Reviewing the Mail: Week of 12/27

Welcome to the last "Reviewing the Mail" post of this year, covering the books that arrived Christmas week at my small home in riverine New Jersey. I haven't read these particular editions since the books arrived, but here's what I can tell you about them anyway:

The George R.R. Martin-edited Wild Cards was one of the earlier shared-worlds series -- I think Thieves' World kicked it all off, but Wild Cards was only a little behind -- and has been running, with some stops and starts, for over twenty-five years. But most of the older books in the series have been out of print for most of that time; reprinting efforts have never managed to get beyond the first half-dozen titles. But there's another effort underway now, and it's hit the fourth book: Aces Abroad is coming as a Tor trade paperback on January 13. It has the original eleven stories from the 1988 edition -- by Martin, John J. Miller, Lewis Shiner, Stephen Leigh, Edward Bryant, and others -- plus two new stories by Kevin Andrew Murphy and Carrie Vaughan.

And I also have two manga volumes coming out from Vertical this month: first up is Ajin: Demi-Human, Vol. 2 by Gamon Sakurai. It continues the story of the "demi-humans," who keep coming back when they're killed and thus -- because this is comics, and so drama is the most important thing -- have been declared to be not human and thus fair game to be killed as often as anyone wants. Our hero is the requisite callow young man

The other book I have from Vertical is Tsutomu Nihei's Knights of Sidonia, Vol. 12, in which the remnants of humanity are crammed into one giant ship, pursued by creepily organic space-monsters, fighting back in big mecha-suits, and searching for somewhere new to live. I looked at the first volume in a round-up post last year.