The Feast Makers, H. A. Clarke (Erewhon Books 978-1-64566-081-1, 405pp, $18.95, hc). Cover by Anka Lavriv. March 2024.
The Feast Makers is the third book in the Scapegracers trilogy; there are a lot of spoilers for The Scapegracers and The Scratch Daughters in this review.
As The Feast Makers opens, Sideways Pike faces hardships that fall into two camps. The first is being a butch lesbian high school senior in ...Read More
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Cast of Wonders 4/13/24, 5/5/24 Escape Pod 4/25/24 Strange Horizons 4/29/24, 5/16/24 Lightspeed 5/24
Cast of Wonders’ April included Plangdi Neple’s “Bodies of Sand and Blood”, which follows a young trans boy trying to learn the magic of the men of his people, but who again and again is told he cannot because of his body. And yet at his lowest, he hears voices in the darkness ...Read More
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Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear, Robin Wasley (Simon & Schuster 978-1-665-91460-4, $19.99, hc, 400pp) February 2024. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.
The tourist town of Llewellyn, AKA Wellsie, is famous for the magic that used to be there. Just like Springfield is the town where Lincoln was born, and Roswell is where aliens might have landed, Wellsie is where something happened once. It’s a town on a fault ...Read More
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The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman (Viking 978-0-73522-404-9, $35.00, 688pp, hc) June 2024.
In a “Historical Note” to his new novel The Bright Sword (his first adult novel since wrapping up The Magicians trilogy), Lev Grossman remarks that people have been re-working and re-inventing King Arthur’s story for nearly 1,400 years. As he poetically puts it, the legend has “never been told quite the same way twice. Every age and ...Read More
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Beyond the Light Horizon, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51482-6, £10.99, 336 pp, tp) May 2024. Cover by Duncan Spilling. (Pyr 978-1-64506-066-6, $21.00, 336pp, tp) June 2024.
Beyond the Light Horizon picks up right where Beyond the Reach of Earth (click to see review) ends, with Grant figuring out when he has landed and how he might return to his own time. But his problem is only the beginning of a ...Read More
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In the Shadow of the Fall, Tobi Ogundiran (Tordotcom 978-1-25090-796-7, $20.99, 160pp, hc) July 2024.
There are probably hundreds of examples of how the Chosen One motif has served SF and fantasy, and there’s a certain boldness in the way in which Tobi Ogundiran hints at it on the very first page of In the Shadow of the Fall, the first in a two-novella sequence called Guardian of ...Read More
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Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison (Union Square & Co. 978-1-45495-337-1, $19.99, 496pp, tp) March 2024. Cover by Max Loeffler.
What can be said about Harlan Ellison at this point? The man is a legend. Unfortunately, sometimes legends get lost in the folds of time and that makes it harder for newer generations of readers to discover their work. Greatest Hits, a superb collection of some of Ellison’s best short ...Read More
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The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron 978-1-25087-861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) June 2024.
Fantastical train journeys are pretty much a subgenre unto themselves, and no wonder. There’s a huge amount of imaginative space between, say, Snowpiercer and The Polar Express, or between Miéville’s Railsea and anything else at all – though Sarah Brooks’s debut novel, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, carries a few ...Read More
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The Sky on Fire, Jenn Lyons (Tor 978-1-250-34200-3, $29.99, 448pp, hc) July 2024. Cover by Michael Rogers.
Jenn Lyons made her debut with The Ruin of Kings, first of a five-book series (“the Chorus of Dragons”) that took epic fantasy, shook it, subverted it, and played entertaining games with the pieces that fell out. The Sky on Fire is not at all related to that series, except that ...Read More
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Shanghailanders, Juli Min (Spiegel & Grau 978-1-95411-860-7, 270pp, $28.00, hc). May 2024. Cover by Charlotte Strick.
In the first chapter of Juli Min’s Shanghailanders, another novel-in-stories, Leo Yang, a successful real estate developer, boards the maglev train from Pudong International Airport to downtown Shanghai. It is January 2040, and he is returning home after seeing off his wife, Eko, his eldest daughter, Yumi, and his middle daughter, Yoko, ...Read More
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Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda (W.W. Norton & Company 978-1-324-06585-2, $26.99, 224pp, hc) May 2024.
Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda’s spectacular debut collection, is an instant classic. These 12 stories feature hauntings, reincarnations, invisible markets, dancing masquerades, shapeshifting houses, miracles, and magical transformations. Even the stories that aren’t overtly speculative possess a speculative, surreal sensibility. But regardless of the degree of imaginative calisthenics employed, the roots of every narrative in this collection ...Read More
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In Universes, Emet North (HarperCollins 978-0-06331-487-0, 240pp, $26.99, hc) April 2024.
Much like time travel, the multiverse, as a scientifically originated but unproven theory, can be used as a narrative conceit with varying degrees of rigour. For every Timescape a Doctor Who; for every Anathem an Everything Everywhere All at Once. I don’t think a work’s placement on this spectrum is a predictor of its quality, but ...Read More
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The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to The Wastelands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron Books 978-1-25087-861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) June 2024.
I was surprised to discover that there are few novels, vintage or contemporary, set on the Trans-Siberian Express. There are plenty of memoirs and travel guides, but, unlike the Orient Express, with its Agatha Christies and Graham Greenes, very little fiction. The irony is that Sarah Brook’s eerie debut novel, The Cautious ...Read More
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Twice Lived, Joma West (Tordotcom 978-1-250-81032-8, $26.99, hc, 256pp) February 2024. Cover by FORT.
Author Joma West explores the idea of parallel worlds in an unexpected way in her science fiction novel, Twice Lived. Canna and Lily are one person, a ‘‘shifter’’ who uncontrollably moves back and forth between the two worlds. Her mothers detected her nature when they were pregnant, as the fetus would disappear and reappear ...Read More
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Beyond the Reach of Earth, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51480-2, £10.99, 336pp, tp) March 2023. Cover by Duncan Spilling. (Pyr 978-1-64506-665-9, $21.00, 334pp, tp) July 2023.
I reviewed the opening volume of Ken MacLeod’s Lightspeed Trilogy, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, back in 2022, but I didn’t see the second volume, Beyond the Reach of Earth, when it appeared last year. Now, though, I have it and the final ...Read More
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Diabolical Plots 4/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/4/24, 4/18/24 Kaleidotrope 4/24
Anne Liberton’s “Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” anchors the April Diabolical Plots, and for marketing fans (or soft drink fans) it’s a rather delightful and sharp look at capitalism, religion, and corporate interests. Framed as an internal document in a soft drink company that produces Miracle Fresh, which contains blood of the Messiah, the assessment looks at ...Read More
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Mirrored Heavens, Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press 978-1-53443-770-8, $29.99. 608pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by John Picacio.
Black Sun, the first book in Rebecca Roanhorse’s epic fantasy series Between Earth and Sky, opened with one of the most impactful first chapters I’ve read in a long time. Fevered Star, the sequel, contained one of the most intense scenes of people who kinda deserved it getting slaughtered by ...Read More
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Navola, Paolo Bacigalupi (Knopf 978-0-59353-505-9, $30.00, 576pp, hc) July 2024.
Without meaning to stir up those enthusiastic taxonomists who are determined to Let No Subgenre Go Unlabeled, is there a term for the sort of historical fantasy that draws on recognizable times and places, but replaces familiar geographical, historical, or mythical names with invented ones, and often employs only minimal supernatural or magical elements? Guy Gavriel Kay seems to ...Read More
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Baby X, Kira Peikoff (Crooked Lane 978-1-63910-633-2, $30.99, 336pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Nicole Lecht.
Kira Peikoff’s Baby X is a solid technothriller that feels very timely while also delivering great entertainment. At once a novel of big ideas that will satisfy fans of science fiction and a fast-paced narrative about crimes that might become a reality sooner rather than later, Baby X pulls readers into a future ...Read More
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Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-662-51391-6, $16.99, tp, 284pp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.
Cynthia Pelayo’s Forgotten Sisters begins with a nightmare, then moves to a nuanced family history of sisters Jennie and Anna, who live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River that was owned first by their grandparents, then their parents, and now is theirs to treasure and maintain. In the second chapter, ...Read More
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Beyond the Light Horizon, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51482-6, £10.99, 336 pp, tp) May 2024. Cover by Duncan Spilling. (Pyr 978-1-64506-066-6, $21.00, 336pp, tp) June 2024.
