Locus Online

Clarkesworld 12/22 Assemble Artifacts Summer ‘22 Underland Arcana Summer ‘22

The last Clarkesworld of the year begins with “Law of Tongue” by Naim Kabir. The nar­rator is managing interspecies negotiations between humans and a pod of orcas near Seattle. The grandmother orca demands help in recovering a grandchild, who has been hunting in Alaska. The whole situation puts the narrator in a bad position, and as the ...Read More

Hopeland, Ian McDonald (Tor 978-0765375551, hardcover, 512pp, $30.99) February 2023

Try to imagine some improbable authorial workmate pairings. Tanith Lee and Andre Norton? Dan Brown and Christopher Priest? Robert Sheckley and M. John Harrison? It’s a given that such mismatches would come to naught. But a similar yoking of semi-antithetical writers—at least in spirit—is at play in Ian McDonald’s big new exciting and tender saga, Hopeland. It’s a ...Read More

I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, Marisa Crane (Catapult 978-1-64622-129-5, $27.00, 352pp, hc) January 2023.

Recently, author and editor Nick Mamatas nailed the “X meets Y” elevator pitch when he accurately described Titan by Japanese author Mado Nozaki as “The Lifecycle of Software Objects meets Pacific Rim.” But if I were handing out gold medals for the best use of this formulation, it would be to the ...Read More

The Keeper’s Six, Kate Elliott (Tordotcom 978-1-25088-913-3, $19.99, 208pp, hc) January 2023. Cover by Emmanuel Shiu.

Kate Elliott is a writer whose work I have long enjoyed and admired for its human­ity and its scope, even when that work tackled subjects I couldn’t quite enjoy. From epic fantasy with the high politics and romantic entanglements of the Spiritwalker trilogy, the convulsions of societies in transition of the Crossroads trilogy, ...Read More

All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, Izzy Wasserstein (Neon Hemlock 978-1-952086-42-7, $18.99, 204 pp, tp) July 2022. Cover by Vivian Magaña.

Izzy Wasserstein’s All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From opens with a story of the same name. Set in a second person point of view, readers follow a multi­verse traveler who keeps returning to different variations of their hometown. Each version is slightly different, ...Read More

Cast of Wonders 11/15/22, 12/11/22 Escape Pod 11/17/22, 12/8/22 Strange Horizons 11/14/22, 11/21/22, 11/28/22, 12/5/22

Cast of Wonders rounded out November with the feline-centric “The Cat of Lin Villa” by Megan Chee. The story features a cat who enjoys the company of a woman trapped in an unhappy and abusive marriage. Because she gives treats and com­pany, this cannot stand, and it’s up to the cat to ...Read More

Check out this week’s new releases!

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 75 of Locus.

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

Karma of the Sun, Brandon Ying Kit Boey (CamCat 978-0-7443-0760-3, $25.99, 352pp, hc) January 2023.

Brandon Ying Kit Boey’s debut novel, Karma of the Sun, is a much-needed and welcome shot in the arm to apocalypse fiction – a rich subgenre, to be sure, but one crowded with Western views and Western voic­es on the end of the world. Instead, Boey takes us to the future nestled in ...Read More

Penguin Random House has announced plans to separate Crown Publishing Group (CPG), making it independent from the Random House Publishing Group (RHPG). Crown was previously separate before being absorbed in 2018.

The newly reorganized Random House Publishing Group will include Random House, the Dial Press, Hogarth, the Modern Library, One World, Ballantine Bantam Dell/Delacorte, Random House Worlds, Harmony/Rodale, Convergent, and WaterBrook & Multnomah. The new Crown Publishing Group will include ...Read More

The Audio Publishers Association has announced the 2023 Audie Awards finalists, recognizing excellence in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment.

Audie finalists of genre interest follow.

Nominations are now open for the Hugo Awards, the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, and the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, to be presented at Chengdu Worldcon 2023, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, to be held October 18-22, 2023 in Chengdu, China. The convention says,

Everyone with memberships to either Chicon 8 or the 2023 Chengdu Worldcon that was purchased before February 1, 2023 is eligible ...Read More

The Origin of Storms, Elizabeth Bear (Tor 978-0-76538-017-3, $28.99, 384pp, hc) June 2022.

If I were a TV producer who wanted to take on an epic fantasy story à la Game of Thrones or Wheel of Time, I would look no further than Elizabeth Bear’s Lotus Kingdom books. To be honest, I’d much rather see an interpretation of Bear’s work over yet another Euro-based, medieval-esque retread of dudes ...Read More

The top five winners of Uncanny‘s 2022 Favorite Fiction Reader Poll have been announced:

Cold Water, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris 978-1-78618-722-2, £9.99, tp) November 2022. Cover by blacksheep-uk.

We’ve encountered the story many times before: the master criminal coming out of retirement for one last job; the retired doctor who finds himself the only person with medical knowledge when disaster strikes; perhaps most pertinently the aged spy called back to the service in order to unmask the mole in the Circus. So now we ...Read More

Nigerian author and editor Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was reportedly denied entry to the US when attempting to attend the NAACP Image Awards ceremony as a nominee.

Ekpeki said on Twitter today,

I’m alive, though I won’t say well, yet. Currently in Nigeria. I was detained for 3 days, & missed the NAACP Image awards. Been seeing the speculations. I’ll just say it’s way worse than anyone is says or thinks. ...Read More

Wait for Me, Sara Shepard (Union Square & Co. 978-1-4549-4577-2, $18.99, hc, 320pp) Novem­ber 2022. Cover by Erin Fitzsimmons.

Sara Shepard’s Wait for Me is a thriller that might be about ghosts and reincarnation or might be about an unreliable protagonist struggling with mental illness and some well-meaning but seriously intrusive friends and relatives. I was re­ally onboard with the reincarnation angle, which includes an undying romance, until I ...Read More

The Scarlet Circus, Jane Yolen (Tachyon 9781616963866, $17.95, 256pp, tp) February 2023.

If you’re thinking about catching up on reading Jane Yolen, forget it. She’s already way ahead of you, with (by her own count) ‘‘well over 400 books, plus thousands of poems and a huge bas­ket load of stories.’’ Of course, a lot of those are children’s and YA titles, but even excluding those, there is a daunting ...Read More