Tor.com Publishing Fall 2015 Sampler

Tor.com Publishing Fall 2015 Sampler

Tor.com Publishing Fall 2015 Sampler

Tor.com Publishing Fall 2015 Sampler

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Overview

Enjoy samples from Tor.com Publishing's first ten novellas in the Fall 2015 sampler!

Featuring Kai Ashante Wilson, Nnedi Okorafor, K. J. Parker, Daniel Polansky, and many more, this sampler contains exciting new fantasy worlds, harrowing science fiction adventures, stolen memories, edible angels, and talking salamanders.

The novellas these chapters are taken from are available in ebook, trade paperback, and audiobook.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780765387332
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Publication date: 08/15/2015
Sold by: Macmillan
Format: eBook
Pages: 32
Sales rank: 578,066
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

Paul Cornell
Nnedi Okorafor
K. J. Parker
Daniel Polansky
Alter S. Reiss
Angela Slatter
Michael R. Underwood
Matt Wallace
Kai Ashante Wilson
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley


KAI ASHANTE WILSON was the 2010 Octavia Butler scholar at Clarion writing workshop in San Diego. He won the Crawford award for best first novel of 2016, and his works have been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Most of his stories can be read at Tor.com, and the rest at Fantasy-magazine.com or in the anthology Stories for Chip. His novellas The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and A Taste of Honey are available from all fine e-book purveyors. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.
Paul Cornell has written episodes of Elementary, Doctor Who, Primeval, Robin Hood and many other TV series, including his own children’s show, Wavelength. He’s worked for every major comics company, including his creator-owned series Saucer State for IDW and This Damned Band for Dark Horse, and runs for Marvel and DC on Batman and Robin, Wolverine and Young Avengers. He’s the writer of the Lychford rural fantasy novellas from Tor.com Publishing. He’s won the BSFA Award for his short fiction, an Eagle Award for his comics, a Hugo Award for his podcast and shares in a Writer’s Guild Award for his Doctor Who. He’s the co-host of Hammer House of Podcast.
Alter S. Reiss is an archaeologist and writer who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Naomi and their son Uriel. He likes good books, bad movies, and old time radio shows.
NNEDI OKORAFOR, born to Igbo Nigerian parents in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 8, 1974, is an author of fantasy and science fiction for both adults and younger readers. Her Tor.com novella Binti won the 2015 Hugo and Nebula Awards; her children's book Long Juju Man won the 2007-08 Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa; and her adult novel Who Fears Death was a Tiptree Honor Book. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University at Buffalo.
Having worked in journalism, numismatics and the law, K. J. Parker now writes for a precarious living. He is the author of Devices and Desires, Evil for Evil, The Devil You Know, and other novels, and has won the World Fantasy Award twice. Parker also writes under the name Tom Holt.
Specialising in dark fantasy and horror, Angela Slatter is the author of the Aurealis Award-winning The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, the World Fantasy Award finalist Sourdough and Other Stories, Aurealis finalist Midnight and Moonshine (with Lisa L. Hannett), among others. She is the first Australian to win a British Fantasy Award, holds an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was an inaugural Queensland Writers Fellow.
MATT WALLACE is the author of The Next Fix, The Failed Cities, and the novella series, Slingers. He's also penned over one hundred short stories, some of which have won awards and been nominated for others, in addition to writing for film and television. In his youth he traveled the world as a professional wrestler and unarmed combat and self-defense instructor before retiring to write full-time. He now resides in Los Angeles with the love of his life and inspiration for Sin du Jour's resident pastry chef.
DANIEL POLANSKY was born in 1984 in Baltimore, Maryland. He is the author of the Low Town series, the Hugo nominated The Builders, and A City Dreaming. He currently resides on a hill in eastern Los Angeles.
Sylvia Spruck Wrigley was born in Germany and spent her childhood in Los Angeles. She emigrated to Scotland where she guided German tourists around the Trossachs and searched for the supernatural. She now splits her time between South Wales and Andalucia where she writes about plane crashes and faeries, which have more in common than most people might imagine. Her fiction was nominated for a Nebula in 2013 and her short stories have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Michael R. Underwood has circumnavigated the globe, danced the tango with legends and knows why Thibault cancels out Capo Ferro. He also rolls a mean d20. His novels include Geekomancy, Celebromancy and Shield and Crocus. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and an ever-growing library, and when he's not writing/gaming/living the dream he's the North American Sales and Marketing Manager for Angry Robot Books.

