SF Signal’s March 2015 roundup of new SF/F releases included 361 titles, and their roundup of comic / graphic novel releases included 188 more. That’s … a lot. I’ve been spending less and less time sampling titles in sub-genres that I’m unlikely to respond to well, but I’ve made an effort in each case, nonetheless. Anyway, here’s what I’d highlight from March.

• Brandon Graham and Simon Roy, Prophet, v. 4: Joining. I had never heard of this science fiction comic before, but it looks amazing. The art is strange and Moebius-like, the characters are intriguing, and the story (at least in this volume) spans millennia. Poking around on the web a bit, I see a number of very positive reviews as well.
• John Joseph Adams (ed.), Operation Arcana. This is a collection of original fantasy stories with military themes. The title is strongly reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos / Operation Luna, a classic “magitech” series I always liked, and that’s basically what the first story here reminds me of too. However, looking ahead in the contents, contemporary magitech stories don’t seem to be the only focus (maybe not even the primary focus).
• George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (eds.), Old Venus. I’m fond of planetary romances and early SF set on Venus in general (e.g. Burrough’s Carson Napier of Venus, Lovecraft’s “In the Walls of Eryx,” Leigh Brackett’s Venusian stories, etc.), and that’s exactly what this anthology of new/original stories intends to bring back. Based only on the preview, I wasn’t as sure of its earlier companion volume, Old Mars, but I’m sold on that now too (both begin with stories by Allen Steele set in the same universe, so seeing them together supplies a better picture of what’s going on).
• Daryl Gregory, Harrison Squared. This novel delves into the backstory of the key character from Gregory’s Nebula-nominated novella We Are All Completely Fine (which is being adapted for TV by Wes Craven). Based as much on reading the novella as sampling the novel, I expect a light, fast-paced horror/adventure story full of Lovecraftian themes.
• Terry Pratchett, A Blink of the Screen: Collected Shorter Fiction. Pratchett didn’t write a lot of short fiction, but what he did write was delightful: no Discworld fan should miss this. I haven’t read much of his non-Discworld fiction, but what’s on preview at Amazon is essentially juvenilia of relatively mild interest.
• Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland. Valente’s Fairyland novels are wonderfully imaginative, and now she appears to be changing them up a little. This fourth volume in the series introduces a new protagonist, and instead of being a human who goes to Fairyland, he’s a kid from Fairyland being raised in Chicago. I’d worry that it might be dull in comparison to the other books, but the preview is reassuringly strange.
• Paul Kirkley, Space Helmet for a Cow: The Mad, True Story of Doctor Who (1963-1989). This book aims to be “as entertaining a history of Doctor Who as possible,” and based on the preview, it does seem to be a very light, readable, opinionated, and amusing overview of the classic years of the show.
• Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical. A world dominated by a Dutch empire that exploits steampunk robots as labor? To me, that’s a pretty interesting start by itself, but the opening chapter of the book also tells a good story. I’ve enjoyed Tregillis’s earlier work, so I’m looking forward to this.
• Rachel Hartman, Shadow Scale. This is the sequel to Seraphina, which I greatly enjoyed. But what I didn’t know until recently was that both books are sequels to Hartman’s minicomic Amy Unbounded, which was thoughtful and charming and awesome, but also very, very low key. So when I read reviews of Shadow Scale suggesting its pacing is a bit slow in parts, I remain hopeful that just means it’s more like Amy Unbounded than Seraphina.
• Mark Teppo (ed.), Thirteen: Stories of Transformation. I’d never heard of this anthology or even its publisher before, but at least five of the contributors are familiar to me and make me feel optimistic about it. The theme of “transformation” seems very broad, so I’m not sure what it’s all about. But the first story offers a hint that it’s going to be sort of literary in its aspirations but for sure pretty weird.
• Joanne Merriam (ed.), How to Live on Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens. This is a Kickstarter-funded collection of SF short stories about the immigrant experience. I recognize a ton of the contributors, and overall, the contents look great. In the preview, you only get to read a little of Ken Liu’s story, but it starts by explaining a short Lisp program to students from the very far future, which seems fun.
• Paige McKenzie (with Alyssa B. Sheinmel ghost-writing most of the novel), The Haunting of Sunshine Girl. Sunshine Girl is evidently kind of a big deal. Here’s the New York Times business section discussing the publication of this novel, which is based on a YouTube channel with over 300k subscribers. I like ghost stories, print media, and keeping up with popular culture, so the novelization of the YouTube stuff sounds pretty good to me on the face of it. I don’t know if the preview would have caught my attention without this backstory to it, but it seems interesting enough.

It’s been a while since I last posted about new releases in SF/F, but I haven’t given up. Here are the titles that stood out to me as I went through the available Amazon previews linked in SF Signal’s February round-up. In February, SF Signal began listing comics and graphic novels separately, and I went through those as well.

• Victoria Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic. A smoothly written story about multiple, magical, interconnected Londons, I can imagine breezing through this in an evening.
• Joe Abercrombie, Half the World. This is the second volume in Abercrombie’s YA fantasy series, set in a world loosely based on the medieval Baltic Sea. What caught my attention was that it switched to a new POV character with a completely new set of problems.
• Kate Elliott, The Very Best of Kate Elliott. Kate Elliott mostly writes novels, e.g. Cold Magic, and I wasn’t aware she wrote short fiction at all. So I was intrigued by the existence of this collection, which seems to include essays on gender and fantasy fiction too.
• Steph Swainston, The Castle Omnibus. I’ve been hearing about Swainston’s weird fantasy “Fourlands” series for years, but I’ve never sampled it before. The setting seems to be a sort of medieval fantasy world at war with giant insects, and there’s also a gang of immortals, at least one of whom can travel to some other alternate reality with living dirigibles, turtle people, and shopping malls. There’s a lot of dialogue too, so I found it easy to imagine all that as a comic book or anime.
• Neal Asher, Dark Intelligence. The start of a new subseries in the Polity universe, this appears to be a space opera revenge story about a war veteran and the AI that killed him. Just as noteworthy is the re-release of Asher’s The Gabble and Other Stories, in which grotesque alien biologies seem to be the focus.