Enter the Octopus

I love novellas. They’re the perfect length for single-sitting reading, and I think that there’s something about the form that encourages experimentation. Longer than a short story, I suspect that they give some writers plenty of area to explore ideas without the pressure of completing a full novel. Still, it’s their size that make them hard to publish. They’re not short enough for magazines, and not quite long enough to stand on their own, so they’re generally the domain of collections and anthologies. One such collection that I’m very excited about is Alembical from Paper Golem.

Featuring work from ENTER THE OCTOPUS pal Jay Lake, along with Bruce Taylor, James Van Pelt and Ray Vukcevich, Alembical is getting rave reviews from people like Nancy Kress and James Patrick Kelly, who writes, “Here are four of the deftest sleight-of-hand artists working in the fantastic today. … They will slip past your expectations before you know it and astound you without ever raising their voices beyond a hypnotic murmur.”

High praise, indeed! Although I haven’t had an opportunity to get Alembical myself, I have been fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at Lake’s contribution, and it’s a doozy. Grab a copy of Alembical today over at Paper Golem’s website.

By the way, If you’ve not been exposed to Jay’s work before, you owe it to yourself to check out his clockpunk alt-history novels Escapement and Mainspring, both available from TOR. These novels explore an alternative Age of Enlightentment, where God’s existence is demonstrated on a daily basis by a celestial clockwork architecture of brass and gears around which the Earth, a world of flying men, airships and angels and heaven, rotate.  Full of adventure and political intrigue, Lake’s novels are a hybrid creation all their own.