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Greetings:
And welcome to the latest issue of the Pyr® newsletter. This issue, we're going to tout the paperback release of Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky, catch up on some Abercrombie-related triva, and round up some reviews and Best of the Year announcements.
So here we go.
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Kay Kenyon: The Future So Bright...
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 Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky debuts this month in trade paperback (and I've already spotted it in bookstores). This space opera slash sci-fantasy that is drawing comparisons to Ringworld, Rama and other such classic epics, was a starred review in Publishers Weekly and went on to make their Best Books of the Year list too. Bright also made Jeff Vandermeer's 2007: The Best of the Year for LocusOnline, and Greg L. Johnson Best of 2007 list for SFSite. It showed up on SFFWorld's annual two part Review of the Year. The Washington Post called it "a splendid fantasy quest as compelling as anything by Stephen R. Donaldson, Philip José Farmer or, yes, J.R.R. Tolkien."
And now it's out in paperback!
To mark the occasion, Kay Kenyon has a totally revamped website, rebuilt around her The Entire and the Rose series. Check it out here. And if you like what you see, drop by her livejournal and let her know. As she says, the new site features:- Inside views of the Universe Entire (Universe Extras)
- How to get signed copies of Bright of the Sky in trade paper.
- Full color artwork of the series covers by the phenomenal Stephan Martiniere.
- Where Kay will be showing up around the country.
- Sample of Kay's e-newsletter.
Meanwhile, (you know what's coming), you can read sample chapters here.
And the follow-up is out in March!
Which brings me to:
Publishers Weekly has given a starred review to the forthcoming A World Too Near.
 
"The fate of two universes hangs in the balance in this intricately plotted sequel to Bright of the Sky (2007)....Tangled motivations, complex characters and intriguing world-building will keep readers on the edges of their seats." Btw, I just finished reading the manuscript to book three, City Without End, and can't imagine it's going to do any less. Really, she's that good.
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Best of the Year(s)
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Pyr books are showing up in a flurry of Best of the Year lists, I'm very pleased to say.
SciFiNow:
 SciFiNow magazine, one of Britain's premiere sf media mags, released their Best Books of 2007. And among the list, Ian McDonald's Brasyl, and Michael Moorcock's The Metatemporal Detective.
SFSite:
(As mentioned above) Greg L. Johnson of SFSite has posted his Best of 2007
list, a list of "the ten science fiction and fantasy books that I liked
the most in 2007." And wouldn't you know it, Pyr takes the # 2 and # 1
spot.
Greg's #2 choice for 2007 is Ian McDonald's Brasyl,of
which he says, "With wit and stunning imagery, Ian McDonald takes us to
a near-future, and a distant past, that is as strange as any alien
world. ...a story that masterfully blends history, character,
Portuguese street slang and cosmological speculation, meeting both the requirements of hard SF and literary style along the way."
And coming in at #1, Kay Kenyon's aforementioned Bright of the Sky,which "lies somewhere between Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Sun and Karl Schroeder's Ventus, and was, for me, the one book of the year that, once I started reading, was impossible to put down."
Congratulations to both Ian and Kay!
Locus Online :
Claude Lalumière has posted his SF, Fantasy, and Horror in 2007: Recommended Reading list for LocusOnline. One of ours pops up under Collections:
"Michael Moorcock's The Metatemporal Detective (Pyr)
is good pulp-fueled fun, filled with stories that deftly pastiche many
modes of popular fiction..."
Locus Online (again!):
As recounted earlier, Jeff Vandermeer has posted his 2007: The Best of the Year list over on LocusOnline. I'm thrilled to see a few Pyr mentions.
From the Best Novels list:
"On the science fiction side, Ian McDonald reaffirmed his excellence with Brasyl,which
contains three separate narrative strands describing the Brazil of
past, present, and future. The novel is a tour de force of storytelling
momentum, with a level of invention that represents a master at the top
of his form. McDonald is an amazing stylist, yes, but here it's all
about motion. He does a wonderful job of including his
trademark detailed and inventive description while making sure nothing
in this complex, often beautiful novel is static."
and
"Kay Kenyon's Bright of the Sky, after
a slow first seventy pages, knocked my socks off with its brilliant
evocation of a quest through a parallel universe that has a strange
river running through it. Unique in conception, like Larry Niven's Ringworld, this is the beginning to what should be an amazing SF-Fantasy series."
From the Best Anthologies list:
" Another first volume of a new original series, the Lou Anders-edited Fast Forward 1
featured thought-provoking speculative takes on making sense of our
(post)modern world by, among others, Ken MacLeod, Gene Wolfe, and Nancy
Kress. Consistently interesting, this SF anthology fills a gap, as most
of the current spate of anthologies seems skewed toward the fantasy
side of things."
And from Notable Reprints:
"...The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, a rough-and-tumble, bold new voice in the heroic fantasy ranks."
All good to read! (I mean it's good to read all this praise, but you can take it to mean these books are good to read too, because, of course, they are.)
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What Real Fame Gets You
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 I was pretty geeked to discover earlier this week that I now have a wikipedia page, and quite humbled by the scope of it too. Then Joe Abercrombie sent me this: Gene Ambaum and Bill Barnes's Unshelved, "the world's only daily comic strip set in a public library," has just run a comic strip devoted to The Blade Itself.
Now, that's true fame!
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A Round of Reviews
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Well close out this newsletter with a selection of reviews, beginning with:
 Don D'Ammassa's Critical Mass, on Mike Resnick's Starship Mercenary: "The storytelling is as good as ever...
The ability to write good space opera is increasingly a misplaced, if
not entirely lost art, but Resnick knows how to draw on a hidden lode
of it. Lightweight but genuine fun."
Publishers Weekly, in a starred review for Joe Abercrombie's forthcoming Before They Are Hanged:
"This grim and vivid sequel to 2007's The Blade Itself
transcends its middle volume status, keeping the reader engaged with
complicated plotting and intriguing character development...
Abercrombie leavens the bloody action with moments of dark humor,
developing a story suffused with a rich understanding of human darkness
and light." Comic book scribe Ron Fortier has posted a review of Chris Roberson's Paragaea: A P***tary Romance on his Pulp Fiction Reviews site, and seems to have liked it:
"Hold
on to your hats! When you open this book you are in for a rip-roaring,
old fashion adventure in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burrough's p***t
stories... Their quest is a lively action filled romp that I enjoyed to
the max and was sorry to reach the end all too quickly. It does end
with several unresolved plots that I hope will be handled in
forthcoming sequels. Heironymous, Leena and Balam are three of the best
adventure heroes ever created and I'm so happy to have made their
acquaintance. It's an experience I'd like to repeat and soon. So will
you."And Grasping for the Wind on Scott Mackay's Tides: "If you pass this novel up, you will have missed what I think is one of
the best novels of speculative fiction currently in print."
Yup.
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That's it for this issue. As ever, be sure to see the coupon at the bottom of this newsletter, and please feel free to check out our entire catalog and drop by our blog.
Have a Happy New Year,
Lou Anders
Editorial Director, Pyr®
an imprint of Prometheus Books
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