A brutal assault nine months ago left eccentric portrait artist Micah with facial scars and PTSD. He’s struggled to leave his apartment ever since, and he can’t let anyone in. Then his only sanctuary is disrupted by signs of a haunting.
Between the 80s synth pop and motivation messages scrawled on his bathroom mirror, Micah finds himself more charmed than frightened by who he believes to be Cosmo, the deceased previous resident of his apartment. But when Cosmo’s ghostly visits suddenly stop, Micah is determined to lure him back.
Meanwhile, sculpture artist Cosmo – dramatic, unconventional, and very much alive – is mourning his old self. His boyfriend’s a serial cheater, he’s continually passed over for a promotion at work, and he’s lost contact with his best friend. To make matters worse, his apartment is being haunted by the ghost of a bespectacled man with an eye socket of scars. It’s his last straw, and seeking a new start, Cosmo moves out.
In a chance meeting, Cosmo and Micah’s paths cross again, and tentative sparks fly. But the phantoms of their pasts still linger. In order to find a future where they can both be happy together, Micah and Cosmo need to confront their trauma once and for all.
Extinction Horizon meets Contagion in this sequel to 2025’s sci-fi thriller Symbiote, where the biological threat has escaped the South Pole and is now wreaking havoc upon Antarctica.
The survivors of the South Pole massacre will find that getting off the Antarctic continent may cost them their lives…
Months after the events of Symbiote, sunrise has come to the ice continent, bringing with it the beginning of the annual tourist season. where 1,500 summer visitors will soon call the coastal McMurdo Station home. With them are the architects of the classified CIA program that unleashed the deadly microbes, who are determined to uncover what happened with their experiment and harvest samples of the mutation to turn into a biological weapon.
However, when Ben Jacobs returns from an impossible journey to the Pole and is reunited with Penny – an asymptomatic carrier of the symbiotic microbes – all hell breaks loose. When the sea ice surrounding the station becomes a fertile breeding ground for a new and more dangerous infestation, Rajan Chariya and his friends will have to join forces with the CIA to fight the onslaught of infected “sea people” roving the streets. With tensions high and stakes even higher, the question becomes when will the group stop being useful, and start becoming targets who know too much?
Worse, there may be more than one asymptomatic carrier….
With a heart-stopping pace and twists that will leave readers breathless, Sentient is a thrilling sequel that brilliantly combines all the best horror tropes with real world scenarios.
Release Date 2025-01-28 Formats Ebook, Paperback EBook ISBN 28th January 2025 | 9781915202956 | epub | £5.99/$9.99/$11.99 Paperback ISBN 28th January 2025 | 9781915202949 | Paperback | £9.99/$18.99/$24.99
When a mysterious tower appears in the skies over England, thirteen strangers are pulled from their lives to stand before it as a countdown begins. Above the doorway is one word: ASCEND.
As they try to understand why they’ve been chosen and what the tower is, it soon becomes clear the only way out of this for everyone is… up.
And so begins a race to the top with the group fighting to hold on to its humanity, through sinking ships, haunted houses and other waking nightmares. Can they each overcome their differences and learn to work together or does the winner take all? What does the tower want of them and what is the price to escape?
EBook ISBN 25th March 2025 | 9781915998514 | epub | £5.99/$9.99/$11.99 Paperback ISBN 25th March 2025 | 9781915998507 | Trade Paperback | £9.99/$18.99/$24.99
Johnny Gomez, a custodian – or space broom – on Kilgore Station, teams up with a pair of smugglers to sell a stolen data chip full of video game avatars and finally make his fortune
Everyone aboard Kilgore Station is living their best life. Everyone except for Johnny Gomez.
While humans, the augmented, and aliens of all shapes and sizes enjoy exotic cuisine on the dining deck, or gamble away their credits on the entertainment deck, Johnny is elbow-deep in oily, black, alien excrement. A ‘space broom’ custodian for the entire station.
This was obviously not the life Johnny dreamt of. Ten years ago, he travelled to Kilgore, the farthest space station in our solar system, in search of fortune like everyone else. Some people are just luckier than others.
Yet his meaningless, uneventful existence is immediately turned upside down when he happens upon a tiny glass data-chit, hidden amongst the alien poop he must clean up. Unbeknownst to him, every nefarious creature in the solar system will soon be after him to claim it for their own.
With the help of his augmented roommate, a pair of smugglers and a mysterious and beautiful stranger, Johnny fights off thugs and sails as fast as possible to earth’s moon, Luna, in effort to sell the chit to the Obinna Crime Syndicate. But with assassins and mobsters on their tail, the trip is anything but a cakewalk. And Luna itself proves to be nothing like a safe haven, when Johnny’s painful past finally catches up to him…
Space Brooms! is a heart-warming, tongue-in-cheek homage to all things sci-fi, from television and movies, to video games and books.
I reviewed Gogmagog in March and will be reviewing Ludluda later this month.
This duology by Jeff Noon and Steve Beard is a sea-faring adventure that has tapped into the minds & hearts of readers who love strange and mythical perspectives on the UK. Ahead of Ludluda‘s publication, Angry Robot is excited to announce the very first in-person event with Jeff & Steve. Who better for them to be talking to then the fantastic Adrian Tchaikovsky! The panel will be chaired by New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Dr Una McCormack.
Join them at 7pm on Tuesday 3rd December for a wonderful chat and evening with special, exclusive, tote bags of goodies for attendees!
For an indie publisher like Angry Robot, an event at Foyles in December is a
big deal
I’m very pleased for them and wish I could get to it, because I would love to get my copies of Gogmagog, Ludluda, and Vurt signed. However, London in December is not my idea of fun – there are too many people doing their shopping and it’s rather expensive to stay in London in December. Plus, train tickets less than four weeks out will be extortionate.
