The Book Plank

Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu A gentle fantasy. Love, paper tigers, mail order bride, culture clash. Ken Liu's incredible story "Paper Menagerie" just became the first work of fiction to win all three of SF's major awards: the Hugo, the Nebula and the World Fantasy Award. And we're proud to be able to reprint the whole story, right here at io9. Here's your chance to find out what all the excitement is about, and discover one of science fiction's fastest rising stars.  Every once in a while you across a story that is beautiful, thought provoking and that gives you the chills all at the same time. Basically one that messes up your emotions. Paper Menagerie is one that does it, no wonder that this short story by Ken Liu has won three of the most prestigous awards: the Nebula, Hugo and the World Fantasy Award.  The start of Paper Menagerie is really normal. The story is told from the perspective of the young boy Jack who is playing with his mother....

The Waste Lands by Stephen King, The Dark Tower #3 In 1978, Stephen King introduced the world to the last gunslinger, Roland of Gilead.  Nothing has been the same since. More than twenty years later, the quest for the Dark Tower continues to take readers on a wildly epic ride. Through parallel worlds and across time, Roland must brave desolate wastelands and endless deserts, drifting into the unimaginable and the familiar. A classic tale of colossal scope—crossing over terrain from The Stand, The Eyes of the Dragon, Insomnia, The Talisman, Black House, Hearts in Atlantis, ’Salem’s Lot, and other familiar King haunts—the adventure takes hold with the turn of each page. And the tower awaits.... Roland, The Last Gunslinger, moves ever closer to The Dark Tower of his dreams and nightmares—as he crosses a desert of damnation in a macabre world that is a twisted image of our own. With him are those he has drawn to this world: street-smart Eddie Dean and courageous wheel...

Author interview with Neal Asher Author bio: I’ve been an engineer, barman, skip lorry driver, coalman, boat window manufacturer, contract grass cutter and builder. Now I write science fiction books, and am slowly getting over the feeling that someone is going to find me out, and can call myself a writer without wincing and ducking my head. As professions go, I prefer this one: I don’t have to clock-in, change my clothes after work, nor scrub sensitive parts of my body with detergent. I think I’ll hang around.   -------------------------------------------------------------- Hi Neal, welcome over at The Book Plank and for taking your time to answer these few questions for us. BP: First off, could you give us a short introduction as to who Neal Asher is? What are you likes, dislikes and hobbies besides writing? NA: Well I guess I can be defined as Neal Asher the SF writer now. As for likes, dislikes and hobbies they are all in a state of flux at...

The Blasted Lands by James A. Moore, Seven Forges #2 The Empire of Fellein is in mourning. The Emperor is dead, and the armies of the empire have grown soft. Merros Dulver, their newly-appointed – and somewhat reluctant – commander, has been tasked with preparing them to fight the most savage enemy the world has yet seen. Meanwhile, a perpetual storm ravages the Blasted Lands, and a new threat is about to arise – the Broken are coming, and with them only Death. Back in 2013 I read many great books of Angry Robot and one of them was Seven Forges by James A Moore. James A. Moore has written numerous books in the Horror genre and Seven Forges was his first venture into the Epic Fantasy and one that paid off very well. When I read Seven Forges I was amazed with the story, so many elements working together and you could clearly see that James A. Moore wasn't scared to bring in some Horror elements as well. As I said in my review of Seven Forges, it had the everyting: ...

Pan Macmillan win bidding auction to acquire ‘hot property’ Blake Crouch’s DARK MATTER Editorial Director, Julie Crisp has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Alexis Hurley at Inkwell Management to  Dark Matter in a nice six figure deal after an exciting multi-publisher auction based on a 140 page partial.   Imagine Stephen King’s The Time Traveller’s Wife starring Jason Bourne, and you’ve got the central concept of this pulse-pounding new thriller, that has already sold in a fantastic preempt to Molly Stern at Crown for a seven figure deal and also had film rights optioned by Sony Pictures  for $1.25 million after they beat five other film studios to take the rights off the table. The novel will be published in summer 2016. Dark Matter is the story of Jason Dessen,  a forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago. One night, after an evening out he’s kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an aban...

Hounded by Kevin Hearne, The Iron Druid Chronicles #1 Atticus O’Sullivan, last of the Druids, lives peacefully in Arizona, running an occult bookshop and shape-shifting in his spare time to hunt with his Irish wolfhound. His neighbors and customers think that this handsome, tattooed Irish dude is about twenty-one years old—when in actuality, he’s twenty-one centuries old. Not to mention: He draws his power from the earth, possesses a sharp wit, and wields an even sharper magical sword known as Fragarach, the Answerer. Unfortunately, a very angry Celtic god wants that sword, and he’s hounded Atticus for centuries. Now the determined deity has tracked him down, and Atticus will need all his power—plus the help of a seductive goddess of death, his vampire and werewolf team of attorneys, a bartender possessed by a Hindu witch, and some good old-fashioned luck of the Irish—to kick some Celtic arse and deliver himself from evil. Hounded has been a book that has been on my ...

Media Alert: Gollancz wins three more in the bestselling series of novels that inspired the eight million copy selling computer game franchise, THE WITCHER Gollancz is thrilled to announce the acquisition of three more books in Andrzej Sapkowski’s hugely popular THE WITCHER series. The first book, THE SWORD OF DESTINY, will be published in May 2015 alongside the blockbusting new computer game THE WITCHER 3: THE WILD HUNT, which won the Award for Most Anticipated Game during The Game Awards 2014. Sales for the previous two games in THE WITCHER franchise have totalled over 8 million copies worldwide.   SWORD OF DESTINY is a collection of linked short stories which fills in some of the gaps in the Witcher’s legend. Two further books – THE SWALLOW’S TOWER and LADY OF THE LAKE – will be released in 2016 and 2017 and will conclude the main story of Geralt the Witcher. All three books will be translated by David French, ...