* Anderson, Barth : The Patron Saint of Plagues
(Bantam Spectra 0-553-38358-2, $13, 372pp, trade paperback, April 2006)

Near-future SF novel, the author's first novel, about a man-made plague that strikes Mexico City.
• Bantam's site has this description and an excerpt.
• The author has a website and a journal. He's known for short fiction -- "Lark Till Dawn, Princess" won a 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award -- and for co-editing the Rabid Transit chapbook anthologies.
• Amazon has the Booklist review by David Pitt: "The topic is timely (viruses and pandemics are hot), and the just-around-the-corner world is very well realized, full of smart extrapolations from today's technologies and social conventions."

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* Barnes, John : The Armies of Memory
(Tor 0-765-30330-2, $25.95, 429pp, hardcover, April 2006, jacket art John Harris)

SF novel, final volume in the 'Thousand Cultures' series that began with A Million Open Doors (1992) and continued with Earth Made of Glass (1998) and The Merchants of Souls (2001), set in an interstellar far future featuring 'psypyx' immortality and instantaneous matter transmission. Several sections of this book ran in Analog.
• Barnes has no official or fan website, but Wikipedia has this entry with a statement from the acknowledgments of this book concerning his two divorces.
• Amazon has the starred Publishers Weekly review, from its January 23rd issue, which says that it wraps up the "far-future cloak-and-psychological-dagger series" and calls it a "final chorale of a long and brilliant SF symphony".
• Locus Magazine ran reviews by Nick Gevers in March and Russell Letson in April.

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* Birt, Danny : Ending an Ending
(iUniverse 0-595-37573-1, $22.95, 8+429pp, trade paperback, February 2006)

Fantasy novel, first book in the "Laurian Pentology", about a man with no memories trying to understand the gods' rules.
• Amazon has the back cover description and a brief excerpt, which also appear on the publisher's page and the author's site; the latter also has samples of Birt's music CD "Narcoleptic Pianist".
• Birt has an author's note in which he emphasizes how this book is not a traditional formulaic fantasy.

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* Forbes, David : The Amber Wizard
(Eos 0-06-082011-x, $7.99, 544+560pp, mass market paperback, April 2006)

Fantasy novel, first book in the "Osserian Saga" and the author's first novel, about a crown prince who begins training to become the first new wizard in thousands of years.
• The publisher's site has a description and an .
• The author's site has a list of forthcoming titles in the series, with links to excerpts, a map, and a glossary. Forbes also has a new blog.

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* Ford, Jeffrey : The Empire of Ice Cream
(Golden Gryphon Press 1-930846-39-8, $24.95, 11+319pp, hardcover, April 2006, jacket painting John Picacio, jacket design Lynne Condellone)

Collection of 14 stories, with an introduction by Jonathan Carroll. Titles include the Nebula Award-winning title story, Fountain Award-winning "The Annals of Eelin-Ok", three stories on Locus' 2005 Recommended Reading List, "A Man of Light", "Boatman's Holiday", and "Giant Land", and an original novella, "Botch Town".
• The publisher's site has this description with links to reviews and the complete table of contents.
• Amazon has reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist; the latter concludes "Ford is nothing if not versatile, as this collection confirms to great effect."
• Locus Magazine ran reviews by Nick Gevers in the March issue and Gary K. Wolfe in the April issue. Gevers says "Jeffrey Ford may well be the finest short fiction writer at work in SF and fantasy today" and says about the book's new story "Botch Town" that it's "a fresh indicator of Ford's uncanny literary versatility, and certainly one of the best novellas of the year."

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* Green, Simon R. : Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth
(Ace 0-441-01387-2, $6.99, 247pp, mass market paperback, March 2006, cover art Jonathan Barkat)

Fantasy novel in the author's "Nightside" series about detective John Taylor in an otherworldly realm in the middle of London, that began with Something from the Nightside (2003). This book concerns Taylor's not-quite-human mother.
• Green's Wikipedia entry describes the premise of the series.
• Amazon has reader reviews.

