Locus Bestsellers, July 2019
The Locus Bestsellers for July include top titles Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey, Dune by Frank Herbert, The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin, and Star Wars: Thrawn: Alliances by Timothy Zahn.
| HARDCOVERS | Months on list |
Last month |
|
| 1) | Tiamat’s Wrath, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US) | 2 | 2 |
| 2) | Radicalized, Cory Doctorow (Tor) | 2 | 7 |
| 3) | The Raven Tower, Ann Leckie (Orbit US) | 3 | 3 |
| 4) | Fire & Blood, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) | 6 | 8 |
| 5) | A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (Tor) | 1 | – |
| 6) | Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James (Riverhead) | 3 | 1 |
| 7) | No Country for Old Gnomes, Delilah S. Dawson & Kevin Hearne (Del Rey) | 1 | – |
| 8) | The Ruin of Kings, Jenn Lyons (Tor) | 2 | 9 |
| 9) | Luna: Moon Rising, Ian McDonald (Tor) | 1 | – |
| *) | The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon (Bloomsbury USA) | 3 | 4 |
| PAPERBACKS | |||
| 1) | Dune, Frank Herbert (Ace) | 27 | 3 |
| 2) | Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett (Morrow) | 20 | 4 |
| 3) | A Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin (Bantam) | 92 | 7 |
| 4) | The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW) | 67 | 2 |
| 5) | The Wise Man’s Fear, Patrick Rothfuss (DAW) | 31 | – |
| 6) | The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson (Tor) | 12 | – |
| 7) | Head On, John Scalzi (Tor) | 1 | – |
| 8) | That Ain’t Witchcraft, Seanan McGuire (DAW) | 2 | 1 |
| 9) | American Gods, Neil Gaiman (Morrow) | 38 | 6 |
| *) | Mistborn, Brandon Sanderson (Tor) | 3 | – |
| TRADE PAPERBACKS | |||
| 1) | The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US) | 28 | 1 |
| 2) | Leviathan Wakes, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US) | 20 | – |
| 3) | Kill the Farm Boy, Delilah S. Dawson & Kevin Hearne (Del Rey) | 1 | – |
| *) | A People’s Future of the United States, Victor LaValle & John Joseph Adams, ed. (One World) | 3 | 3 |
| *) | Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, K.J. Parker (Orbit US) | 1 | – |
| *) | The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu (Tor) | 31 | 5 |
| 7) | The City of Brass, S.A. Chakraborty (Harper Voyager) | 1 | – |
| 8) | Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US) | 4 | – |
| 9) | The Power, Naomi Alderman (Back Bay) | 3 | 7 |
| 10) | Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett (Morrow) | 1 | – |
| MEDIA & GAMING RELATED | |||
| 1) | Star Wars: Thrawn: Alliances, Timothy Zahn (Del Rey) | 6 | 1 |
| 2) | Star Wars: Master & Apprentice, Claudia Gray (Del Rey) | 1 | – |
| 3) | Firefly: The Magnificent Nine, James Lovegrove (Titan US) | 2 | 2 |
| 4) | Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light, Dayton Ward (Gallery) | 1 | – |
| 5) | Doctor Who: Scratchman, Tom Baker & James Goss (BBC Books) | 1 | – |
Tiamat’s Wrath, book eight in James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, conquered the hardcover list with almost twice as many votes as our second place finisher, Radicalized by Cory Doctorow. The new runner-up was A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C.A. Fletcher (Orbit US). We had 54 nominated titles, up from 38 last month.
On the paperback list, old favorites dominated with Dune by Frank Herbert taking the top spot, followed by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens in second. On our list, only two books had a publication date after 2010, and only one, That Ain’t Witchcraft by Seanan McGuire, was published this year. Red Sister by Mark Lawrence (Ace), the first book in the Book of the Ancestor series, was our new runner-up. There were 64 titles nominated, up from last month’s 51.
N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season remained number one on the trade paperback list with a substantial lead over James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Wakes, the first book in The Expanse series. Nisi Shawl edited the new runner-up, New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (Solaris). We had 72 titles nominated, up from 70 last month.
In media and gaming related books, Star Wars: Thrawn: Alliances by Timothy Zahn held onto first place, followed by Star Wars: Master & Apprentice by Claudia Gray in second place. There were no new runners-up. We had 24 nominated titles, up from last month’s 23.
Compiled with data from Bakka-Phoenix Books (Canada), Barnes & Noble (USA), Borderlands (CA), McNally Robinson (2 in Canada), Mysterious Galaxy (CA), Toadstool (NH), Uncle Hugo’s (MN), University Book Store (WA), White Dwarf (Canada).
Data period: April 2019
Note: book titles and covers on this page link to IndieBound, a network of independent booksellers, such as those that contribute to this list.
From the July 2019 issue of Locus.
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I will put this comment here.
I have never gotten a good reading on what long time science fiction fans think of the TV show The Expanse…
I know it seems TV is not reviewed in Locus, I guess? But this show is extraordinary .
(I have not read the novels.)
To my old Science Fiction reading eyes the Expanse is unique as visual narrative science fiction mainly because it is framed by a prose narrative I know so well. Reading science fiction in the 1950s (I started when I was 13 in 1953)… I was totally entranced by the story telling and the verisimilitude in those tales on the page. I knew enough about the factual world by the time I was 15 to see that plausibility was a crucial entertainment element of this kind of storytelling. Heinlein is the great example of this (at least Heinlein from 1940 to 1960) … first the story narrative was great but the attention of everyday details zero g, pressure suits, the vacuum of space, everything in a creditable world building that keep the facts straight entranced me ….it was moments of transport. It was not just Heinlein but almost everything on the pages of John Campbell’s Astounding* (well maybe always the core story) just hit the mark with me in the ‘feels like liven in’ department. Many authors Clarke, Asimov, Pohl, Anderson, Sturgeon, de Camp…. The list is very long.
*(Tho Campbell got into some silly (in the 50’s stuff) .. and Galaxy and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction were publishing much better stories 1950-1960.)
The first few seasons scenario of war between Earth and Colonial Mars is much like Robert Heinlein’s Between Planets , 1952, The Belters are essentially in Asimov’s story The Martian Way , 1952 .. The Belters occur explicitly in Larry Niven’s KNOWN SPACE series 1960s…. but it is more the nity gritty of solar system colonialism that has never really been portrayed in science fiction on TV , it was (still is) common currency in the prose form. … That goes back to John Campbell’s magazine starting in roughly 1938!
I know Star Trek borrowed from SF prose, and I liked Firefly and Battle Star Galactica … but this is better than those.
So it is a revelation to see classic lived-in domesticated space opera finally as visual narrative in The Expanse. There is a verisimilitude I thought it would never happen.
I puzzle over why the show is not mentioned that much here, or maybe I have missed it.
Season 4 continues the excelence.