March 2003
© 2003 Ernest Lilley / SFRevu
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March rolls around and there is much to celebrate in terms of UK releases. Not least of which is a new high profile biography of the late and much lamented Douglas Adams released by Hodder & Stoughton. This is a major publication and is receiving deserved and widespread coverage in the mainstream press. Written by M.J.Simpson - regarded as the foremost authority on Adams' life and career, this accomplished hard cover work will doubtless sell by the bucket load - and so it should! Priced at £17.99, Hitchhiker : A Biography of Douglas Adams is already in UK bookshops. It is not clear yet whether this book will be separately published in the US.

Listed as a March release in the Hodder & Stoughton catalogue is a new novel from British horror master Simon Clark -  Vampyrrhic Rites - a hardcover priced at £18.99. Amazon, however, list this as a July title and so confusion reigns as to when this one is going to hit the shops. Clark of course, is most recently known for The Night of the Triffids (see review) his sequel to the Wyndham classic but it is worth noting also that he is fast becoming a very collectable writer with prices for his early works well into three figures.  Find out more about the author by visiting his web site at http://www.bbr-online.com/nailed/ (though the site does not confirm the release date of the new novel). Check out Earthling Publications too. This is a small press enterprise started by Clark aficionado Paul Miller and it has grown to encompass works by and about some other top-notch British genre names including Michael Marshall Smith and Tim Lebbon. Their web site is at http://www.earthlingpub.com/

More horror too from Hodder's paperback division, NEL, who publish the mass market edition of Stephen King's collection, Everything's Eventual - priced at £6.99.

The Gollancz lead title this month is Richard Morgan's Broken Angels  (review) - his follow-up to the highly acclaimed Altered Carbon which is coincidentally published in the US this month by Del Rey (see SFRevu Feb'02 Feature Author interview and review). Broken Angels is issued in both hard cover (priced at £17.99) and trade paperback (£10.99). In the on-going SF Masterworks series, two Philip K. Dick masterpieces see reissues - Cantata-140 and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) are released as trade paperbacks priced at £6.99. In the yellow jacketed Gollancz SF Classics series, there are two titles released - The Blue World by Jack Vance and Robert Silverberg's Son of Man are both trade paperbacks priced at £9.99. Though undoubtedly also classics, two Frank Herbert novels see reissue this month also, though not as part of any formal series - Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune are repackaged in new mass market paperback editions priced at £6.99. Three further mass market editions are also released by Gollancz - Salt, On, and Stone, all by Adam Roberts are issued with fine new cover art and priced at £6.99. Look out for Robert's new novel Polystom coming from Gollancz in May and also a new PS Publishing novella, Jupiter Magnified due ...sometime soon! Find out more about this exciting author at his excellent web site http://www.adamroberts.com/index.htm . The final Gollancz release this month is The New Discworld Companion by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs - this is a revised edition issued in trade paperback and priced at £12.99.

Tom Holt fans will rejoice this month with Orbit's release of his new novel, The Portable Door. Holt is a writer with a seemingly endless output at the moment (and that's ignoring works published pseudonymously) and this new comic delight is a hard cover priced at £16.99. Coinciding with this is the mass market paperback release of Holt's previous novel, Little People - priced at £6.99. Continuing their series of Smallville tie-in novels, this month sees Orbit release Smallville : Whodunnit by Dean Wesley Smith - this is a mass market paperback priced at £5.99. Lastly Orbit publish the mass market edition of Pattern by K.J. Parker - the second volume in The Scavenger Trilogy - priced at £6.99.

Mentioned in previous columns has been the imminent arrival of Macmillan's major new imprint, Tor UK. They finally launch this month with some very notable novels. Their lead title is Wolfskin, the start of new Viking fantasy series by antipodean Juliet Marillier, author of the highly acclaimed "Sevenwaters" trilogy published here in Britain by HarperCollins. (see SFRevu's reviews of the US editions of Books 2 Son of the Shadows & 3 Child of the Prophecy.) Wolfskin is smart hardcover priced at £16.99.

Regular Sfrevu readers will know I am a great fan of Neal Asher (see SFRevu's author interview)- a young British writer who, though present on the fringes of the scene for some time, finally hit the big time a couple of years ago with Gridlinked (review). His follow up, The Skinner was even better - in fact it ranked amongst my top five books of 2002 - and now his brand new novel, The Line of Polity, is published by Tor UK. Another bloody and gritty story involving agent Cormac, The Line of Polity is a large format trade paperback priced at £10.99. This month also sees The Skinner (see review) reissued in mass market paperback priced at £6.99, and in the US, Gridlinked is given a hard cover release by Tor. The final title in the Tor UK opening salvo is a debut novel from a new home grown talent. Limbo by Andy Secombe is a beautifully bizarre creation in the best tractions of British comic fantasy and science fiction. Limbo is a trade paperback priced at £10.99 and I recommend it most highly.

HarperCollins' Voyager imprint bring us Arthurian fantasy in the shape of Lindsay Clarke's Parzival and the Stone from Heaven - this Grail romance originally appeared in hard cover back in 2001 and is now issued as a mass market paperback priced at £6.99. If that isn't your thing then there are other fantasy releases to chose from - Robin Hobb's The Golden Fool, book two in The Tawny Man series is released as a large format trade paperback priced at £11.99 and both A Sorcerer's Treason by Sarah Zettel and Eric Van Lustbader's second volume in The Pearl Saga, The Veil of a Thousand Tears are published as mass market editions - £6.99 and £7.99 respectively.

Lastly, in what, looking back over this column, seems to be a pretty busy month, we have two  Transworld titles - the Corgi mass market paperback release of Anne McCaffrey's Freedom's Ransom (the fourth title in The Catteni Sequence) priced at £6.99 - and from Bantam, a paperback original release of the A Caress of Twilight by the hugely popular Laurell K. Hamilton. This is priced at £6.99.

More next month.

© 2003 Ernest Lilley / SFRevu
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