Notable new SF, Fantasy, and Horror books seen : Posted 5 July 2004

Anthology of 29 stories first published in 2003; the 21st volume in Dozois' long-running best-of-the-year series, generally regarded as the best, and certainly the largest, ongoing SF series; last year's volume just won the Locus Award as Best Anthology of 2003.
• Authors in this book include William Barton, John Kessel, John Varley, Michael Swanwick, Vernor Vinge (his Locus Award-winning novella "The Cookie Monster"), Geoff Ryman, Kage Baker, Paul Di Filippo, and Terry Bisson.
• Dozois's introductory "Summation: 2003" covers the year's developments in book, magazine, and Internet publishing, anthologies and collections, TV and movies, awards and deaths. And there's a lengthy list of honorable mentions at the end of the book.
• The book is also available in hardcover. Amazon reproduces the review from Publishers Weekly.
• Gary K. Wolfe reviews the book in the July 2004 issue of Locus Magazine, in his annual column comparing and contrasting the SF year's best anthologies by Dozois, Hartwell & Cramer, and Haber & Strahan.
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SF novel, volume 1 of the "Taken Trilogy", a humorous novel about alien abductions according to the Publishers Weekly review reproduced on the Amazon page, which says that Foster "puts a fresh spin on the theme in the wacky first book of a new comic SF series ..."
• The publisher's site has this description and excerpt
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Anthology of 16 original SF and fantasy stories about dogs, "in the tradition of DAW's Cat Fantastic series."
• Authors include Tanya Huff, Julie E. Czerneda, Fiona Patton, and Michelle West. A web search did not turn up a table-of-contents listing, but it did turn up Harriet Klausner's brief review on about 53 different websites, including Amazon's.
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Fantasy novel interweaving three narrative strands about artists, spanning Victorian England to the present.
• The publisher's site has this description, and an excerpt.
• The author's site, www.elizabethhand.com, has this background about the writing of the book, plus links to the recent Washington Post review and the starred review from the May 3rd Publishers Weekly.
• Among the cover blurbs is this from Peter Straub: "An exceptionally gifted writer ... has written the best book of her generation."
• Gary K. Wolfe reviewed the book in the June issue of Locus Magazine.
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Anthology of 21 fantasy stories first published in 2003. Authors include Michael Swanwick, Octavia E. Butler, Neil Gaiman (his Locus Award winning short story "Closing Time"), Lucius Shepard, Tim Pratt, Gene Wolfe, and Terry Bisson.
• Cramer's website has the complete table of contents (scroll down).
• The Eos site has this description, and an excerpt from Swanwick's story "King Dragon".
• Gary K. Wolfe's review will appear in the August issue of Locus Magazine.
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Substantial collection of 16 fantasy stories, by a writer often cited as someone people should be reading instead of J.K. Rowling.
• Despite the title this is not a collection of all of Jones' stories; there are at least four earlier collections, and this one overlaps those only a little.
• The HarperChildren's site has this description. The author's website, www.dianawynnejones.com, only points to the publisher's site.
• Farah Mendlesohn reviewed the book in the June issue of Locus, concluding that the book "is one of the least consistent of Jones's collections, drawing on her interest in SF, in humour, in myth, but that is its strength. It demonstrates the extraordinary versatility of a writer who is not like anything, whose work can be neither summarised or predicted."
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Contemporary thriller, about a man who wakes in a hospital and discovers he's undergone surgery following a car accident.
• The author's site, frankmrobinson.com, previews chapter 1.
• The Amazon page reproduces the Publishers Weekly review, which concludes "This is a gripping tale, extremely well told."
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Anthology of 9 original stories about "the future of freedom". Authors include Jack Williamson, Mike Resnick, Robert J. Sawyer, James P. Hogan, and the late Lloyd Biggle Jr.
• Baen's site has this description, with links to Tier's introduction and excerpts from several of the stories.
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The letter was written in German. Learmont recognized the hand as that of Dr. Hoffmann, head physician at the mental hospital in Frankfurt -- his friend and colleague, a man who had played host to him three decades earlier, in 1842. Since then their friendship had been maintained exclusively through correspondence, despite Hoffmann's written adjurations that Learmont was always welcome at his home, and that Hoffmann's wife, Therese, wished to be remembered to him with all good grace, and (more recently) that the three Hoffmann children were now no longer children but themselves nearly as old as the two physicians had been when first they met.

Even with the drugs, Dennis Heller still hurt like hell.

He shifted in bed, winced at the pain, then fumbled for the call button. A few minutes later a hatchet-faced nurse came in, moved him slightly so she could check the catheter in his spine just below his shoulder blades, then adjusted the numbers on the morphine pump hanging on its stand by the bed. He tried to ask her questions about what they’d done to him but all he could manage was a croak. The morphine gradually took effect and as the pain drained away he tried desperately to remember why he’d landed in the hospital again.