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This was a very interesting topic, I cheated a bit and mostly chose my favorite imprints and not the publisher because I can love a particular imprint and not whole the thing published by a publishing house. They’re all (expect one) SFF related so I thought that it fitted the theme of SciFi Month quite well! 😉
- Solaris
I am pretty sure that it is my favorite imprint ever, they tend to publish really unique books that are filled with original and clever ideas. I mean, it published the wonderful Fractured Europe Sequence by Dave Hutchinon and Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee. I have yet to read a bad book from them (I read Every Mountain Made Low last month and even though I didn’t really like it, it was very clever and unique!).
- Tor/Tor.com
Again, some of my favorite book of all time were published thanks to Tor, it’s a great SFF publishers, it’s an enormous publishing house so, of course, I am not going to like everything they put out but I like the fact that their selection is broad. Some of my favorite titles are The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, Too Like the Lightning and The Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne trilogy by Brian Staveley.
- Orbit
Another fantastic SFF imprint, as with Solaris, I have yet to really dislike one of their titles, I mean The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (I am just 20% but I can already tell that it’s going to be a great one) were published by this imprint and they’re damn good.
- Gollancz
This UK imprint also puts out SFF books, I haven’t loved everything I read by them but I tend to be interested by most of their titles. Also, every single of their book covers are freakin’ gorgeous, I mean, I don’t know how they do that but they always manage to impress me with how amazing they look!
- Penguin Random House (Spectra/Bantam/Penguin English Library)
Penguin Random House is an enormous publishers and I really like three of their imprints, Spectra and Del Rey publish SFF books, Hyperion by Dan Simmons and The Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brwonare from those imprints. I haven’t read a ton of their titles yet but so far, I really loved what I read!
Penguin English Library is the only non-SFF imprint present here but they publish some of my favorite editions of classic. I am slowly collecting them and even though I’m not that good about reading classics (I alaways forget that I have them on my TBR), they are gorgeous and good quality!
What are some of your favorite publishers? 🙂
This is a great topic! We don’t get to talk about our favorite publishers very often. I totally agree with you with Tor and Orbit. I don’t really have access to Gollancz (and I’m pretty sure the same thing with Solaris) because I’m in the US, I’ll need to think about how I would round out my top 5!
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Some of Solaris’s titles are available in the US but I don’t think it’s the case of all of their publications which is a real shame!
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I don’t focus much on publishers but I definitely like books printed by all these publishers except for Solaris. I think I do not own anything from Solaris. Must check out their books.
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They are a smaller imprint but their selection is excellent ! 🙂
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I also have lots of love for Tor, Penguin (Ace/Roc/DAW especially), and Orbit. But props for also naming Solaris! Some of the smaller SFF pubs and imprints put out some great books and are wonderful to work with, like Pyr, Jo Fletcher Books…it would be so tough for me to do this topic because there’s too many to name!
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It’s a tough topic because it’s hard to narrow down only five, I didn’t think about Pyr and Jo Fletcher because I don’t believe that I’ve read a lot of their titles but it’s true that I enjoyed what I read of theirs!
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I love them all! And Hodder, Angry Robot, Titan Books, Harper… anyone who provides awesome SF for us to read 😀
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They are so many of them, it’s hard to narrow it down to only five publishers!
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That’s a topic I would never have thought about, but with hindsight it makes a lot of sense!
And nice choices, indeed… 🙂
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It’s true that we mostly think in terms of authors and not in publishers but it’s very interesting to see where our favorite titles came from! 😀
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Great post, I haven’t thought about publishers much! I’m not sure I’ve read anything from Solaris. I’ve liked some Angry Robot stuff. I used to like a lot of DAW’s stuff but haven’t read much from them lately? Tor and Penguin Random of course… I’ll have to pay more attention to who’s publishing.
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Angry Robot is hit or miss for me, I tend to either love their titles (United States of Japan is very good for example) or feel very “meh” about them.. I don’t read a lot of DAW’s titles but I really liked what I read by them! 🙂
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