Ao contrário do mercado português, a maioria dos lançamentos começa a ser publicitada largos meses antes do lançamento, por vezes quando o livro ainda nem sequer está terminado. Deixo-vos, assim, alguns dos livros que já estão anunciados e cuja data de lançamento já estou a seguir.
Locke & Key de Joe Hill e Gabriel Rodriguez é das mais fantásticas séries de horror de todos os tempos. Joe Hill, filho de Stephen King, é conhecido pela sua obra escrita e nesta parceria com Gabriel Rodriguez criou uma série presente em qualquer lista de boa desenhada de horror. Apesar da série de 6 volumes estar terminada, em Janeiro será lançado Small World, uma história autónoma que decorre no mesmo mundo ficcional e muito material extra, uma edição que parece sobretudo para coleccionadores:
hree years after wrapping up their award-winning, best-selling Locke & Key saga, the team that built Keyhouse returns to Lovecraft, Massachusetts with a new tale of terror and suspense! An impossible birthday gift for two little girls unexpectedly throws open a door to a monster on eight legs!
This deluxe hardcover edition contains the new 24-page story and adds pages from various drafts of Joe Hill’s scripts, from the earliest hand-written pages to the various revisions; process pages from Gabriel Rodriguez; a special pinup from Brian Coldrick, and more!
Desconheço outros trabalhos dos autores, mas pegando na história épica do herói que batalha Grendel (a propósito, aconselho a leitura da história contada da perspectiva do monstro, publicada cá pela Saída de Emergência), este volume parece prometer um bom trabalho, pelo menos do ponto de vista gráfico:
Existem organizadores de antologias cujo trabalho se destaca e John Joseph Adams é um deles. Todas as antologias que organiza possuem histórias excelentes e uma qualidade média acima do razoável, histórias concretas com princípio, meio e fim, que ultrapassam o objectivo do conceptual e nos apresentam uma boa narrativa. Esta antologia promete muita acção num enquadramento menos forte a nível científico, com autores como Alan Dean Foster, Charlie Jane Anders ou Kameron Hurley.
Depois de Norse mythology, Neil Gaiman lança esta adaptação para Banda Desenhada de um clássico gótico:
Somewhere in the night, a raven caws, an author’s pen scratches, and thunder claps. The author wants to write nonfiction: stories about frail women in white nightgowns, mysterious bumps in the night, and the undead rising to collect old debts. But he keeps getting interrupted by the everyday annoyances of talking ravens, duels to the death, and his sinister butler.
Simultaneamente amaldiçoando pela paragem de Abarat e saltando de alegria por nova história de Cliver Barker, eis Infernal Parade, uma novela onde o autor parece ter recuperado o espírito negro dos seus livros:
From the beginning of his distinguished career, Clive Barker has been the great visionary artist of contemporary dark fantasy, a form that Barker himself has termed “the Fantastique.” Through his many novels, stories, paintings and films, he had presented us with unforgettable images of the monstrous and the sacred, the beautiful and the grotesque. His body of work constitutes a great and varied contribution to modern popular culture.
This astonishing novella, Infernal Parade, perfectly encapsulates Barker’s unique abilities. Like the earlier Tortured Souls, an account of bizarre—and agonizing—transformations, Infernal Parade is tightly focused, intensely imagined, and utterly unlike anything else you will ever read. It begins with the tale of a convicted criminal, Tom Requiem, who returns from the brink of death to restore both fear and a touch of awe to a complacent world. Tom becomes the leader of the eponymous “parade,” which ranges from the familiar precincts of North Dakota to the mythical city of Karantica. Golems, vengeful humans both living and dead, and assorted impossible creatures parade across these pages. The result is a series of highly compressed, interrelated narratives that are memorable, disturbing, and impossible to set aside.
Infernal Parade is quintessential Barker: witty, elegantly composed, filled with dark and often savage wonders. It proves once again that, in Barker’s hands, the Fantastique is not only alive and well, but flourishing. This is vital, visionary fiction by a modern master of the form.
Apesar de se basear num mundo criado noutras séries, Empire Games é o primeiro volume de uma nova série de Charles Stross de realidades alternativas e viagens por mundos paralelos. Uma série sobre a qual tenho grande curiosidade, principalmente depois de ter visto o autor na Eurocon, de espírito sagaz e cómico:
Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games. Expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes. The year is 2020. It’s seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence―the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth’s great leap forward―has a problem. For years, she’s warned everyone: “The Americans are coming.” Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis.
In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Miriam’s own estranged daughter to spy across timelines in order to bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security.
Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies try to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn’t result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women―a mother and her long-lost daughter―are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.
Mais conhecido por O Último Unicórnio, Peter Beagle escreveu muita fantasia de premissa menos medieval que, mantendo um tom clássico na estrutura, contem elementos estranhos mas fascinantes. In Calabria será o próximo livro do autor, com data marcada para Fevereiro:
Claudio Bianchi has lived alone for many years on a hillside in Southern Italy’s scenic Calabria. Set in his ways and suspicious of outsiders, Claudio has always resisted change, preferring farming and writing poetry. But one chilly morning, as though from a dream, an impossible visitor appears at the farm. When Claudio comes to her aid, an act of kindness throws his world into chaos. Suddenly he must stave off inquisitive onlookers, invasive media, and even more sinister influences.
Apesar de desconhecer o autor, a premissa desta história é suficiente para a colocar como possível aquisição para os próximos tempos:
What if you could live multiple lives simultaneously, have constant, perfect companionship, and never die? That’s the promise of Join, a revolutionary technology that allows small groups of minds to unite, forming a single consciousness that experiences the world through multiple bodies. But as two best friends discover, the light of that miracle may be blinding the world to its horrors.
Chance and Leap are jolted out of their professional routines by a terrifying stranger—a remorseless killer who freely manipulates the networks that regulate life in the post-Join world. Their quest for answers—and survival—brings them from the networks and spire communities they’ve known to the scarred heart of an environmentally ravaged North American continent and an underground community of the “ferals” left behind by the rush of technology.
In the storytelling tradition of classic speculative fiction from writers like David Mitchell and Michael Chabon, Join offers a pulse-pounding story that poses the largest possible questions: How long can human life be sustained on our planet in the face of environmental catastrophe? What does it mean to be human, and what happens when humanity takes the next step in its evolution? If the individual mind becomes obsolete, what have we lost and gained, and what is still worth fighting for?
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