Daniel Abraham, The Dragon's Path (Orbit Apr 2011)

In this first volume of The Dagger and the Coin series, a notorious military leader tries to keep a low profile, a young woman attempts to smuggle a bank's assets out of a doomed city, and a hapless noble is given more responsibility than he wants, in a world where 13 sentient races — created to serve long-extinct dragons — live uneasily together. Meanwhile, war seems inevitable, and the cult of a forgotten goddess stirs in the wild territories to the East. This marks a welcome return to epic fantasy for Abraham, who previously wrote the Long Price Quartet.

Joan Aiken, The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories (Small Beer Press Apr 2011)

This posthumous collection by the famed fantasy author includes 19 stories, seven previously unpublished, mostly from the 1950s and '60s. Includes an introduction by the author about short stories from 1995, and a new introduction by her daughter Lizza Aiken. "Aiken's shorts have a marvelous ambiguity lurking in their moral hearts... almost every reader will be able to find a story here that tickles his or her fancy." [Adrienne Martini]

Peter S. Beagle, Sleight of Hand (Tachyon Publications Apr 2011)

The prolific fantasist's latest collection includes 13 of his most recent stories, along with author notes on each piece. Includes two originals, including "The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon", set in the world of The Last Unicorn. "Perhaps the finest fantasy writer at short lengths working today." [Gary K. Wolfe]

Carol Emshwiller, The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Volume One (NonStop Press Apr 2011)

This retrospective, first of two planned volumes, collects a staggering 88 stories published from 1954-2002, including one original, plus a foreword by Emshwiller discussing her development as a writer. "Emshwiller is a writer of fierce intellectual honesty and clarity of vision, and when she combines this with the deep empathy and marvelous wit that she seems to have grown more comfortable with in recent years, no one can match her." [Gary K. Wolfe]

Brent Hayward, The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (ChiZine Jun 2011)

The dark fantasy author's second novel combines elegant writing with moral ambiguity and an impressive array of grotesque characters. The city of Nowy Solum is crumbling, forsaken by its gods and oppressed by eternal cloud cover, when the decadent chatelaine takes in a child with melancholy for blood, setting off a series of events that could hasten the city's demise.

China Miéville, Embassytown (Ballantine Del Rey May 2011)

Miéville moves into science fiction with this far-future tale set on a remote planet where a small number of humans live among the alien Ariekei, who have linguistic peculiarities even stranger than their physiologies. "Miéville has managed the extraordinary feat of transforming matters of semiotics, the stuff of earthly academe, into pulse-pounding SF." [Faren Miller]

Frederik Pohl, All the Lives He Led (Tor Apr 2011)

The 91-year-old SF Grand Master is still going strong. His latest novel takes place in 2079, 17 years after the explosion of the massive "supervolcano" in Yellowstone Park rendered much of North America uninhabitable. Displaced American Brad Sheridan gets a job working at a theme park recreating the Italian city of Pompeii, devastated 2,000 years earlier by the volcano Vesuvius — but when he stumbles on a terrorist plot, he's reminded that there are worse things than natural disasters.

Robert J. Sawyer, WWW: Wonder (Ace Apr 2011)

In this concluding volume in the WWW trilogy, a suspicious military expert on artificial intelligence recruits hackers to destroy Webmind, the vast consciousness that arose spontaneously from the World Wide Web — and only the 16-year-old math genius who discovered and bonded with Webmind can save her friend... and posssibly the world.

Jonathan Strahan, ed., Eclipse Four (Night Shade Books May 2011)

The fourth volume in the celebrated original anthology series includes new stories by Peter M. Ball, Damien Broderick, Emma Bull, Andy Duncan, Jeffrey Ford, Eileen Gunn, Nalo Hopkinson, Kij Johnson, Gwyneth Jones, James Patrick Kelly, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Rachel Swirsky, and Jo Walton. "Exceptional.... The book is split roughly equally between fantasy (generally in some sense almost whimsical, even when quite serious) and some quite sophisticated SF... first rate overall." [Rich Horton]

Michael Swanwick, Dancing With Bears (Night Shade Books May 2011)

Fans of Swanwick's short stories about the con-artist team of Darger and Surplus (a human and a surgically-altered sentient dog, respectively) have long hoped for a novel about the duo, and here it is at last: a bizarre trip through a "postutopian" future Russia featuring vicious cyberwolves, genetically-enhanced bears, Neanderthals, women engineered to be irresistible, and even stranger things. "It may begin and end in familiar Darger/Surplus territory, but in between is a far more complex and fully formed novel than those rather waggish (sorry) tales might have led us to expect." [Gary K. Wolfe]

Genevieve Valentine, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti (Prime Books May 2011)

In this poetic and peculiar debut novel the ringmaster of a circus composed of partially-mechanical performers — "living engines" — tries to keep her troupe together in a devastated future torn by war. "Valentine ignores many tropes of circus horror and classic dark carnival tales.... Even the most freakish players retain some humanity, whether or not we see it straight away." [Faren Miller]

Gordon Van Gelder, ed., Welcome to the Greenhouse (OR Books Feb 2011)

This original anthology of 16 stories is dedicated to SF about climate change, with fiction by Brian W. Aldiss, Paul Di Filippo, Alan Dean Foster, Matthew Hughes, Bruce Sterling, Ray Vukcevich, and others, plus a foreword by environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert.

Jack Williamson, At the Human Limit: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Eight (Haffner Press May 2011)

The final volume in this ambitious and authoritative collection of works by the late SF Grand Master includes 34 stories from 1959-2008, plus an appendix with 25 works of non-fiction, a foreword by Connie Willis, and an afterword by Williamson written in 2005.