Mighty Mur Lafferty has a new book coming out called The Shambling Guide to New York City. It’s a fun and funny look at being human in the increasingly supernatural city of New York.

Here’s the official description:

A travel writer takes a job with a shady publishing company in New York, only to find that she must write a guide to the city – for the undead!

Because of the disaster that was her last job, Zoe is searching for a fresh start as a travel book editor in the tourist-centric New York City. After stumbling across a seemingly perfect position though, Zoe is blocked at every turn because of the one thing she can’t take off her resume — human.

Not to be put off by anything — especially not her blood drinking boss or death goddess coworker — Zoe delves deep into the monster world. But her job turns deadly when the careful balance between human and monsters starts to crumble — with Zoe right in the middle.

And here’s the trailer (and more goodies!)…
Read the rest of this entry

If The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes is half as creepy as this trailer, I wanna read it.
Read the rest of this entry

Here’s a stylish trailer for Glitter & Mayhem: The Speculative Nightclub Anthology, a book that was successfully crowd funded:
Read the rest of this entry

Pat's Fantasy Hotlist notes that the book trailer for Peter V. Brett’s The Daylight War (Book Three of The Demon Cycle) has been released:

About the book:
Read the rest of this entry

Gail Carriger is on the verge of launching a new series tied to her Parasol Protectorate series. On February 5th, you can get your properly gloved hands on Etiquette & Espionage, the first book of the brand new Finishing School series aimed at young asults (but enjoyable by “old” adults as well).

Here’s what the book is about:

It’s one thing to learn to curtsy properly. It’s quite another to learn to curtsy and throw a knife at the same time. Welcome to Finishing School.

Fourteen-year-old Sophronia is a great trial to her poor mother. Sophronia is more interested in dismantling clocks and climbing trees than proper manners–and the family can only hope that company never sees her atrocious curtsy. Mrs. Temminnick is desperate for her daughter to become a proper lady. So she enrolls Sophronia in Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality.

But Sophronia soon realizes the school is not quite what her mother might have hoped. At Mademoiselle Geraldine’s, young ladies learn to finish…everything. Certainly, they learn the fine arts of dance, dress, and etiquette, but the also learn to deal out death, diversion, and espionage–in the politest possible ways, of course. Sophronia and her friends are in for a rousing first year’s education.

Set in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate, this YA series debut is filled with all the saucy adventure and droll humor Gail’s legions of fans have come to adore.

Here’s the trailer…
Read the rest of this entry

Book trailers are a tough sell on readers, usually because most of them aren’t terribly inventive. This one, however, works. It’s for the latest book in Myke Cole’s supernatural/military Shadow Ops series, Fortress Frontier, described thusly:

The Great Reawakening did not come quietly. Across the country and in every nation, people began to develop terrifying powers–summoning storms, raising the dead, and setting everything they touch ablaze. Overnight the rules changed…but not for everyone.

Colonel Alan Bookbinder is an army bureaucrat whose worst war wound is a paper-cut. But after he develops magical powers, he is torn from everything he knows and thrown onto the front-lines.

Drafted into the Supernatural Operations Corps in a new and dangerous world, Bookbinder finds himself in command of Forward Operating Base Frontier–cut off, surrounded by monsters, and on the brink of being overrun.

Now, he must find the will to lead the people of FOB Frontier out of hell, even if the one hope of salvation lies in teaming up with the man whose own magical powers put the base in such grave danger in the first place–Oscar Britton, public enemy number one…

ANd here’s the tariler…

Read the rest of this entry

Here’s the book trailer for Earth Unaware by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston, described thusly:

A hundred years before Ender’s Game, humans thought they were alone in the galaxy. Humanity was slowly making their way out from Earth to the planets and asteroids of the Solar System, exploring and mining and founding colonies.

The mining ship El Cavador is far out from Earth, in the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto. Other mining ships, and the families that live on them, are few and far between this far out. So when El Cavador’s telescopes pick up a fast-moving object coming in-system, it’s hard to know what to make of it. It’s massive and moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

But the ship has other problems. Their systems are old and failing. The family is getting too big. There are claim-jumping corporates bringing Asteroid Belt tactics to the Kuiper Belt. Worrying about a distant object that might or might not be an alien ship seems…not important.

