The Reference Library
by Sean CW Korsgaard
Given that many of you are reading this column when this issue of the magazine runs in the fall, I approached this column with a single goal in mind: to gather for you a selection of some of the very best in recent science fiction horror and thrillers. Novels to quicken your pulse, make your heart pound and your gooseflesh stand up from the moment you crack open the cover to the stunning and occasionally horrifying conclusions.
Needless to say, the selections I bring before you more than deliver on every front, and each offer something different for those who prefer their thrills to be one flavor or another.
A time travel alternate history caper from one of the genre’s grandmasters whose heroes must save the world by first saving the Roman Empire. A sophomore effort from one of the rising stars of science fiction’s horror scene, showcasing much of what has made her a fast favorite. A heartfelt coming of age story of a teen girl overcoming doubt, trauma, and the zombie apocalypse in Appalachia. A cyberpunk dystopian thriller from South Korea that blends the best of William Gibson, Snowpiercer, and K-pop. An unlikely alliance between astronauts and prisoners forced to work together after they awaken to a devastated Earth. A doomed spaceship slinking its way back to Earth after a failed colonization mission, before things go from bad to worse. All caped off with an earnest celebration and retrospective of one of speculative fiction’s most storied and macabre magazines.
I hope one or more of these books keep you on the edge of your seat from the first pages to the last.
* * *
To Turn the Tide
S.M. Stirling
Baen Books, 480 pages,
$28.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $9.99
ISBN: 978-1982193539
Series: Make the Darkness Light 1
Genre: Alternate History, Time Travel, Exploration & Discovery, Adventure SF
* * *
Few names carry more weight within the alternate history genre than S.M. Stirling, and for good reason. His Domination of the Draka series and Nantucket trilogy are essential works of the genre, the later along with 1632 helping to redefine the time travel subgenre within alternate history. It’s one reason why his pivot to fantasy for much of the past two decades, be it his Emberverse series or his recent Conan novel, can feel frustrating at times—and why his new novel, To Turn the Tide, is such an electrifying return to form.
The first in a new series, To Turn the Tide is the latest in a proud tradition of alternate history works, like Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp and Stirling’s own Nantucket trilogy, focused on five time travelers on a mission: to prevent the end of the world by helping the Roman Empire unify it.
The year is 2032, and five American historians, each experts in their fields of Ancient or Roman history, arrive in Vienna, Austria just in time for the end of the world. They’ve come at the invitation of a strange Austrian physicist who selected them for the first test run of his temporal displacement device—which he activates just as Vienna, and the rest of this Earth, go up in thermonuclear flame.
The year is now 165 AD, and those five Americans find themselves in the Roman province of Pannonia Superior, with no way home, and no home to return to if they did, outfitted only with the supplies sent back with them and the two millennia of human knowledge in their heads. After some discussion, establishing themselves in the Roman Empire and beginning the process of technological and social uplift is the surest way to prevent the kind of future they came from.
They’re on a ticking clock though—both the Marcomannic Wars and Antonine Plague are set to begin in just over a year or two. That and their actions eventually attract the attention of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Aside from the terrific core concept—Save Rome, Save the World!—and the always enjoyable alternate history standby of watching our heroes go all Connecticut Yankee on the downtimers, what makes To Turn the Tide so effective is the great core group of characters. Stirling has created a group where just as each of the five Americans brings some knowledge or expertise to the mission, they bring a different viewpoint of Roman society to the novel.
Mark Findlemann is Jewish—a useful skill when their first merchant contact is Greek Jew Josephus ben Matthias—but is all too aware of the precarious position Jewish people have in Rome after the Jewish revolts. Filipa Chang is a lesbian who finds sexual norms of the era are utterly alien by our standards. Paula Atkins, being African American, is horrified by the rampant slavery of the empire, and even more so that in a world where slavery is the norm, the empire that crucifies rebelling slaves is on the kinder end of the spectrum. Jeremy McCladden is a Wisconsin farmboy thrilled to be introducing everything from New World crops to horse collars to Roman agriculture. Meanwhile, Arthur Vandenberg is a U.S. Army captain with a doctorate from Harvard who struggles over the family he left behind, and unlike Martin Padway, does know how to make gunpowder.