However, I really hope people who can get there will go, and have a great time.
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Release Date: 2024-09-24 Formats: Ebook, Paperback EBook ISBN 24th September 2024 | 9781915998019 | epub | £4.99/$6.99/$7.99 Paperback ISBN 24th September 2024 | 9781915998002 | epub | £9.99/$18.99/$23.99
Description
On the heels of the terrorist attacks on the planet Nova’s capital, the Special Projects Team finds itself targeted by the ambitious new head of the Commonwealth Intelligence Directorate, Aidan Kester. When Kovalic and General Adaj are arrested on charges of treason, Tapper, Brody, Sayers, and Taylor are forced to go on the run. While Kovalic and the general attempt to uncover an Illyrican mole within the Commonwealth’s intelligence apparatus, it’s up to the rest of the team to clear their friends’ names, even if that means making a deal with an old enemy to carry out a daring heist that might just get them all killed.
Release Date 2024-08-13 Formats Ebook, Paperback EBook ISBN 13th August 2024 | 9781915998132 | epub & mobi | £4.99/$7.99/$8.99 Paperback ISBN 13th August 2024 | 9781915998125 | Paperback | £9.99/$17.99/$23.99
Blurb
An alien invasion hits the town of Muddy Gap, but a disgruntled pie aficionado is the only one who seems to remember it…
Denver Bryant’s passion for pie has sent him across Wyoming in search of the best slices. Though he dutifully posts reviews on his blog, he’s never been able to recreate his brief moment of viral popularity, and its trickling income isn’t enough to pay his rent next month.
Driving home from a roadside diner, Denver witnesses a UFO explode directly over his tiny town of Muddy Gap. When he questions his neighbors, it appears that Denver is the only person to have seen anything – or to care that the residents’ strange behavior, as well as a shower of seashell hail, might be evidence of something extraterrestrial. Being both non-binary and autistic, he’s convinced his reputation as the town eccentric is impeding his quest for answers. Frustrated, he documents the bizarre incidents on his failing pie blog, and his online popularity skyrockets. His readers want the truth, spurring him to get to the bottom of things.
The only person in town who takes him seriously is handsome bartender, Ezra. As the two investigate over pie and the possibility of romance, the alien presence does more than change the weather. People start disappearing. When Denver and Ezra make a run for it, the town refuses to let them leave. Reality is folding in on itself. It’s suddenly a race against time to find the extraterrestrial source and destroy it before it consumes not only Muddy Gap but everything beyond. Denver’s always been more outsider than hero, but he’s determined to ensure that a world with Ezra – and with pie – still exists tomorrow.
Key Lime Sky is the second book from AL Hess at Angry Robot – check out his previous work, World Running Down.
Format: 444 pages, Paperback Published: February 8, 2022 by Angry Robot ISBN: 9780857669667 (ISBN10: 0857669664) Language: English
Description
Lesbian gunslinger fights spies in space!
Three factions vie for control of the galaxy. Rig, a gunslinging, thieving, rebel with a cause, doesn’t give a damn about them and she hasn’t looked back since abandoning her faction three years ago.
That is, until her former faction sends her a message: return what she stole from them, or they’ll kill her twin sister.
Rig embarks on a journey across the galaxy to save her sister – but for once she’s not alone. She has help from her network of resistance contacts, her taser-wielding librarian girlfriend, and a mysterious bounty hunter.
If Rig fails and her former faction finds what she stole from them, trillions of lives will be lost–including her sister’s. But if she succeeds, she might just pull the whole damn faction system down around their ears. Either way, she’s going to do it with panache and pizzazz.
My Review
Angry Robot sent me a copy of Bluebird to read while I waited for The Hunter’s Gambit, also by the same author. The Hunter’s Gambit is fantasy and I’m reviewing it in late June. Bluebird is sci fi and I had no review date planned, I just happened to sit down yesterday and read the book. I started reading it when the book arrived, but stuff got in the way, so I only read three chapters. Yesterday, I read the remaining 370 pages. Totally worth spending my Saturday afternoon/evening reading it.
We meet Rig, a Kashrini, who has escaped the human faction Pyrite that took over her species’ homeworld and enslaved her species, when they aren’t murdering them, on a mission to rescue more indentured people. In the process she meets Ginka, from a felidae sentient species who’s species has come under the control of the Ossuary faction of humans. Ginka is a fighting machine with strange technology. And then Rig’s former faction catches up with her. This sends Rig and Ginka on a series of adventures as they avoid and/or fight both Pyrite and Ossuary spies. We get interludes where we find out about Ginao’s background and discover why she is out in space alone.
Rig wants to rescue her sister, Daara (loyal to Pyrite but now imprisoned), and protect her partner, Jane, who is an Ascetic faction librarian; Ginka wants to go home to her husband, Crane. They have allies known and unknown who want freedom. There are two powerful intelligence agencies against them. They might have to take down the factions to do it.
I wish I’d had time to read this earlier, it’s so good! As we journey across space with the pair, and meet various allies and enemies, and both of them almost die, the tension pulls the reader on, to keep turning the page. I needed to know what was going to happen next. We learn about the deeper issues in this ancient space empire, and humans don’t come out of it well. This is a richly imagined space adventure, with well-developed characters. The relationships between Rig and the other characters are fascinating and develop across the 400+ pages as they travel and fight.
The book ends with love and hope. We get happy endings for Rig and Ginka, while Daara has to make her own choices in life. One faction has been beaten and the other two have been forced to back off.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 