They’re wrong. It’s the most important thing that has happened to the human race in a million years. This is humanity’s first contact with an alien race. The First Formic War is about to begin.

Read the rest of this entry

The new novel Henry and the Incredibly Incorrigible, Inconveniently Intelligent Smart Human by L A Messina comes with a nifty book trailer.

Here’s the synopsis:

Henry Jacobson, a robot in the 13th upgrade, can’t process the data. Sure, humans can follow simple instructions to sweep floors and do other menial tasks that robots don’t want to do, but they can’t do anything complicated. Humans are just simple gadgets invented to make the lives of robots easier. Then his dad’s boss gives them a HueManTech ETC-420- GX-2 and Henry’s life is turned upside down. This human unit is like no other. It can read, play video games and, it seems to Henry, think for itself. In fact, the more time Henry spends with the ETC, the more the gadget seems less like a human unit and more like a full-fledged robot with thoughts and feelings. But that’s not possible. Is it? And if the ETC really is as smart as it seems, Henry can’t help but wonder: Is the human just the next-generation technology or a secret government weapon that will ultimately destroy them all?

And here’s the trailer
Read the rest of this entry

Check out this book trailer for Nir Yaniv’s new collection The Love Machine & Other Contraptions. +1 for use of classic robots!

But first, the description….

What happens when every wish you make is immediately granted by God? If you could use the power of music to travel through time? If your body was the battleground for a strange, alien invasion?

In this, his debut collection in English, Israeli author Nir Yaniv shows his remarkable versatility, collecting stories from over a decade of writing and a wide range of the fantastic. In turns humorous, lyrical, profound – but always entertaining – these are the haunting tales of an author at the height of his power.

“Each story is a bright flash of odd brilliance… unmissable.” – Lavie Tidhar, World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama.

“A fantastic, wonderful, weird story … Speaks very powerfully to the human spirit.” – Strange Horizons, on “Undercity”

“Hypnotic, surreal and prophetic, Nir Yaniv’s “The Dream of the Blue Man” is a story you won’t soon forget.” – World Fantasy Award winner Ann VanderMeer

And here’s the trailer:
Read the rest of this entry

From acclaimed author David Herter comes an epic novel in the tradition of Ray Bradbury’s SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and Tim Powers’s LAST CALL….

Halloween, 1931. The metropolis of Grenton. On the ruined canals, a clock tolls midnight. Willis H. O’Brien, the father of stop motion animation, seeks a dark miracle. And Henri Mordaunt, the undying Phantasmagoria magician, will soon provide it. An uncanny bargain is struck, leading to betrayal and dire retribution, and an act of cinematic alchemy that echoes down the history of fantastic film.

Halloween, 1977. For thirteen-year-old Will and his best friend Jim—amateur stop-motion animators and Famous Monsters of Filmland fanatics—summer darkens into mysterious autumn. A black balloon prowls theskies of their suburban neighborhood, strange portents appear on the midnight monster movie show, and their lifeless armatures twitch to uncanny life, long after midnight. Everything will lead them to a reclusive magician – once an acolyte of Willis O’Brien’s – who wrought a curse in the frames of an unseen, unseeable film named Dark Carnival. And everything is destined to end on Grenton’s ruined canals, at the faded cinema palace where STAR WARS has been showing non-stop since late May, a gateway into the mysteries of Grenton’s past, and a secret history playing out on either side of the silver screen….

Fully revised by the author, with new or expanded scenes, OCTOBER DARK is now available for Kindle and Nook in a deluxe E-book edition.

Read the rest of this entry

From the book jacket:

#1 New York Times bestseller Philip Pullman retells the world’s best-loved fairy tales on their 200th anniversary

Two centuries ago, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of Children’s and Household Tales. Now Philip Pullman, one of the most accomplished authors of our time, makes us fall in love all over again with the immortal tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Pullman retells his fifty favorites, from much-loved stories like “Cinderella” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel” to lesser-known treasures like “The Three Snake Leaves,” “Godfather Death” and “The Girl with No Hands.” At the end of each tale he offers a brief personal commentary, opening a window on the sources of the tales, the various forms they’ve taken over the centuries and their everlasting appeal.

Suffused with romance and villainy, danger and wit, the Grimms’ fairy tales have inspired Pullman’s unique creative vision—and his beguiling retellings will draw you back into a world that has long cast a spell on the Western imagination.