That reference to Lest Darkness Fall is deliberate by the way—several of our uptime characters reference the novel, and it’s nice to have a set of enjoyably genre savvy characters dealing with the same scenario that L. Sprague de Camp’s hero once did. Throw in some vivid exploration of an oft-ignored corner of the Roman Empire as well as ancient Eastern Europe, and a few appearances from the like of Emperor Marcus Aurelius and the physician Galen, and you have a fairly unique twist on what has now become an alternate history standby.
Stirling has said he could easily see this as a series than runs for a dozen books, and if this is any sign of things, I sincerely hope we get to see them. To Turn the Tide is an exhilarating return to alternate history from a grandmaster of the genre, and it shouldn’t be missed.
* * *
Ghost Station
S.A. Barnes
Tor Nightfire, 384 pages,
$27.99 (Hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $14.99
ISBN: 978-1250884923
Genre: SF Horror,
Psychological/Sociological SF,
Space Travel, Exploration & Discovery, Alien Beings
* * *
Way back in my very first column for Analog, I reviewed S.A. Barnes’ debut SF novel, Dead Silence, a deliciously tense horror thriller set on an abandoned starliner, and I singled out Barnes as a name to watch. With her sophomore outing, Ghost Station, I’m pleased to say Barnes is well on her way to being one of the eminent names of horror-tinged space opera.
Dr. Ophelia Bray is a psychologist who specializes in treating spacefarers for a psychosis known as Eckhart-Reiser syndrome, a condition similar to a very nasty case of PTSD that can be spread person-to-person. The most infamous figure to suffer from it—her father—killed twenty-nine people, which has given her a very personal stake in its treatment. Most recently she has been assigned by her employer, the Montrose Corporation, to travel with and monitor an exploration crew tasked with exploring Lyria 393-C, a distant, icy planet previously inhabited by an extinct alien race, following the death of one of the team’s members.
The tight knit crew, having just lost a member and knowing Bray is there to monitor them for their employer, is cold and mistrustful of her—and that mistrust is quickly mutual as it becomes clear the team is hiding something. Of course, as they begin work on this tomb world, they’ll find things far more dangerous than each other—there are clear signs the previous crew from a rival company left in a hurry,
And when their pilot is killed and all hell starts to break loose on Lyria 393-C, it’s not clear if the death is connected to ERS or something else entirely. There are dark and dangerous secrets lurking among these alien ruins—and just as many dark and dangerous secrets are being kept by each member of the crew, including Bray herself. Whether the danger be some barely understood psychosis, a previously unknown alien threat, or the result of a crew collapsed into infighting, the chances of getting off this world alive are dropping fast.
Ghost Station capably gets the tension started almost immediately and builds upon it by introducing new sources—a barb from nasty coworkers here, a cyclopean alien ruin there, a gruesome murder elsewhere—the sense of dread moves toward climax. The world of Lyria 393-C also makes for a foreboding setting, with freezing temperatures, stormy weather, vast alien ruins that housed a dead alien race, and a previous failed human exploration. The fear and tension are palpable; it hits enough terrors that there’s bound to be something to make your skin crawl—very literally in the case of a couple of unfortunate crew members, for all of our fans of body horror.
Part of the reason I enjoyed Barnes’ work with Dead Silence so much is that novel’s protagonist Claire was an incredibly well-handled portrayal of a trauma survivor working through PTSD, and Ghost Station’s Dr. Ophelia Bray is very much of that same mold, and once again Barnes deserves top marks. Not every writer can nail the consuming anxiety and fear she has done now twice, and part of why the horror in these novels is so effective is that all of that tension and trauma pours from these characters until it practically seeps off the page.
I also enjoy how Barnes’ fictional ailment Eckhart-Reiser syndrome reflects some of the very real issues and stigmas surrounding PTSD. A number of characters in Ghost Station dismiss ERS as made up, just an excuse for malingering by lazy spacers. There are efforts to hush it up because diagnosis of ERS or symptoms that could lead to ERS are career killers. What causes ERS to metastasize is isolation, and most of the deaths in the novel connected to ERS are, despite its reputation, suicides. It’s a tragic reflection of real world mental health stigmas that lends the fictional ones in Ghost Station realism.
