New and forthcoming UK books

Sarah Alderson – Fated. Simon & Schuster £6.99

Chris Beckett – Dark Edens. Corvus £18.99

Kit Berry – Magus of Stonewylde. Gollancz £7.99

Kit Berry – Shadows at Stonewylde. Gollancz £9.99

Simon Bestwick – The Faceless. Solaris £7.99

Cinda Williams Chima – The Warrior Heir. Indigo £6.99

Cinda Williams Chima – The Wizard Heir. Indigo £6.99

Cinda Williams Chima – The Dragon Heir. Indigo £6.99

Philip Emery – The Shadow Cycles. Immanion £12.99

Jasper Fforde – One of Our Thursdays is Missing. Hodder & Stoughton £7.99

Matt Forbeck – Carpathia. Angry Robot £7.99 (May)

John Fultz – Seven Princes. Orbit £7.99

David Gaider – Dragon Age: Asunder. Titan £6.99

MLN Hanover – Unclean Spirits. Orbit £7.99

Chris Holm – Dead Harvest. Angry Robot £7.99 (March)

Mia James – Darkness Falls. Indigo £9.99

Alison Littlewood – A Cold Season. Jo Fletcher Books £7.99

Helen Lowe – The Heir of Night. Orbit £7.99

Anne Lyle – The Alchemist of Souls. Angry Robot £8.99 (April)

James Maxey – Greatshadow. Solaris £7.99

David Moody – Them or Us. Gollancz £12.99

Philip Palmer – Artemis. Orbit £8.99

Otto Penzler – Zombies. Corvus £19.99

Rod Rees – Demi-Monde: Spring. Jo Fletcher Books £18.99

Brandon Sanderson – The Alloy of Law. Gollancz £12.99

Gaie Sebold – Babylon Steel. Solaris £7.99

Michael Sullivan – Rise of Empire. Orbit £8.99

Cate Tiernan – Darkness Falls. Hodder & Stoughton £14.99

Chuck Wendig – Blackbirds. Angry Robot £7.99

VM Zito – The Return Man. Hodder & Stoughton £11.99 (March)

The BFS Journal

The British Fantasy Society’s Journal, dated winter 2011/12, is now available. The BFS Journal, incorporating the previous individual publications Dark Horizons and Prism, is edited by Peter Coleborn (fiction), Lou Morgan (non-fiction) and Ian Hunter (poetry). For more information on Peter Coleborn and Dark Horizons, visit his blog.

Fiction in this issue, several using seasonal themes, comes from Allen Ashley, Julian Baxter-Cockbill, James Brogden, Ray Cluley, Alister Davison, Stuart Hughes, Ian Hunter, Andy Oldfield, Rod Rees and Deborah Walker. Non-fiction includes items by or on James Barclay, Mike Barrett, Ramsey Campbell, Peter Crowther, Jo Fletcher, Mark Morris and others.

The cover art is by Vincent Chong, winner of the BFS Best Artist Award, presented at FantasyCon in September 2011.

The BFS Journal is only available as part of membership to the British FantasySociety.

The Faceless by Simon Bestwick

The Faceless is the new supernatural novel by Simon Bestwick, published by Solaris at £7.99.

“In the Lancashire town of Kempforth, people are vanishing. Mist hangs heavy in the streets, and in those mists move the masked figures the local kids call the Spindly Men.

When two year old Roseanne Trevor disappears, Detective Chief Inspector Renwick vows to stop at nothing until she finds her … [and] in the decaying corridors and lightless rooms of a long-abandoned hospital, something terrible is waiting.”

The 2011 Xmas issue of Estronomicon now available

Pop over to the Screaming Dreams website and follow the links to download for free the latest issue of Estronomicon, edited by Steve Upham. Included are stories by James Bennett, Peter Coleborn, Neil Davies, Jan Edwards, Matt Finucane, John Forth, Stewart Horn, Ian Hunter, Mark Howard Jones, Bob Lock, Marion Pitman, Neil Williamson and Stuart Young.

You'll also find links to other Screaming Dreams titles, such as Phantoms of Venice edited by David Sutton and Fearful Festivities by Gary Fry.