Here’s an audio snippet of Philip Pullman reading from the book…

Read the rest of this entry

Here’s the table of contents for Walk The Fire edited by John Mierau, a shared-world anthology featuring one helluva guy, SF Signal contributor Matthew Sanborn Smith.

1. “Shipwrecked : The True Account Of My Life Among The Natives Of Florida” by Nathan Lowell
2. “From Fire, Bring Ice” by Patrick McLean
3. “Lighter” by Brand Gamblin
4. “Embers” by Jason Andrew Bond
5. “The Faithful May Also Be Burned” by J. Daniel Sawyer
6. “Three Boxes” by Jake Bible
7. “Aborted Love With Chaos Motor at Lucky Pierre’s” by Matthew Sanborn Smith
8. “Remember Your Fangs” by Ed W Robertson

BONUS: Here’s an audio trailer.

Here’s the trailer for Drink for the Thirst to Come by Lawrence Santoro, described thusly:

Here There Be Monsters: The fifteen stories of Drink for the Thirst to Come lead the reader into the darkest corners of the imagination. The people who inhabit these places are demons or angels; here, life ends horribly or stretches to the darkest eternity. Here, the world dies whimpering, ends with a bang, or goes down with the clack of a billion tiny teeth. Here, you’ll find all the standard tropes, vampires, zombies, ghosts, ghouls. You may not recognize them, not right away. They might be standing in a quiet corner or walking in a sunny field or seated next to you on a bus, they might be pulling up to the gas pump or, hell, they might be you, sitting there, reading the book.

Read the rest of this entry

Author Lavie Tidhar has posted the trailer for his acclaimed novel, Osama.

In a world without global terrorism Joe, a private detective, is hired by a mysterious woman to find a man: the obscure author of pulp fiction novels featuring one Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante…

Joe’s quest to find the man takes him across the world, from the backwaters of Asia to the European Capitals of Paris and London, and as the mystery deepens around him there is one question he is trying hard not to ask: who is he, really, and how much of the books is fiction? Chased by unknown assailants, Joe’s identity slowly fragments as he discovers the shadowy world of the refugees, ghostly entities haunting the world in which he lives. Where do they come from? And what do they want? Joe knows how the story should end, but even he is not ready for the truths he’ll find in New York and, finally, on top a quiet hill above Kabul—nor for the choice he will at last have to make…

In Osama, Lavie Tidhar brilliantly delves into the post-9/11 global subconscious, mixing together elements of film noir, non-fiction, alternative history and international thriller to create an unsettling—yet utterly compelling—portrayal of our times.

Here’s the trailer. It’s spoken in Hungarian, but you can click on “Enable Captions” to watch it with English subtitles…
Read the rest of this entry

Here’s the heart-thumping book trailer for Malinda Lo’s upcoming science fiction thriller, Adaptation.

But first, a description of what the book’s about:

Across North America, flocks of birds hurl themselves into airplanes, causing at least a dozen to crash. Thousands of people die. Fearing terrorism, the United States government grounds all flights, and millions of travelers are stranded.

Reese and her debate team partner and longtime crush David are in Arizona when it happens. Everyone knows the world will never be the same. On their drive home to San Francisco, along a stretch of empty highway at night in the middle of Nevada, a bird flies into their headlights. The car flips over. When they wake up in a military hospital, the doctor won’t tell them what happened, where they are—or how they’ve been miraculously healed.

Things become even stranger when Reese returns home. San Francisco feels like a different place with police enforcing curfew, hazmat teams collecting dead birds, and a strange presence that seems to be following her. When Reese unexpectedly collides with the beautiful Amber Gray, her search for the truth is forced in an entirely new direction—and threatens to expose a vast global conspiracy that the government has worked for decades to keep secret.

Adaptation is a bold contemporary science-fiction thriller from the acclaimed author of Ash.

Here’s the trailer:
Read the rest of this entry

Andrew Porter has forwarded us this book trailer for The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter. The trailer is a sequence of people (beginning with Pratchett and including Baxter, Neil Gaiman, Peter James, Tony Robinson, Robert Llewellyn, Michael Logan, David Logan and many others) reading from the book.

Before you see it it, it would help to know what it’s about:

The possibilities are endless. (Just be careful what you wish for. . . .)