Ghost Station is a slow burn horror story that reaches an inferno, and S.A. Barnes continues to prove she has a gift for thrusting broken heroes into terrifying peril.
* * *
Mountain of Fire
Jason Cordova
Baen Books, 368 pages,
$28.00 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $9.99
ISBN: 978-1982193614
Series: Black Tide Rising 13
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic SF,
Psychological/Sociological SF,
Dystopian SF, Coming of Age SF, Shared Universe
* * *
I realize that nine times out of ten, zombies are not the stuff of hard science fiction. Hoever, since the beasties of the New York Times bestselling Black Tide Rising series are not undead, but victims of a genetically altered virus akin to airborne rabies, this is the rare one time out of ten I can have my brains and eat them too.
The past year has been a big one for author Jason Cordova, perhaps his biggest ever since he became the first Latino author nominated for the John W. Campbell Award a decade ago. He’s worked with Esther Friesner to bring back the beloved Chicks anthologies, he coauthored a Monster Hunter novel with Larry Correia that blended Aztec myth with disco-era Los Angeles, and now with Mountain of Fire, Codrova has delivered not only a superb entry in the series for newcomers, but perhaps the best Black Tide Rising novel in the series as a whole.
Following the outbreak of the H7D3 virus, and the corresponding mass death and civilizational collapse, St. Dominic’s Preparatory School for Girls finds itself as a rare island of stability in Alleghany County, Virginia. The survivors of this Catholic boarding school find themselves under the strict, structured leadership of Sister Ann Constance, a U.S. Marine gunnery sergeant before she took her vows, who is doing her best to teach the teenage girls how to survive this terrifying new world, while dealing with trauma and survivor’s guilt.
Madison Coryell, or Maddie, has more than enough of both, having borne the unfortunate distinction of having had to kill several of her classmates, including her best friend, during the initial rush to the bunker in the early days of the virus. Already familiar with taking a life, Maddie takes it upon herself to act as security for St. Dominic’s against the infected. All the while, Sister Ann seeks to strike a balance between teaching Maddie some of the combat skills she learned in the marines, while helping her deal with her anguish and guilt. She sees Maddie as a potential leader, and in troubled times, such leaders are desperately needed.
While it borders on cliché for the subgenre, it’s the human touch that lends Mountain of Fire much of its heart. This is Maddie’s story, and following her growth from an understandably shell-shocked and troubled teenager into a leader was a journey to be savored. Her struggles with guilt and having taken lives is very well handled, as is Sister Ann’s mentorship role.
The Appalachian setting and flavor also lend itself wonderfully to a post-Apocalyptic SF setting. Mountains older than life on Earth, crushing poverty, breathtaking geography, and enough homesteads, boarding schools, doomsday bunkers, and government redoubts to make for some fascinating factions to play with, and Mountain of Fire uses them to the utmost. As someone who has traveled extensively in the region of Virginia in which the novel is set, the geography and character of the region are rendered superbly.
There is a particularly heartbreaking moment when Maddie is speaking with a local and they’re hit by the depressing realization that everywhere on Earth is now as broken down as deep Appalachia. While you occasionally see Appalachia pop up in fantasy and horror, or even alternate history thanks to the late Eric Flint, it was nice to see a SF novel romp around the Blue Ridge Mountains for a longer stay.
* * *
Snowglobe
Soyoung Park
Delacorte Press, 384 pages,
$20.99 (hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $10.99
ISBN: 978-0593484975
Series: The Snowglobe Duology 1
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic SF, Cyberpunk, Dystopian SF, Coming of Age SF,
Ecological/Environmental SF,
World SF
* * *
Korean genre fiction has really been enjoying some much deserved international spotlight, with movies like Snowpiercer and television shows like Squid Game attracting audiences around the world. Understandably, a novel that manages to take elements of both, and roll some K-pop and idol culture into the mix, while delivering a crackling cyberpunk dystopian thriller the way Snowglobe managed, is something I hope turns just as many heads.