He's also part of the Hugo-nominated podcast, The Skiffy and Fanty Show.

Read an Excerpt

Tor.com Fall Sampler


By Tom Doherty Associates

Tom Doherty Associates

Copyright © 2015 Tom Doherty Associates
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8733-2



CHAPTER 1

Only mud came up from the wells at Ajeric, no water. That sometimes happened, and most of the caravan had rationed for it; but many hadn't. One among the guardsmen, Gangy, who'd been spendthrift with his water, began to mutter in a manner damaging to brotherly morale. It would begin by feeling your eyes dry tearless and unblinkable, said Gangy, your tongue swelling blueblack in your mouth, and skin shriveling up into leather, into jerky. Perhaps a year hence, some wayfarer would spot a skull scoured meatless by the sands, sun-bleached: yours — The seditious remainder cut short by the hard back of Captain's hand. They would all reach the next wells alive, said Master Suresh, so long as grown men didn't sit and weep, boo hoo hoo like some sad whore, her six best boys lost this week to marriage. We must do now as she did then: dry the tears, and hustle!

The caravan pressed on. There was no talk, no sound, except the jingling of harness and the vague shush of sands shifted by their passage.

Every night the brazen sphere dissolves in a molten line, compelling the gaze westward when the sky's dark otherwise. With a similar compulsion, the least dampness in the driest wastes would seize Demane's whole attention. No stopping at nightfall, nor for midnight, either: the caravan was still going after moonset. Under cloudless constellations, the camels trudged along the banks of a dead river, extinct since prehistory. They came to a stretch of arroyo where humidity hovered, where some deep spring leaked up even to the surface. Demane snapped the reins of his camel, hurrying the beast from midpack to the caravan's forefront, where Captain rode.

Master Suresh kept watch on all such urgencies. He too brought his camel up abreast, in time to see Demane's gesture and hear the offending word. "Water?" the caravanmaster cried. "Succubee of thirst and mirage! They have fucked out that man's brains, Captain. Tell your fevered brother: this river died before the dragons burnt Daluça!"

The captain ran every day, and much farther on some, whether for penance or harder exercise, who knew. That day he'd run from Ajeric's wells until after sundown. He'd only just mounted his camel. With heart-spoke fatigue, he looked at Demane. Are you sure? Don't make a fool of me.

"I'm telling you, Captain." Demane pointed again down the arroyo's draw. "It's good water right there."

Captain turned to the caravanmaster and gave beautiful corroboration. "It's yours to say: stop or go on. But the water is here, Master Suresh." The master muttered vile curses — not really doubting, though. The captain's word had weight.

"Hold here!" the master bellowed to his caravan.

Spades, mallet, chisel. Demane chose Messed Up, Michelo, Wock, and the captain himself: the men strongest in the caravan. The long draw was more rock than sand, but not steep. By dim stars, the chosen picked their way down. The silver night ablaze for him, Demane ran ahead to where wetness rose richest, near a boulder.

Bent over, noses in the sand and pressed to the rim of the half-ton slab, even the others could smell it. But there was no trickle, only a dark stain in the sand. Nor could they shift the stone, and to bring down more hands would only crowd and hinder, not help.

"Let me try something," Demane said. He had the captain give his highest, sharpest cries, and listening to echoes the rock returned, chose a spot to crouch. He milked his third eye for vitriol. It took time, and to the others it seemed that Demane only knelt, lost in thought or prayer for water. He'd once accomplished this feat as a boy, when still a novice, but never since in earnest.

