A new Judge Dee mystery!
While visiting the mysterious castle of Maidstone for an investigation, Judge Dee and Jonathan discover the only thing more menacing than a vampire child is twin vampire children…
Photo: Hao Zhang [via Unsplash]
Who doesn’t love a crashed spaceship? There is always a mystery, the promise of—what? Treasure? An alien monster hiding in wait? Maybe both! Something, at any rate, is there, in the ruined grandeur of a vast technological marvel. Who can resist it?
Not me, that’s for sure. I put one in Neom, my new SF novel from Tachyon, set in the world of Central Station. This one’s “the Compassionate Heaven, a cargo ship out from Mars on an Earth run,” which somehow crashed deep within the Sinai Desert, stories of treasure swirling round it for years. But when we find it, it has long been empty.
It’s one of those fun tropes, cropping up everywhere. I have a love of old SF, so these ships have been abandoned for a while! What’s your favourite? Here are five of mine.
Judge Dee must himself stand trial before his fellow vampires for the loss of a valuable manuscript, even as those vampires are murdered, one by one, by an unknown hand.
Paris is burning and Judge Dee and Jonathan are on the run. To guarantee their safety, they join a band of seven vampires escaping to England. The only problem? Someone in their midst is killing off members of their group one by one. It’s of no matter to the Judge, provided they don’t breach the Unalienable Obligations, but inevitably he’s drawn into events.
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Escapement, a new novel evoking Westerns, surrealism, epic fantasy, mythology, and circus extravaganzas from author Lavie Tidhar—available September 21st from Tachyon Publications.
Judge Dee returns to solve a new case involving a Parisian party gone wrong. But this time? Everyone in attendance is a suspect, including the judge himself.
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Judge Dee is back to solve a brand-new case involving the mysterious death of the vampire Count Werdenfels. The mystery? Who killed him. The twist? Three different people are proudly proclaiming to have committed the crime.
I spent the past decade trying to pitch a simple idea to publishers: a mass market anthology of international speculative fiction for the bookstore shelf. The responses varied from, well, no response at all to an under-an-hour rejection (that one still hurts).
The idea is simple and, to me, both logical and necessary. I am of that new generation of writers who grew up in a language other than English, and who decided at some point that our way in is to write in this peculiar, second language. Somehow, we reasoned, against all odds and common sense, we’ll break through into that rarefied Anglophone world, maybe even make a go of it. After all, how hard could English be?
No vampire is ever innocent…
The wandering Judge Dee serves as judge, jury, and executioner for any vampire who breaks the laws designed to safeguard their kind’s survival. This new case in particular puts his mandate to the test.
Illustration by Walter Crane (From Henry Gilbert's King Arthur's Knights: The Tales Retold for Boys and Girls, 1911)
Is an Arthurian story a telling or retelling? What are the Arthurian mythos, exactly? And was Merlin really an old dude with a big bushy beard, or do we all just remember it wrong?
To answer these questions, I chose the only path one could, reasonably, take: that is, I got dropped, through no fault of my own, into teaching a group of American undergrad students an advanced literature course on British Fantasy Fiction.
How and why and are you mad? are probably questions for another time and story.
Security through physicality. Security through redundancy. Security through obscurity.
How do immortal artificial intelligences defend themselves? With an air gap. With a security force that has no connection to anything that can harm them. With a young woman, trained to fight and to die who, along with her cohort must keep them safe. But In Xanadu things don’t always go as planned…
My first children’s novel, Candy, is out now from Scholastic UK, and forthcoming soon in several European countries. This is as surprising to me as it must be for anyone who realises my last book in the UK was about Adolf Hitler, but there you go! Candy is about a 12 year old girl detective, Nelle Faulkner, in a world where chocolate has been made illegal and children now run the candy gangs…
Which got me thinking of some of the classic heroines in children’s books that continue to have such a resonance to this day, and who must have been in the back of my mind as I was writing! No doubt I’ve missed many—Meg from A Wrinkle in Time? George from the Famous Five? Anna from Mister God, This is Anna? Dorothy? Hermione? You tell me!—but these five in particular stood out for me as I was writing.
Can dreams come true? They can if you win the lottery, which promises to provide what your heart desires. For a humble shopkeeper in Yiwu, it’s a living, selling lottery tickets. Until a winning ticket opens up mysteries he’d never imagined.
A space opera adventure set in a universe controlled and run by Jewish religious authorities. An enforcer is sent to a distant planet where he discovers an android who changes his mind about what is right and wrong.
Central Station, my new SF novel from Tachyon Publications, is itself a sort of homage to a bygone era of science fiction, one in which many novels were initially published as more or less self-contained stories in magazines before being “collected” into a book. Appropriately, Central Station corresponds with many other works of the corpus of science fiction, though perhaps not always the obvious ones. Here are five novels that helped shape my own work.