Set two hundred years in the future, the novel takes place after an unspecified disaster sparks a massive Ice Age, with surface temperatures averaging 50 below zero across much of the world, with one notable exception: the city of Snowglobe. Built atop geothermal vents, enclosed beneath a massive enclosed glass dome, the city is the last known place on Earth that’s warm.
Space there is limited largely to the rich and famous, whose luxurious lives are streamed to the residents of countless exterior support settlements as 24/7 reality entertainment, all courtesy of the Yibonn Media Group, the media conglomerate that runs Snowglobe.
Jeon Chobham lives in one of those settlements with her mother, grandmother, and twin brother Ongi, working to produce additional electricity for Snowglobe at the local power generation plants. She dreams, however, of becoming a television director, which would allow her to move to the city and become wealthy in the process, especially if she can make anything as popular as The Goh Haeri Show, an idol program whose star, Haeri, bears a passing resemblance to Chobham.
That resemblance is what finally brings a limousine and the director of The Goh Haeri Show, Cha Seol, knocking at her door. It seems Haeri has committed suicide, leaving Seol in need of a new star—or as she proposes to Chobham, at least somebody willing and able to step into the late idol’s shoes and keep playing Haeri. Though quick to agree at what she sees as her big break, Chobham soon discover show business, and Snowglobe with it, can be just as cold and brutal as any winter.
Though on the surface Snowglobe’s primary influence seems to be the popular South Korean dystopias making it big on the screen overseas, the crux of much of the novel’s dread, betrayal, and backstabbing is its searing indictment of Korean idol culture and the entertainment industry. It’s actually one of my personal favorite approaches for a novel to explore a cyberpunk dystopia through its entertainment industry, a la James Tiptree’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In, or Gibson’s Idoru. Not surprisingly given its South Korean origin, Snowglobe has plenty to pull from K-pop and Asia’s idol scene that is every bit as dystopian as anything in fiction. As in the novel, it’s not uncommon for group members to be replaced by the labels without missing a beat, and the artist often seems like the most disposable part of the industry.
Throw in plenty to say about surveillance and corporate culture, and a story that manages to pack in plenty of betryals, twists, and even a climactic high-stakes heist, and there’s a lot to really enjoy about Snowglobe, and one I’ll look forward to revisiting in the next novel in the series. Even by the lofty standards of the Korean science fiction currently making waves around the world, this one’s not just another face in the cyberpunk crowd, but a bonafide star in its own right.
* * *
The Downloaded
Robert J. Sawyer
Shadowpaw Press, 190 pages,
$14.99 (Trade Paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $4.99
ISBN: 978-1989398999
Genre: Technothriller, Cyberpunk,
SF Thriller, Medical SF, Clarke’s Law
* * *
There’s nothing like a crisis to make or break people, bringing unlikely groups together or setting them against each other. In Hugo- and Campbell-Award-winner Robert J. Sawyer’s The Downloaded, two radically different groups are forced to confront a number of dangerous questions: What caused the collapse of civilization? Can we form a new society? And can we do it before the next cataclysm strikes?
Two groups have volunteered for an experimental cryogenics program that will freeze their bodies, while their still-active minds are digitally scanned and uploaded into a massive quantum computer. The first group of volunteers are the astronauts of the U.N.S.S. Hōkūle‘a, preparing to leave Earth on a one-way interstellar colonization mission to Proxima Centauri. The second group consists of convicted murderers and volunteers who have elected to serve their sentences in a virtual-reality prison, serving decades of jail time in only months.
That was the plan, anyway; while both groups are in suspended animation, their cryosleeps are extended by over five centuries. They wake up to find one of the bodies of the hibernating astronauts destroyed—along with industrial civilization, which collapsed following what was believed to have been an EMP from a coronal mass ejection hitting the Earth not long after both groups were frozen and uploaded. Save a few robots and odd groups like the Mennonites, Earth is in shambles—and there’s potentially no way off-world for the still-operable spaceship in orbit or to see if Earth’s Mars colonies survived. They’re going to need one, given there’s a danger far worse than an EMP headed straight toward the Earth.