Master Suresh called down bitterly.

Dolce, the captain called back.

Some time later, Messed Up nudged Demane's shoulder. "Damn, Sorcerer." He breathed by mouth, and poked Demane again. "Why you just setting there?" Demane tried to wave him off, focusing on the contract-release of the tiniest, most obscure muscles.

Captain pulled Messed Up back.

Mouth full, Demane bowed and pressed his lips to a crack under the rock. He spat hard. Weak phosphoros was hid by his body, but the rock cried out — inorganic cavils and groans. "¡Coño!" "The fuck was that?" the brothers exclaimed. Virulent potency sheared deep feet through rock, and then sinking, smelted and cracked the stone. Igneous fumes, hot, hissed out. Demane jumped up and back with the rest. When the fiery stink had cleared, Captain waved Demane beside him, and the other three to the rock's opposite side. This time their strength sufficed to tip the boulder out from the greater shelf beneath. They sent it on its way, sliding to the sandy bottom.

"Pero no veo naá ..." Wock began, and then heard. So did they all: a burbling sigh, the sweet sound of water pissing through fractured stone; then saw the starlit froth too, as it welled up, running away in glitters over the thirsty sand and gravel. Messed Up fell greedily to hands and knees.

"Water," Captain sang to the ridge above. "Come down." The caravan came.

* * *

Abundant water flowed with the effect of wine. The caravan drank and drank and lay down anywhere. Brothers should have known the routine. Five different men guarded each quarter of the night, while four slept the night through. They'd done so more than eighty times already, at every sleep-camp when Captain called the watch. But by the lucky springs, so late it would dawn soon, Captain sat for a moment in the sand. And it must surely have felt soft to him, for he began to nod, his lips slackening. Across camp, watching between slow blinks, Demane lay stretched out already. It had been a long day of highs and lows; he too was at lowest ebb. His knack for medicinals, as it turned out, had proved no help at all with venoms. That feat had drained Demane to the dregs. He ought to practice more, but why, nasty stuff ... Demane slept too.

Some nightmare woke him. The fleshcolored sky was sallowing in the orient. Over the lip of the ridge, down the arroyo's east bank, ragged shapes with machètes or spears loped from rock to rock, sliding where their footing crumbled, descending on the caravan asleep in the bottom sands. Thirty? No, there were fifty of them at least!

Desperados.

Demane's alarums woke the camp. Snoring brothers took hard kicks. Some sleepers he snatched up by the hair and dropped on foot awake. As soon as Demane began to yell, every bandit set up whooping, lunatic as hyenas. Twice the number of blades bristled downslope as up, and there was nobody silent, everyone screaming. Before the teeth of spears could chew them, the merchants scrambled past the brothers to cower against the western bank; and then top and bottom jaw of the skirmish closed. The merchants all lived. Brothers died.

Where was Captain? Amidst the enemy already, a blur of black robes, quarter-way-up the eastern slope in the thick of them. The captain went from one to another, inspiring shrill agony or utter silence as he passed. By sixes and sevens the bandits would close with him before he got the numbers down. A full half dozen pressing together could scrawl shallow wounds on him, or rend his robe. Captain in turn pocked the crush with every movement.

Chickenty thought he was a hero too. Though Demane called him back where the brothers rallied at the bottom, Chickenty ran on upslope. He speared one desperado, and then another behind that first. He engaged a third. Weeks before, in the last raid, he'd worked wonders with his quick feet on firm ground. But sand shifts and rolls, worse on the uphill, and no one's feet can be as fast or sure. Some fourth desperado came driving in on Chick's blindside, and he did hear Demane's warning shout. But his step sideways was not quick enough, and he slipped. The spear skewered Chick kidney-to-kidney. Crumpling sidewise, he vomited blood, and was the first brother to die.