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* Lee, Sharon, & Steve Miller : Crystal Dragon
(Meisha Merlin 1592220878, $25.95, 259pp, hardcover, February 2006, cover art Donato Giancola)

SF novel set in the authors' Liaden universe, second in the "The Great Migration Duology", concerning the founding of Clan Korval.
• Embiid.net, which released it electronically last October, has a sample. Meisha Merlin's site has this description, an excerpt, and quotes from reviews of the first book.
• The authors' site has this FAQ about the Liaden series.
• Amazon has several posts from the authors about this book and their appearance at Boskone.

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* McKiernan, Dennis L. : Once Upon an Autumn Eve
(Penguin/Roc 0-451-46069-3, $23.95, 332pp, hardcover, April 2006, jacket art Duane O. Myers)

Fantasy novel, third in the author's seasonal "Faery" sequence following Once Upon a Winter's Night and Once Upon a Summer Day (2005). This one is about a princess who rescues a knight.
• The parent publisher's site has this brief description.
• The author's site has the book's foreword, and a bibliography that indicates two more volumes forthcoming: Once Upon a Spring Morn and Once Upon a Dreadful Time.
• Amazon has the Publishers Weekly review, which says it's "Based loosely on the fairy tale of the Glass Mountain and the Scottish ballad of Tam Lin".

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+ Moon, Elizabeth : Engaging the Enemy
(Ballantine Del Rey 0-345-44756-5, $25.95, 401pp, hardcover, April 2006, jacket illustration Dave Seeley) First US edition (UK: Time Warner UK/Orbit, March 2006)

Military SF novel, third in the "Vatta's War" series following Trading in Danger (2003) and Marque and Reprisal (2004). In this one Kylara Vatta deals with interstellar pirates while trying to rebuild family ties.
• The publisher's site has this description and an excerpt. It's also available as an e-book.
• Moon's website has these descriptions of the books in the series so far.
• Amazon has the Publishers Weekly and Booklist reviews.

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* Moore, Christopher : A Dirty Job
(HarperCollins/Morrow 0-06-059027-0, $24.95, 387pp, hardcover, April 2006)

Humorous fantasy novel (by the author of The Stupidest Angel and Lamb : The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal), about a San Francisco shopkeeper who learns from a man named Minty Fresh that they are both Death Merchants, whose job it is to collect 'soul vessels'.
• Moore's website has this page for the book, with a description and chapter excerpt. The same are available from the publisher.
• Amazon has the Publishers Weekly review, calling it a "wonderful, whacked-out yarn", and Paul Di Filippo's review from Washington Post, which calls Moore's book "an outstanding addition to his canon".

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+ Novik, Naomi : His Majesty's Dragon
(Ballantine Del Rey 0-345-48128-3, $7.5, 356pp, mass market paperback, April 2006, cover illustration Dominic Harman) First US edition (UK: HarperCollins/Voyager, January 2006)

Fantasy novel about dragons used as weapons during the Napoleonic Wars. It's first of a trilogy, the author's first novel, and was published as Temeraire earlier this year in the UK; Del Rey is bringing out the next two volumes, The Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, in the next two months.
• This book got an A review from Entertainment Weekly (March 31st): "This book is for anyone who's read one of Patrick O'Brian's 19th-century-set naval adventures and mused: You know what would make this better? Dragons." Time Magazine featured it in its March 13 issue: "enthralling reading--it's like Jane Austen playing Dungeons & Dragons with Eragon's Christopher Paolini".
• Del Rey's site has this description and an excerpt. The UK publisher, HarperCollins, is hosting a web-game.
• The author's website, Temeraire, has the same excerpt, plus descriptions, quotes from reviews, galleries of photos from the author's research trips, and extras. The author has this livejournal.
• The book has attracted no less than three reviews from Locus Magazine regulars: Faren Miller in January, Gary K. Wolfe in February, and Carolyn Cushman in April; Wolfe said "the action sequences are terrific, the characters enormously appealing, the style accomplished and ironic, and the promise of future volumes quite inviting".