The Downloaded touches a number of genres, a science fiction mystery with a massive planet-killing ticking clock. It scratches on the ethics and impact of leaving a human mind in a computer for years at a time. One of the astronauts, no longer tied to physical form, explores their gender identity. For the prisoners, it’s a chance to study and reform, but it’s also far more restrictive than even a supermax prison. All have that ripped from them to awaken to an Earth that has been wrecked and no chance to return to their lives.
Anyone who has caught one of Sawyer’s serials in Analog over the years knows what to expect from him as an author—smooth prose, a terrific ensemble cast where each member offers a unique perspective, and some plot twists to throw everybody for a loop, audience included, along the way; The Downloaded is very much in that tradition. The tensions, discussions, contemplations on human nature, and impact living virtually can have upon the human mind are also pure Sawyer.
Throw in the angle of using rotating POVs by interview—think Max Brooks’ World War Z—which adds another unique wrinkle to The Downloaded—not just for perspective, but because the characters will often contradict one another. It helps that the cast itself really crackles and bounces off one another—highlights include Captain Letitia Garvey, the one time commander of the Hōkūle‘a expedition, and Roscoe Koudoulian, a murderer convicted of tracking down and killing his childhood bully and who volunteered to be frozen to see his daughter again in less than ten months just to wake up five hundred years in the future.
As an added bonus, the audiobook is wonderfully narrated by an ensemble cast that includes Academy Award-winner Brendan Fraser, so for anybody looking to spend an Audible credit, this is a good selection.
The Downloaded is a thought-provoking journey from start to finish, so don’t leave this one on ice.
* * *
The Scourge Between Stars
Ness Brown
Tor Nightfire, 163 pages,
$16.99 (Trade Paperback)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $11.99
ISBN: 978-1250834683
Genre: SF Horror, Space Opera,
Colonization, Alien Beings, Artificial Intelligence
* * *
The history of exploration and colonization is filled with as many failures as successes, and perhaps the colonization of the stars will prove no exception. For each Jamestown, there is a Roanoke, each Apollo 11, a Challenger. That threat of failure is the starting point for Ness Brown’s The Scourge Between Stars—and then things proceed to go from bad to worse on a ship where everything that could go wrong already has.
The generation ship Calypso is headed back to Earth, its original mission to colonize an exoplanet in Proxima Centauri a complete failure. Now they are headed back slowly—perhaps too slowly, as supplies were already running low, parts are having to be salvaged from the ship to keep key systems going, and the Calypso has begun to encounter strange pockets in space the crew have termed “engagements” where the ship experiences tension akin to a storm or minefield.
Jacklyn Albright is the daughter of the current captain of the Calypso and the acting captain ever since her father locked himself in his quarters. But she needs his help. Segments of the ship’s population are at the boiling point as fights over resources become more common. They’ve lost contact with the other ships in the fleet headed back to Earth. The ship is less than halfway back to Earth and might not be able to handle another jump. And Jacklyn has done the math and knows they’ll run out of food before ever reaching the Solar System.
If that wasn’t enough, an artificially intelligent android named Watson seemingly goes on the fritz, offering cryptic warnings of strange threats just as dead bodies begin to appear on the ship. And by the state of them, whatever is killing the crew isn’t human.
So much of the terror in The Scourge Between Stars comes from a mission where everything has gone wrong and things find a way to get worse. Logistical issues and hard calls over resources can and will doom the ship and all its residents just as easily as any violent external threat, and they’re at the forefront well before any other dangers show up. As a setting, the Calypso truly does feel claustrophobic, battered and barely held together, which only adds to the terror as threats more imminent than starvation begin to emerge.
And make no mistake, it absolutely nails the fear of the unknown—from the initial mystery of just what the “engagements” happen to be, to what happens to be lurking around the ship killing people, and even the mystery of what went wrong in Proxima Centauri. Some add additional mystery to the proceedings, some linger in the dark, but the result is Brown has crafted a tail perfectly suited to instill dread from the first page and just keep dialing it up until the last.
If there’s a flaw with The Scourge Between Stars, it’s the same as many novellas, where it’s debatable which side of the line between “perfectly contained novella” and “should have been a full novel” it falls. Even a few more chapters could have potentially made this a much stronger book and answered some of the lingering questions left by the novella.