There is a principle called TSIM. Through deep time the universe complicates, all things whatsoever arising from the mother quantum, precisely so this man (writhing now on Demane's spearpoint) might enjoy sentience, choice, and love. This is TSIM. And all who claim to follow the principle must have hands loath and cold when it comes time to kill. You're sworn to better work than murder. Unreckoned aeons gone by, and incalculable effort spent, for what? To kill a man, your unctuous shaft dragging, slippery and bone-caught, through your grasp? Demane braced his foot to the deadman's chest, crushing ribs and sternum under his heel, until his spearpoint pulled loose. Clear as day he heard the Tower laughing on its left side: tsoa. Chaos and pointlessness are the point! That is tsoa. But divinity knocked about inside Demane like some great-winged bird caught indoors, frantic to find that one open window again; and so, however slow and reluctant, still he had faster hands, stronger arms, than anyone facing him.

Xho Xho, Walead, and Bou, clumsy runts all three, wisely kept together. Four times they repeated the same maneuver — scatter, flank, triple-thrust — that Captain had taught them. But then Walead came up tardy on the left and Bou, in front, died for it. So too might have Xho Xho, when the bandit whirled right, wolf-howling. Demane threw his spear into the man's warcry. Bad teeth had clamped onto the shaft when Demane wrenched his spearhead out.

Messed Up roared and stabbed. A wattle of gore, long and red, dangled off his jaw. The seemly flesh had been laid back, his bloodwashed molars in naked discovery, also the bones of his cheek and jaw, and much busy undergristle besides. Desperados scattered away from him. But Messed Up caught them, and killed them, anyway. Rats in rout, with the ratter giving chase! Behold the wake of strewn bodies, and here comes the big one himself, red-toothed and crazed. About the business best suiting him.

No one could save Wock. Nor the twins, Cruz and Glório. Demane didn't even know they'd died 'til afterwards.

Teef and Barkeem, hemmed in by mayhem. Hard pressed by two bandits, T-Jawn scrabbled for footing on a steep patch of sand. He fell, slaughter-ready, before both spears. Demane was too far away to rescue any of the three. Not the captain, though; he swooped in, with the same acts dealing death and deliverance. The point and edge of his spear opened red lips in one bandit's throat. Lifesblood emptied from that new mouth, while the other bandit took the same blow's downstroke, which cored his heart. Captain made the body dance with the twist-jerk of freeing his spear. Beside the two abruptly dead, one of the desperadoes attacking Teef quailed and ran. Captain threw his spear half through the fleeing man's back. He left the corpse transfixed, and yanked his old-style Daluçan knife from its baldric. Called, properly, "sword," the blade was arm's length, and much too long to ply for eating, hunting, or any use apart from war. Barkeem backed from some long-armed bandit who had two daggers, twin snakes, striking from either hand. Captain, in the act of drawing his sword, took the top off that bandit's head. Crown and brow slid, widthwise, from cheeks and jowls. Walead and Xho Xho were in straits again. The captain flew to their salvation — not as some crow might, but his robes as black as wings, and covering the ground as swiftly.

Demane killed the man he fought, and the hot excess of bandit's blood provoked a vision, a moment of retrospect, or of some life unlived. Bangles, khol'd eyes, ankles chiming tiny bells. The captain's naked torso, lithe and rippling. His thighs half-clad in gauze of gold, loins in leopard suede. Some history that might have been, or had been: the captain dancing for the Olorumi sovereign or Kidanese empress. When that august hand waved to clear a marble hall, one hot glance said to him: You, stay. Demane glimpsed shadows of a world forgone in Captain's prosecution of the counterattack. Had nimble limbs turned to other purposes, had they cultivated a different grace. Demane saw some brother down.

Faedou rolled apart from a throttled corpse, the dead man still clutching a knife driven into living flesh. Faedou pried off the futile grip, and plucked the blade from his thigh. On first and second attempt, he couldn't stand. By the third, Demane had reached him and was kneeling. "Sorcerer ...," Faedou panted shallowly, "... head up!"

