New Visionaries of Fantasy Fiction
Discover the New Visionaries of Fantasy Fiction with our curated list of groundbreaking books. Explore fresh voices and epic tales redefining the genre today.
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City of Saints And Madmen
by Jeff VanderMeer
Set in the strange and ancient metropolis of Ambergris, a series of complex and interconnected stories and fantastical visions capture the bizarre lives and fates of the city's unusual inhabitants. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
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Veniss Underground
by Jeff VanderMeer
In his debut novel, literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer takes us on an unforgettable journey, a triumph of the imagination that reveals the magical and mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escape his demons in the shadowy underground--but in doing so makes a deal with the devil himself. In her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. And finally, haunted by Nicola's sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola's lover, embarks on a mythic journey to the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city to bring his love back to light. There he will find wonders beyond imagining...and horrors greater than the heart can bear. By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination. This special edition includes the short stories "The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight"; "Detectives and Cadavers"; and "A Heart for Lucretia" and the novella Balzac's War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss. Praise for Veniss Underground "A wonder-filled journey that echoes Dante's Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch."--Publishers Weekly "Audacious . . . full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders."--San Francisco Chronicle "[The novel's] milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow!"--Booklist "In the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression . . . also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly imaginative."--Peter Straub, author of lost boy lost girl
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The Scar
by China Miéville
A mythmaker of the highest order, China Miéville has emblazoned the fantasy novel with fresh language, startling images, and stunning originality. Set in the same sprawling world of Miéville’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel, Perdido Street Station, this latest epic introduces a whole new cast of intriguing characters and dazzling creations. Aboard a vast seafaring vessel, a band of prisoners and slaves, their bodies remade into grotesque biological oddities, is being transported to the fledgling colony of New Crobuzon. But the journey is not theirs alone. They are joined by a handful of travelers, each with a reason for fleeing the city. Among them is Bellis Coldwine, a renowned linguist whose services as an interpreter grant her passage—and escape from horrific punishment. For she is linked to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, the brilliant renegade scientist who has unwittingly unleashed a nightmare upon New Crobuzon. For Bellis, the plan is clear: live among the new frontiersmen of the colony until it is safe to return home. But when the ship is besieged by pirates on the Swollen Ocean, the senior officers are summarily executed. The surviving passengers are brought to Armada, a city constructed from the hulls of pirated ships, a floating, landless mass ruled by the bizarre duality called the Lovers. On Armada, everyone is given work, and even Remades live as equals to humans, Cactae, and Cray. Yet no one may ever leave. Lonely and embittered in her captivity, Bellis knows that to show dissent is a death sentence. Instead, she must furtively seek information about Armada’s agenda. The answer lies in the dark, amorphous shapes that float undetected miles below the waters—terrifying entities with a singular, chilling mission. . . . China Miéville is a writer for a new era—and The Scar is a luminous, brilliantly imagined novel that is nothing short of spectacular.
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Iron Council
by China Miéville
Following Perdido Street Station and The Scar, acclaimed author China Miéville returns with his hugely anticipated Del Rey hardcover debut. With a fresh and fantastical band of characters, he carries us back to the decadent squalor of New Crobuzon—this time, decades later. It is a time of wars and revolutions, conflict and intrigue. New Crobuzon is being ripped apart from without and within. War with the shadowy city-state of Tesh and rioting on the streets at home are pushing the teeming city to the brink. A mysterious masked figure spurs strange rebellion, while treachery and violence incubate in unexpected places. In desperation, a small group of renegades escapes from the city and crosses strange and alien continents in the search for a lost hope. In the blood and violence of New Crobuzon’s most dangerous hour, there are whispers. It is the time of the iron council. . . . The bold originality that broke Miéville out as a new force of the genre is here once more in Iron Council: the voluminous, lyrical novel that is destined to seal his reputation as perhaps the edgiest mythmaker of the day.
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The San Veneficio Canon
by Michael Cisco
Struck by lightning, resurrected, cut open, and stuffed full of arcane documents, the Divinity Student is sent to the desert city of San Veneficio to reconstruct the Lost Catalog of Unknown Words. He learns to pick the brains of corpses and gradually sacrifices his sanity on the altar of a dubious mission of espionage. Without ever understanding his own reasons, he moves toward destruction with steely determination. Eventually he find himself reduced to a walker between worlds - a creature neither of flesh nor spirit, stuffed with paper and preserved with formaldehyde - a zombie of his own devising. The line twixt clairvoyance and madness is thinner than a razor blade. In 1999, The Divinity Student captured the attention of fans of dark fantasy everywhere, eventually winning the International Horror Guild Award for best first novel. Now, The Divinity Student has been paired with its sequel, The Golem, for a must-have book - The San Veneficio Canon. Michael Cisco has created a city and a character that will live in the reader's imagination long after this book has been read...
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The Tyrant
by Michael Cisco
A new novel from Michael Cisco, the International Horror Writer's Guild Award for Best First Novel of 1999. "Michael Cisco's works immerse the reader in worlds that are not simply dreamlike in the quality of their imagination but somehow manage to capture and convey the power of the dream itself. The Tyrant is his masterpiece." -- Thomas Ligotti
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The Etched City
by K.J. Bishop
Fleeing the ghosts of their past, a healer and a killer escape from the ruined Copper Country to the city of Ashamoil. But as they salvage new lives, they will discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts of the future.
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The Light Ages
by Ian R. MacLeod
Nearing the end of a Third Age of Industry fueled by a magical substanced named aether, Robert Borrow, the son of a guildsman, becomes involved in a revolution to end a society based on inequality, greed, and corruption.