie Nation” by Eric J. Mota: a stagnant society turns its citizens into the living dead.

“Light a Single Candle” by Victor Conde: social networks want too much and never let go.

“Bodies” by Juanfran Jimenez: in a globalized and pseudodemocratic Europe, the rich practice sex tourism by means of mind exchange.

“Memory” by Teresa P. Mira de Echeverria: personal relationships and sex roles evolve in radical ways on a terraformed Mars in a relatively near future.