Rumours of the Marvellous

Rumours of the Marvellous by Peter Atkins: fourteen of the writer's best stories. Limited to 250 signed and numbered copies, features an introduction by Glen Hirshberg, a cover painting by Les Edwards. Co-published by The Alchemy Press and Airgedlámh Productions.

Price and ordering details are available here.

Also recommended: Peter Atkins' blog.

Sailors of the Skies

The Alchemy Press has published its first eBook in Kindle format: "Sailors of the Skies" by Mike Chinn (originally published in Dark Horizons in 2009). “Mix generous dollops of The Scorpion, The Shadow and Dominic Fortune, a taste for 1930s detective fiction, and the simple desire to tell a creepy tale…” Available via Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

The Voidal returns!

Back in the late 1970s Adrian Cole created a fantasy character every bit as enigmatic as Moorcock’s Elric: The Voidal. I haven’t read one of these stories in a long while, perhaps too long. So the recent publication of Cole’s The Long Reach of Night (volume 2) and The Sword of Shadows (volume 3) (both just published by Wildside Press – no prices on the cover but affordable via Amazon UK) offers such an opportunity. Volume 1 of the Voidal stories, Oblivion Hand was published quite a few years ago.

The Long reach of Night includes nine stories, two originally published in 1979 and 1980. The rest are available here for the first time although Cole says that most were placed with magazines that sadly folded before the stories saw print. The dedication in this book is to Mike Chinn, Sean Williams & Phil Harbottle, Darrell Schweitzer and someone called Peter Colebourne (as misspellings go, not too bad: just an extra E and an unnecessary U).

Volume 3, The Sword of Shadows, includes eight stories of which three were previously published in the small presses. In fact, “At the Council of Gossipers” first appeared in Dark Horizons in 1980, and “Dark Destroyer” was originally published in the Alchemy Press/Saladoth anthology Swords Against the Millennium in 2000.

Rumours of the Marvellous

The Alchemy Press in association with Airgedlámh Productions is publishing a collection of short stories by Peter Atkins this year. Visit the Alchemy Press blog for a look at the cover.

Northampton SF Group

The Northampton Science Fiction Group's blog can be found here:

http://northamptonsfwritersgroup.blogspot.com/

The Walking Dead: yet more zombies

Cops A and B, sitting in their squad car, are discussing electric light switches -- which seems to be as relevant to the programme as a discussion on burgerjoints in Paris. Then A owns up to his marriage being in difficulty. There, that's the characters set up.

Immediately after, they rush off, sirens blaring, to apprehend some criminals and in the ensuing chaos cop A is shot and wounded and rushed off to hospital.

When he regains consciousness the flowers beside him are dead. He falls from his bed, ripping out IV feeds, and staggers into the deserted corridor -- where he sees a half-eaten corpse (human, of course), lots of debris and blood, and a locked room housing The Dead. Outside, shrouded corpses fill the car park. Through all this and along streets empty of life he heads for his home, wife and child.

A nod and a wink to the start of Day of the Triffids?

It turns out that he's been in hospital for about a month. Even if his nurses had left him just days ago, how come he's not covered in his own urine and faeces? The site of the IV drips would likely become infected. His muscles would be wasted (yes, I know he does stagger around a bit, but that's just for the first day or so).

Soon he is feeling better (thanks to another living person and his son), and armed (from the cop station's armoury). He heads off searching for his family -- who are most certainly still alive. To cut the story short, he rides a horse into a city and suddenly is surrounded by an army of the dead. Fortunately (?) he finds refuge in a tank -- but the poor old nag gets eaten.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the woods, a group of survivors have made camp. And guess what: there are his wife and son. And cop B who has the hots for her.

This is the start of the TV series. Pur-lease! Zombies are mindless creatures; they get bitten, come back and bite the next living thing. Ad infinitum. Some thrilling modus operandi?

Finally point for now: if a single scratch from a zombie can infect the living (suggesting a microbial explanation to the disease) how come one can shoot a zombie in the head and get splattered with their (infected) blood -- with all those microscopic droplets of blood flying through the air -- and be perfectly fine?