Monday, December 16, 2013

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/14

Hey, I'm back! Didja miss me?

This Monday, I have two books to write about, both of which arrived mysteriously in my mailbox over the past week, left surreptitiously by agents of a government organization or a wide-ranging private contractor. I have not yet studied these documents in great detail, but I know that they are fascinating and unique. But here's what I have managed to decode so far:

Robot Uprisings is a new, mostly original anthology, with seventeen stories about robots conquering humans (or the reverse), assembled and edited by Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams. Wilson is the current go-to guy for killer robots, being the author of Robopocalypse -- and a brand-new story in this book -- and Adams is the king of 21st century anthologies. So, if you're in the market for stories about robots rising up and smashing mankind, this is the best pedigree you could hope for. Other authors examining killer robots include Charles Yu, Genevieve Valentine, Hugh Howey, Cory Doctorow (reprinting 2010's "Epoch"), Alastair Reynolds (reprinting 2010's "Sleepover"), Alan Dean Foster, Ian McDonald, Seana McGuire, and Nnedi Okrafor. Robot Uprisings is an original trade paperback from Vintage, coming on April 1st 2014.

And from Vertical comes Kyoko Okazaki's classic single-volume manga Pink, originally published in Japan in 1989. (Okazaki is also the author of Helter Skelter, which Vertical recently published and which I haven't managed to read yet.) Pink is the story of a young, aimless call girl and a young would-be novelist kept by an older woman -- and, today, is seen as one of the quintessential expressions of Japan's "Bubble era," when it looked like their economy would keep rising forever and Japan would be the next great world power. Pink is available now, and it looks lovely.

No comments:

Post a Comment