Locus Online

Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids, Leyna Krow (Penguin 978-0-59329-965-4, $19.00, 304pp, tp) January 2025.

Leyna Krow’s terrific second collection, Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids, assembles 16 stories that take an askew, sometimes surreal, frequently funny attitude to the physical and emotional bonds that bind us (and octopuses) together.

“Sinkhole” is the collection’s title piece and has been optioned for a Hollywood adaptation, care of Jordan Peele and Issa ...Read More

Private Rites, Julia Armfield (Fourth Estate 978-0-00-860803-3, £16.99, 208pp, hc) June 2024. (Flatiron 978-1-250-59376-611-5, $27.99, 304pp, hc) December 2024.

I don’t know what the weather has been like this year where you live, but in the UK it has been wet. As I write in October, I think we are just about to exceed the 1991-2020 average for annual rainfall; in September, Southern Eng­land saw 233% of that average. ...Read More

Murder by Memory, Olivia Waite (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34224-9, $21.99, 112pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Feifei Ruan.

Olivia Waite is deservedly well-known, at least among my circles, for her queer historical romances featuring women from a wide range of social classes who overcome obstacles while falling in love with other women. In addition to her skills as a novelist, she is also a talented reviewer with a particular focus on ...Read More

Picks and Shovels, Cory Doctorow (Ad Astra UK 978-1-8045-4783-0, £20.00, 400pp, hc) January 2025. (Tor 978-1-250-86590-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) February 2025.

Cory Doctorow’s novels about forensic accountant Martin Hench are playing out as a trilogy-in-reverse: We first met Hench as a wealthy 67-year-old freelance investigator in Red Team Blues (2023), then as he recalled a case from 2006 in The Bezzle, when he was probably approaching 50. Now, ...Read More

How to Steal a Galaxy, Beth Revis (DAW 978-0-756-41948-6, $23.00, 192pp, hc) December 2024.

Beth Revis follows up her decidedly enjoyable Full Speed to a Crash Landing with the second in the Chaotic Orbits trilogy, How to Steal a Galaxy. This time, the action surrounding protagonist Ada Lamarr is more compressed, with the bulk of the novella taking place over a single evening at the Museum of Intergalactic ...Read More

Locus is back with another exciting, if not a bit shorter than usual, new books video! Come by our YouTube channel to check out our picks for the top new releases of the week! An fantastic array of SF, Fantasy, Horror, and YA books are just a click away! You can also support what we do and keep up-to-date on every weeks top new releases by subscribing to the channel! ...Read More

The Horror Writ­ers Association (HWA) has announced their Sum­mer Scares Reading list for 2025.

Adult Books:

• Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke and Other Misfortunes, Eric LaRocca (Titan)
• Reprieve, James Han Mattson (Morrow)
• The Luminous Dead, Caitlin Starling (Harper Voyager)

Young Adult Books:

• Devils Unto Dust, Emma Berquist (Greenwillow)
• The Getaway, Lamar Giles (Scholastic)
• Find Him Where You Left Him Dead, Kristen

“Echo” by Liam Betts of Vanderbilt University is the winner of the 2025 Dell Magazines Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing.

Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/14/24, 11/28/24 Small Wonders 11/24 Lightspeed 11/24

Beneath Ceaseless Skies opened November with an issue focused on revolution, including “Another Tide” by Will Greatwich, which finds the narrator leaving their home in a long-conquered area of a vast empire to visit and study its fringes, where resistance still lives embodied in a man named Goruna. The two meet, and the narrator joins Go­runa’s cause ...Read More

Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Harper Voyager‎ ‎ 978-0063430822, trade paperback, 368pp, $15.99) January 2025

My partner Deborah Newton proclaims that her favorite type of movie is the heist film. I suspect that there are many who share her affection for this genre. From Rififi to The Italian Job, from A Fish Called Wanda to Ocean’s 11, such highly entertaining and suspenseful stories span a huge range and ...Read More

The Sentence, Gautam Bhatia (Westland IF 978-9-36045-152-3, ₹599, 396pp, tp) October 2024.

A hundred years ago, the city-state of Peruma emerged from a bloody civil war between its landowning elites and its working classes with a legal compromise. A charter that divided the city into High Town, ruled by the corporate-controlled Council, and Low Town, ruled by the anarchistic Commune. In between are the Guardians, an order of law­yers ...Read More