Don’t take that to mean it isn’t already very strong. The Scourge Between Stars is a taut, tense, and terrifying journey through the cosmos.
* * *
Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird
Edited by Jonathan Maberry
Blackstone Publishing,
498 pages, $27.99 (Hardcover)
iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $8.99
ISBN: 979-8200687992
Genre: Space Opera, SF Mystery,
Theme Anthologies, Non-Fiction, Genre History
* * *
It may border on heresy to say this in the pages of the magazine once known as Astounding Stories: I absolutely adore Weird Tales. If you are a devoted fan of sword-and-sorcery or Lovecraftian horror or the golden age of pulp fiction—and on all fronts, I very much am—how could you not be? Under Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales did as much to shape modern fantasy and horror as John W. Campbell did early science fiction here at Astounding/Analog.
Assembled by the editor of the most recent reboot of Weird Tales magazine, Jonathan Maberry, Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird marks a century since the first issues of the magazine hit the newsstands, and celebrates, highlights and examines its role within the genre ever since.
To start, there are some really great original stories in the collection. If you grew up with R.L. Stine’s children’s books like I did, seeing him take a stab at adult horror with “Disappear Donna” will prove electrifying. Dana Fredsti’s “Bait” is a truly surreal Lovecraftian horror story from the point of view of a surfer. The shocker for me was “The World Breaker” by Blake Northcott, a comic book writer whose story may well be what you’d get if classic Weird Tales took a swing at superheroes.
As for the reprints, there are the obvious ones—“Call of Clthulu” by H.P. Lovecraft, “The Black God’s Kiss” by C.L. Moore—but I have to commend Maberry for thinking outside of the box for others. For example, rather than choose one of the more famous Conan or Soloman Kane stories to showcase Robert E. Howard, the Bran Mak Morn tale “Worms of the Earth” is included. Some might question the omission of authors like Clark Ashton Smith and August Derleth, but I think the choice to showcase some of Weird Tales’ “lesser known” alumni a bold one—Tennessee Williams, Isaac Asimov, and Richard Matheson among them, and Ray Bradbury’s “The Scythe” offers a wonderful example of the early work of one of the masters of short fiction.
There are also a number of accompanying essays throughout Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird, highlighting the history of the magazine, retrospectives on its notable authors, and examinations of the number of careers and genres it influenced or quite often started. Henry Herz looks at the history of the Occult Detective subgenre from Manly Wade Wellman to Jim Butcher. Charles R. Rutledge’s essay on sword-and-sorcery is a stirring history of the genre and why Weird Tales enjoys such a fond reputation among the genre’s fans and authors. Yet few offer perhaps more insight than Maberry’s own, which opens the anthology. He talks fondly about how much the magazine and its authors have shaped his reading, his writing, and his life. This is a wonderful reflection of just how much genre fiction and fandom can impact a reader—of how an author, story, or magazine can inspire decades later.
I also feel the need to commend Blackstone Publishing for putting together a beautifully assembled book—the hardcover has some genuine heft to it, the dust jacket and paper are of superb quality, and the interior art throughout the book is superb. The book itself feels like a show piece, perfectly fitting for a celebration of a century of one of spec fiction’s most iconic titles.
Weird Tales: 100 Years of Weird is a must-own for any lover of speculative fiction and its history. If you’re the kind of person who fell in love with sword-and-sorcery from old Conan paperbacks, have been haunted by Lovecraftian or cosmic horror, burned through the urban fantasy of Laurel K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher, or Larry Correia, or have been enraptured by the work of the authors whose work has found a home on its pages—this is not just Weird Tales’ story, but yours as well, and it deserves a cherished spot on your shelves.
Though perhaps make sure to pair it with Alec Nevala-Lee’s equally essential Astounding, to ensure that all of your bases are covered.
Sean CW Korsgaard is a U.S. Army veteran, award-winning freelance journalist, author, editor, and publicist who has worked with Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Baen Books, and Writers of the Future, and recently became the editor of Anvil and Battleborn magazines. His first anthology, Worlds Long Lost, was released in December 2022, as was his debut short story, “Black Box.” He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and child, along with, depending on who you ask, either far too many or far too few books.
Copyright © 2024 Sean CW Korsgaard