1916: The Western Front. Private Percy Blakeney wakes up. He is lying on fresh spring grass. He can hear birdsong and the wind in the leaves. Where have the mud, blood, and blasted landscape of no-man’s-land gone? For that matter, where has Percy gone?

2015: Madison, Wisconsin. Police officer Monica Jansson is exploring the burned-out home of a reclusive—some say mad, others allege dangerous—scientist who seems to have vanished. Sifting through the wreckage, Jansson find a curious gadget: a box containing some rudimentary wiring, a three-way switch, and . . . a potato. It is the prototype of an invention that will change the way humankind views the world forever.

The first novel in an exciting new collaboration between Discworld creator Terry Pratchett and the acclaimed SF writer Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth transports readers to the ends of the earth—and far beyond. All it takes is a single step. . . .

Now, here’s the trailer:
Read the rest of this entry

Evildoers beware! Retribution is at hand, thanks to Britain’s best-kept secret agents!!
Certainly no strangers to peculiar occurrences, agents Wellington Books and Eliza Braun are nonetheless stunned to observe a fellow passenger aboard Britain’s latest hypersteam train suddenly vanish in a dazzling bolt of lightning. They soon discover this is not the only such disappearance . . . with each case going inexplicably unexamined by the Crown.

The fate of England is once again in the hands of an ingenious archivist paired with a beautiful, fearless lady of adventure. And though their foe be fiendishly clever, so then is Mr. Books . . . and Miss Braun still has a number of useful and unusual devices hidden beneath her petticoats.

And here’s the book trailer…
Read the rest of this entry

On July 10, 2012, Del Rey will be publishing Year Zero by Rob Reid (the guy who started the company that built the Rhapsody music service).

Here’s the description:

An alien advance party was suddenly nosing around my planet. Worse, they were lawyering up. . . .
In the hilarious tradition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Rob Reid takes you on a headlong journey through the outer reaches of the universe—and the inner workings of our absurdly dysfunctional music industry.

Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. And boy, do they have news.

The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on humanity’s music ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), when American pop songs first reached alien ears. This addiction has driven a vast intergalactic society to commit the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang. The resulting fines and penalties have bankrupted the whole universe. We humans suddenly own everything—and the aliens are not amused.

Nick Carter has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly, and he’s an unlikely galaxy-hopping hero: He’s scared of heights. He’s also about to be fired. And he happens to have the same name as a Backstreet Boy. But he does know a thing or two about copyright law. And he’s packing a couple of other pencil-pushing superpowers that could come in handy.

Soon he’s on the run from a sinister parrot and a highly combustible vacuum cleaner. With Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick now has forty-eight hours to save humanity, while hopefully wowing the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.

And here’s the book trailer…
Read the rest of this entry

Here’s Robert Jackson Bennett baring his all for his soon-to-never-be-released novel A Sexual Experience: The Robert Jackson Bennett Story.
Read the rest of this entry

From New York Times bestselling, Hugo and Nebula award-winning authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear comes The Mongoliad Trilogy, the first installment in the Foreworld Saga, a collaborative epic (with Erik Bear, Joseph Brassey, E.D. deBirmingham, Cooper Moo, and Mark Teppo) unlike any other that will enthrall fans of fantasy, martial arts, and historical fiction.
Here’s the book description:

The first novel to be released in The Foreworld Saga, The Mongoliad: Book One, is an epic-within-an-epic, taking place in 13th century. In it, a small band of warriors and mystics raise their swords to save Europe from a bloodthirsty Mongol invasion. Inspired by their leader (an elder of an order of warrior monks), they embark on a perilous journey and uncover the history of hidden knowledge and conflict among powerful secret societies that had been shaping world events for millennia.

But the saga reaches the modern world via a circuitous route. In the late 19th century, Sir Richard F. Burton, an expert on exotic languages and historical swordsmanship, is approached by a mysterious group of English martial arts aficionados about translating a collection of long-lost manuscripts. Burton dies before his work is finished, and his efforts were thought lost until recently rediscovered by a team of amateur archaeologists in the ruins of a mansion in Trieste, Italy. From this collection of arcana, the incredible tale of The Mongoliad was recreated.

Full of high adventure, unforgettable characters, and unflinching battle scenes, The Mongoliad ignites a dangerous quest where willpower and blades are tested and the scope of world-building is redefined.

And here’s the trailer:
Read the rest of this entry