Vellum by Hal Duncan

'A burning map. Every epic... should start with a burning map,' says a character at the start of Hal Duncan's Vellum. Perhaps I'm reading too much into that comment, but it's tempting to see it as a call for the destruction of that most familiar epic-fantasy accessory. Certainly it serves as a warning that this unmapped and perhaps unmappable (in the conventional sense) fantasy does not play by the rules (at least, not by those rules)...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Further links:
Hal Duncan
Macmillan

Gift from the Stars by James Gunn

Aerospace engineer Adrian Mast finds designs for a spaceship in the back of a remaindered book on UFOs -- designs that, to Adrian's trained eye, appear workable. Could the plans be of extra-terrestrial origin? Adrian is determined to find out and persuades the sprightly bookseller Frances Farmstead to help him track down the author of the mysterious book. Naturally enough, they manage to do so, and the plans are genuine...

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
James Gunn
BenBella Books

The Ephemera by Neil Williamson

The Elastic Press collections are a great way to discover new authors; but they also offer the chance to rediscover authors, to give shape to the styles and concerns of writers you've read maybe once or twice in a magazine, but whose voices have become lost in the din. My reason for wanting to read The Ephemera was Neil Williamson's superb contribution to The Elastic Book of Numbers (which, I thought at the time, was the only story of his that I'd read; though, as it turned out, there had been another). I wanted to find out what the rest of his work was like; I discovered that he has an intriguing and distinctive style that permeates the entire collection without becoming stale or predictable. Like to know more? Step this way...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Two books by Brendan Connell

The Translation of Father Torturo:

The Translation Of Father Torturo is the tale of Xaverio Torturo, seemingly a model of spirituality - pious, learned, and athletic to boot. But he has a dark side: born into a family which has produced (to paraphrase his uncle) its fair share of criminals but no cardinals, Torturo has ambitions towards the latter (and beyond) - and has no qualms about dealing with those who stand in his way. Nor is he above dabbling in the 'supramundane', by stealing saints' relics and having them sewn into his own body - to what end, only he knows...

Dr Black and the Guerrillia:

In the novella Dr Black And The Guerrillia, the good doctor has travelled to San Corrados to study the religious customs of the Yaroa people. Naturally, things don't quite go according to plan, what with Dr Black having all his supplies stolen, becoming caught up in the coils of a snake, and being hauled in front of a firing squad by the local People's Revolutionary Army...

Read more at The Zone.