Locus Online

Conquest, Nina Allan (riverrun 978-1-52942-803-2, £16.99, 308pp, hc) May 2023.

One of the first things you learn about Nina Allan’s novels is that there are virtually no minor characters – everyone has a story, and the stories are likely to weave together in unexpected ways. Another is that some of these stories involve speculative elements, although assigning a genre label like SF – or mysteries, as with her new ...Read More

Dual Memory, Sue Burke (Tor ‎ 978-1250809131, hardcover, 352pp, $29.99) May 2023

A small plucky polity full of rebellious freethinkers, under siege by outside aggressors, is led to victory by a quirky Artificial Intelligence eager to assist its humans, using asymmetric warfare. Of course, that’s Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, right? Right, but not in today’s particular case. Because we are talking about Sue Burke’s fourth ...Read More

Under the Hollywood Sign, Tom Reamy (Subterranean 978-1-64524-131-7, hardcover, 544pp, $50.00) May 2023

I got my first subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1967. By the mid-seventies, I was a veteran F&SF reader, basking in the flow of new and familiar names. What a vintage era, under the editorship of Ed Ferman (who would later ennoble me and enlist me in his pantheon by buying ...Read More

Uncanny 1-2/23 Tor.com 2/1/23, 2/8/23, 2/15/23, 2/22/23

The year is off to an awesome start with an abundant amount of admirable fiction! I have a few quibbles here and there, but still find everything mentioned here to be worthwhile reading.

Issue 50 of Uncanny is double-sized and probably the best one yet. Lead-off “Collaboration?” by Ken Liu & Caroline M. Yoachim is a creative collaborative effort that explores creative collaboration. ...Read More

Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean 978-1-64524-033-4, $45, 125 pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by David Curtis.

Arkady Martine’s Hugo-winning novels are delightfully huge, sprawling affairs. It’s a different kind of delight to see her approach some of the same themes and influences in a new style, as she does in her latest: the tight and unsettling novella Rose/House. Against the backdrop of the near-future California desert, two small-town detectives ...Read More

Witch King, Martha Wells (Tordotcom 978-1-25082–6794, $28.99, 432 pg, hc) May 2023. Cover by Tommy Arnold.

‘‘I’m just trying to learn how everything works,’’ one of the secondary characters says in Martha Wells’s Witch King. Same, secondary character. Same.

For the last few years, Wells’s Murderbot stories have been collecting readers and awards across the genre. All of the praise is well-earned. These science fiction stories about a ...Read More

Greetings from beyond the paywall! We have been posting new content monthly on our Patreon Archive Feed – scans of vintage Locus and audio clips from author interviews and more – and wanted to share a little of what that feed looks like by making some of our earlier posts public. Check out this post with the entire issue 130 of Locus.

In addition to all the benefits of lower ...Read More

Seven minutes to find out the top new books out this week! (pay no attention to the year typo)

The Scourge Between Stars, Ness Brown (Night­fire 978-1-2508-3468-3, $16.99, 176pp, tp) April 2023.

Ness Brown’s The Scourge Between Stars is a perfect blend of science fiction and horror that has enough elements of each to fully satisfy lovers of both. Short, fast, engag­ing, wildly entertaining, and unexpectedly gory, it almost demands to be devoured in one sitting, but packs more than pulpy entertainment and alien forms spilling guts across ...Read More

Flux, Jinwoo Chong (Melville House 978-1-68598-034-6, $28.99, 352pp, hc) March 2023.

Central to Jinwoo Chong’s whip-smart, time-bending, and emotionally scarring debut novel Flux is Raider, a fictional mid ’80s cop drama named after its gravel-voiced, leather-wearing hero known for his Dirty Harry-like catchphrase, ‘‘give me a reason.’’ For eight-year-old Bo, Raider is his favourite show. He watches and rewatches his father’s old VHS tapes, drawn to the titular ...Read More

The Locus SF Foundation is thrilled to announce two esteemed personalities will be headlining the upcoming Locus Awards ceremony. Author Maggie Tokuda-Hall (Love in the Library; The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea; Squad) will bring her wit and personality to the stage as emcee for the event, and legendary science fiction writer Connie Willis will grace the evening as the guest speaker. The Locus Awards will take ...Read More

That Self-Same Metal, Brittany N. Williams (Amulet Books 978-1-41975-864-5, $19.99. 352pp, hc) April 2023.

I finished That Self-Same Metal, book 1 of Brit­tany N. Williams’ Forge and Fracture Saga, about 15 minutes before writing this and I’m already desperate for the sequel. That I have to wait a whole year for it is a crime, plain and simple.

Set in London in 1605 at the beginning of the ...Read More

The Future Worlds Prize for Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers of Colour, for “unpublished writers of colour based in the UK” announced the winner of the Future Worlds prize.

Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean 978-1-64524-033-4, $45, 125 pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by David Curtis

Arkady Martine’s new novella, Rose/House, is markedly different from the anthropological explorations and space operatics of her two far-future Teixcalaan Empire novels. Instead, it’s an Earthbound 22nd-century murder mystery that combines elements of the locked-room and police-procedural subvariet­ies, and features a science-fictionized haunted house. Detective Maritza Smith, working out of an understaffed China ...Read More

A Brief History of Living Forever, Jaroslav Kalfař (Little Brown 978-0-31646-318-8, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2023.

‘‘The downsides of living forever’’ is practically a genre unto itself at this point, with all manner of fiction devoted to the philosophical and existential crises likely to crop up when faced with eternal life. And, on a slightly different tack, realistic AI and brain-uploading technologies have their own sets of ethical complications, ...Read More

Norwescon 45 was held April 6-9, 2023 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Seattle Airport in SeaTac WA; the theme was ‘‘Between Two Worlds.’’ Guests of honor were P. Djèlí Clark (writer), Grace P. Fong (artist), and Greg Dubos (science). Uncanny was the spotlight publisher, represented by Lynne M. Thomas & Michael Damian Thomas. The weekend included hundreds of hours of programming with scores of panels and readings, plus special ...Read More

The 44th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA) took place during a sunny and warm March 15-18, 2023 at the tropical Marriott Orlando Airport Hotel Lakeside, with a theme of ‘‘Afrofuturism.’’ Academics, writers, publishers, editors, art­ists, students, independent scholars, and more participated, with 355 people attending (down from 2019’s 480 in-person attendees) with 184 presenters in the academic track and 84 invited creative guests. Guest of honor ...Read More