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+ Robson, Justina : Living Next Door to the God of Love
(Bantam Spectra 0-553-58742-0, $13, 453pp, trade paperback, April 2006, cover art Stephen Youll) First US edition (UK: Macmillan UK, September 2005)

SF novel, a loose sequel to Natural History, in which an intelligence known as Unity creates various pocket universes for humanity to play in; the story follows a 15-year-old runaway.
• This is the first US edition; the UK edition published last year is a finalist for this year's British Science Fiction Association Awards. (Two of the author's previous novels are currently up for the Philip K. Dick Award.)
• Bantam's site has this description and an excerpt.
• Amazon has reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist; the former says "If William Gibson and Norman Spinrad had dropped acid together, this fourth SF novel by British author Robson (Natural History) is the book they might have written."
• Gary K. Wolfe reviewed the book in the March '06 issue of Locus Magazine, concluding "Robson is an author of frequent brilliance and considerable imaginative ambition who clearly wants to move beyond her past successes rather than recapitulate them, and who's interested in stretching her instrument to its limits. That, it seems to me, is a recipe for the career of a major SF novelist."

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* Varley, John : Red Lightning
(Ace 0-441-01364-3, $24.95, 330pp, hardcover, April 2006, cover illustration Bob Warner)

SF novel, sequel to Red Thunder (2003), in which suburban misfits from Daytona, Florida built a spaceship to Mars. This book concerns the son of two of the Mars adventurers, after an object strikes the Atlantic and wipes most of the US east coast.
• The publisher's site has this brief description.
• Amazon has the PW and Booklist reviews; PW concludes "Drawing unabashedly on current events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, the author mixes space opera-esque adventure and merriment with uncensored images of disaster areas and teenage sex. At his Heinlein-channeling best, Varley preaches the gospel of individual responsibility with all the fervor of a space-age libertarian revival preacher."
• Russell Letson reviews it in the April issue of Locus Magazine, who says "once again the dominant impression is of an updated Heinlein 'juvenile' (as we used to call Young Adult books)", and, noting the citations to current events, concludes "I suspect that this darkness is as authentic and permanent a feature of the Varley vision (he said, in a transport of synaesthesia) as the optimism, and that this will probably make Varley's versions of the 'juvenile' age more gracefully than any but the toughest of the Old Man's. When we reach into the magic hat we might draw back a hand missing some fingers. But reach in we must."

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* Weber, David : In Fury Born
(Baen 1416520546, $27, 846pp, hardcover, April 2006, cover art David Mattingly)

Military SF novel, an expanded version of the author's 1992 novel Path of the Fury, about a military woman who sets out to take revenge on the pirates who destroyed her world.
• Baen's site has this description and links to several chapters.
• Amazon has a description and several reader reviews.

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* Wellington, David : Monster Island
(Thunder's Mouth Press 1-56025-850-0, $13.5, 282pp, trade paperback, April 2006)

Horror novel, subtitled "A Zombie Novel", the author's first novel and first of a trilogy, set in Manhattan.
• The author's website has the complete text of what was first published as an online novel, as well for sequels Monster Nation and Monster Planet. They're also available for ipods.
• The publisher's site has this description.
• Boing Boing posted this review by Mark Frauenfelder last year.
• Amazon has reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal; the latter calls it "a fantastic zombie novel" and concludes "There are many layers to this zombie apocalypse, and this book just gets things rolling. Stay tuned."

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* Wright, Susan : To Serve and Submit
(Penguin/Roc 0-451-46068-5, $14, 299pp, trade paperback, April 2006, jacket art Chad Michael Ward)

Fantasy novel about a young woman from the fens who becomes a pleasure slave and falls in love with her master.
• The publisher's site has this description; "Between domination and subservience exists a realm of sensual fantasy unlike any ever dreamed."
• Amazon has the review from Publishers Weekly, and a note from Library Journal saying that the book "should appeal to fans of Jacqueline Carey, Terry Goodkind, and Storm Constantine".

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