Are Ken MacLeod novels realistic? Twenty-five years ago I would have said no. Reading the Fall Revolution series (1995-1999) as a teenager, part of the thrill (I see now) was the vivid granular depiction of a world that (I thought then) didn’t work that ...Read More
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Echo of Worlds, M. R. Carey (Orbit 978-0316504690, trade paperback, 512pp, $19.99) June 2024
I pled for the author’s and publisher’s mercy in my review of the first captivating book in this series—Infinity Gate—begging for a quick sequel. Well, about fourteen months later, a reasonable interval, here we are. Prayers answered!
I also mentioned then that Infinity Gate was billed as the first book in a series. ...Read More
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The Knife and the Serpent, Tim Pratt (Angry Robot 978-1915202802, $18.99, 400pp, tp) June 2024.
Between Tim Pratt novels, I always forget just how unabashedly pulp he is as a writer. I say pulp as a compliment, not a criticism. Pratt has a gift for embracing the ridiculous and turning it into entertainment: playing the emotional field with seriousness while rolling around in weird and wacky SFFnal propositions. In ...Read More
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GigaNotoSaurus 3/24 Fiyah Spring ’24 Baffling 4/24
GigaNotoSaurus’s April story, “The Grandmother Hypothesis” by J.S. Richardson, finds the narrator jumping from reality to reality using a machine of her own creation – one that cannot take her home again. But returning to her own world was never the goal, not after losing her child, and the story follows the narrator as she loses herself trying to explore, ...Read More
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The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron Books 978-1-25088-425-1, 400pp, $29.99 hc) April 2024. Cover by Jim Tierney & Emma Pidsley.
Spain in the 1500s was not a great place to be if your family were converso – a term applied to Jews or Muslims who had been (often forcefully) converted to Catholicism – and worse still if you were caught secretly practicing your familial faith: It was the time of the ...Read More
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Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom 978-1-25084-768-3, $27.99, 304pp, hc) June 2024.
To quote Tom Clancy (or was it Jeff Bezos?), it takes ten years to become an overnight success. I suspect Vajra Chandrasekera can relate. He spent a decade working on his craft, with short fiction published in various genre magazines and anthologies. Then, last year, Chandrasekera published his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, which immediately caught ...Read More
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The City of Stardust, Georgia Summers (Redhook 978-0-316-56148-8, $29.00, hc, 352 pp) January 2024.
The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers blends our recognizable world, mostly through the home of the Everly family in the English countryside, with the fictional city of Fidelis, a place of academics and magic that hides a horrific truth. (And that horror really is bad; we’re talking ritual-sacrifice-of-kidnapped-children kind of bad.) Violet Everly lives ...Read More
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Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-66251-391-6, $16.99, 303pp, tp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.
Cynthia Pelayo has made a name for herself in horror by bringing to the table a mixture of horror, crime fiction, and folklore that always contains a dash of poetry and by telling stories that invariably take place in Chicago, a city that Pelayo always turns into a character in her work. ...Read More
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Pulsifer: a Fable, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474918, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Jan 2024
Land of Ice, a Velvet Knife, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474932, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Feb 2024
It is very seldom—perhaps almost never—that one opens up one’s copy of the Sunday New York Times and discovers that the lead article in the Magazine section is devoted to a still-living author whose roots ...Read More
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Analog 3-4/24 khōréō 3.4 Clarkesworld 4/24
The March/April 2024 issue of Analog opens with “Enough” by William Ledbetter, wherein a graffiti artist encounters tech designed to resist tagging and report the location of artists to authorities. Working with his ex-girlfriend and her new partner, he finds a way to co-opt the tech and broadcasts a message of hope and resistance. “A Long Journey into Light” ...Read More
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Ghost of the Neon God, T. R. Napper (Titan 978-1803368115, hardcover, 128pp, $17.99) June 2024
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and, arguably, 1984 can serve as the birthday of the cyberpunk genre as well or better than any adjacent year. I think at this point, we can cease debating about the nature of cyberpunk, its utility and whether it’s here ...Read More
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The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941, David Ritter, Daniel Ritter, Sam McDonald, & John L. Coker III (First Fandom Experience 978-1-73665-965-6, $149.00, 504pp, hc) April 2024.
If someone were to tell me that a lavish 500-page coffee-table book selling for $149 is basically a microhistory describing what a bunch of people I’ve mostly never heard of were doing in 1941, I’d quite reasonably be skeptical; ...Read More
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