Some mother's son tilted downhill. About thirteen years old, maybe twelve, the bandit boy held his spear as mounted men hold a lance. There was time and space enough for Demane to throw his spear, but he didn't. Even a moment later, his reach being much longer, Demane might have simply angled up his spear. Running headlong, the boy would have impaled himself on the point, like a chunk of meat on a skewer. Instead, Demane dropped his spear and caught the boy's with one hand, just below the point.

Though slowed, the boy wasn't stopped. Faedou howled and curled like a beetle, his leg kicked or trod in the scuffle. Demane's palm burned as the spearshaft greased down his bloodslick grip. The leverage was all wrong for him, perfect for the boy: on the downhill, speeding weight behind him, a two-handed grip. Demane had thrown his right and stronger hand back, braced to the ground, to keep himself from reeling ass over end. The child bore down, driving with desperate strength. Chapped lips snarling back from whitest teeth.

This was not the way he'd thought he'd die. But as the spearpoint broke skin on his chest, Demane felt only sublime relief: TSIM. No one else's son would die by his hands today, or ever again. Then red gleamed, sunlight on wet steel. Smitten off, the boy's head flew, fell, rolled away downhill. Arterial jets from the stump spewed brighter amidst darker dribble. It listed, its knees buckled, and rather than drop the corpse went subsiding down in stages, to bow over and decant headless onto the sands. Captain —

CHAPTER 2

Judith Mawson was seventy-one years old, and she knew what people said about her: that she was bitter about nothing in particular, angry all the time, that the old cow only ever listened when she wanted to. She didn't give a damn. She had a list of what she didn't like, and almost everything — and everybody — in Lychford was on it. She didn't like the dark, which was why she bit the bullet on her energy bills and kept the upstairs lights on at home all night.

Well, that was one of the reasons.

She didn't like the cold, but couldn't afford to do the same with the heating, so she walked outside a lot. Again, that was only one of the reasons. At this moment, as she trudged through the dark streets of the little Cotswolds market town, heading home from the quiz and curry night at the town hall at which she had been, as always, a team of one, her hands buried in the pockets of her inappropriate silver anorak, she was muttering under her breath about how she'd get an earful from Arthur for being more than ten minutes late, about how her foot had started hurting again for no reason.

The words gave her the illusion of company as she pushed herself along on her walking stick, past the light and laughter of the two remaining pubs on the Market Place, to begin the slow trudge uphill on the street of charity shops, towards her home in the Rookeries.

She missed the normal businesses: the butcher and the greengrocer and the baker. She'd known people who'd tried to open shops here in the last ten years. They'd had that hopeful smell about them, the one that invited punishment. She hadn't cared enough about any of them to warn them. She was never sure about calling anyone a friend.

None of the businesses had lasted six months. That was the way in all the small towns these days. Judith hated nostalgia. It was just the waiting room for death. She of all people needed reasons to keep going. However, in the last few years she'd started to feel things really were getting worse.

With the endless recession, "austerity" as those wankers called it, a darkness had set in. The new estates built to the north — the Backs, they had come to be called — were needed, people had to live somewhere, but she'd been amazed at the hatred they'd inspired, the way people in the post office queue talked about them, as if Lychford had suddenly become an urban wasteland. The telemarketers who called her up now seemed either desperate or resigned to the point of a mindless drone, until Judith, who had time on her hands and ice in her heart, engaged them in dark conversations that always got her removed from their lists.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Tor.com Fall Sampler by Tom Doherty Associates. Copyright © 2015 Tom Doherty Associates. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
THE SORCERER OF THE WILDEEPS,
WITCHES OF LYCHFORD,
SUNSET MANTLE,
BINTI,
THE LAST WITNESS,
OF SORROW AND SUCH,
ENVY OF ANGELS,
THE BUILDERS,
DOMNALL AND THE BORROWED CHILD,
GENRENAUTS EPISODE 1: THE SHOOTOUT SOLUTION,

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