Books

Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere by Anastacia Reneé

locusmag 0 Comments

Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, Anastacia Reneé (Amistad 978-0-06322-168-0, $17.99, 144pp, tp) March 2024.

I’ve never really seen eye to eye with poetry. As a kid, all that word-play, metaphor, and allu­sion seemed like hard work, especially when my literary diet consisted mainly of Terrance Dicks Doctor Who novelisations and Stephen King. But in the last decade I’ve made a concerted effort to read outside my comfort zone ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Alex Brown Reviews The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years by Shubnum Khan

locusmag 0 Comments

The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, Shubnum Khan (Viking 9780593653456, $28.00. 320pp, hc) January 2024.

When I started Shubnum Khan’s first novel to be published in the US, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years, I had no idea what to expect. I haven’t read much South African speculative fiction, and nothing that delves into Indian culture transplanted to Africa. It’s not a history or culture I’m familiar with, ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi

locusmag 0 Comments

Convergence Problems, Wole Talabi (DAW 978-0756418830, $27.00, 320pp, hc), February 2024.

After the exuberant fantasy/heist caper that was his debut novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, it might be easy to overlook Wole Talabi’s background as an engineer and SF writer. His new collection, Convergence Problems, serves as a rewarding reminder of his connections to more-or-less traditional SF themes and techniques. A story like ‘‘Blowout’’, ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Adrienne Martini Reviews Paladin’s Faith by T. Kingfisher

locusmag 0 Comments

Paladin’s Faith, T. Kingfisher (Argyll Productions 978-1614506096, $6.99, 422pp, eb) December 2023.

T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) ventures back into her Saint of Steel universe with Paladin’s Faith. Each book in the planned seven-book series is nominally about one of the paladins whose spirits were broken when their animating saint died. But Kingfisher expands what we know about these paladins, their god, and his demise with each volume. ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews Equimedian by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

LocEditor 0 Comments

Equimedian, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Hex 979-8988082712, hardcover, 326pp, $31.99) February 2024

I would venture to guess that most SF fans know Alvaro Zinos-Amaro as one of our best critics and interviewers. Case in point is his recent volume, Being Michael Swanwick, which I reviewed on this platform just a short time ago. But like Green Arrow or Hawkeye, the man has more than one arrow in his quiver. (I ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Jake Casella Brookins Reviews Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

locusmag 0 Comments

Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park (Random House 978-0-8129-9897-9, $30.00. 544pp, hc) November 2023. Cover by Will Staehle.

Framed from the perspective of Soon Sheen, a writer-turned-tech worker, Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams is an intri­cate and entertaining puzzlebox of a novel, an expansive and allusive meditation on Korean history and much else. Soon works for GLOAT, a giant and quietly dystopian tech company in the mold of ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews Beggar’s Sky by Wil McCarthy

LocEditor 0 Comments

Beggar’s Sky, Wil McCarthy (Baen 978-1982193188, hardcover, 320pp, $28.00) February 2024

Wil McCarthy has had an atypical career that is almost neatly bifurcated. He came out of the gate strong with a duology, Aggressor Six, from 1994-1996. With the dawn of a new century, he delivered an even better, more mature and inventive series, Queendom of Sol (2000-2005). But then, for whatever reason, he fell more or less ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews Short Fiction 

Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: GigaNotoSaurus, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed and Rosalind’s Siblings

locusmag 0 Comments

GigaNotoSaurus 12/23 Diabolical Plots 12/23 Lightspeed 12/23, 1/24 Rosalind’s Siblings, Bogi Takács, ed. (Atthis Arts) September 2023

The December GigaNotoSaurus mixes two of my favorite things in Sara Norja’s “Reconciliation Dumplings and Other Recipes”: Sspeculative fiction and food! The piece is framed as parts of a book of family recipes collated and annotated by Ember, who is writing them down to save them for future generations. ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Jake Casella Brookins Reviews Swim Home to the Vanished by Brendan Shay Basham

locusmag 0 Comments

Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Shay Basham (Harper 978-0-0632-4108-4, $30.00. 240pp, hc) August 2023. Cover by Elina Cohen.

Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel Swim Home to the Vanished is a gorgeously writ­ten story of magical transformations, and of grief. Following a Diné man cast adrift by loss, it’s a novel both fluid and sharp, full of shapeshifters and enchanted landscapes, rich in dialog and insight.

After the death ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews Again and Again by Jonathan Evison

locusmag 0 Comments

Again and Again, Jonathan Evison (Dutton 978-0-59318-415-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) November 2023.

I’ve been a massive fan of Jonathan Evison’s fiction since encountering his 2012 novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Not only does Evison have a cracking sense of humour, but he can see beauty and humanity in the darkest and most challenging of situations. I never thought, though, that I’d be reviewing one of Evison’s books ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Alexandra Pierce Reviews 2022 Best of Utopian Speculative Fiction edited by Justine Norton-Kertson

locusmag 0 Comments

2022 Best of Utopian Speculative Fiction, Justine Norton-Kertson, ed. (Android Press 978-1-95812-166-5, $21.99, 240pp, tp) December 2023.

In their follow-up to Bioluminescent: A Lu­narpunk Anthology, Justine Norton-Kertson has assembled a range of stories that suggest different ways of thinking about “utopia.” Going into this anthology I had clear expectations of what “utopia” meant and what these stories would probably look like: societies would be shown as having figured ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Liz Bourke Reviews Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

locusmag 0 Comments

Fathomfolk, Eliza Chan (Orbit US 978-0-316-56492-2, $19.99, 448pp, tp) February 2024. Cover by Kelly Chang.

Eliza Chan has racked up several short fiction pub­lications in recent years, but Fathomfolk represents her debut novel. And it is an interesting debut, albeit one that, on the whole, didn’t come together as I might have hoped.

Fathomfolk takes place in a world dominated by water, apparently in the aftermath of a process ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Tusks of Extinction by Ray Nayler

locusmag 0 Comments

The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler (Tordotcom 978-1-25085-552-7, $26.99, 112pp, hc) January 2024.

Just over a year ago, Ray Nayler offered us a brilliantly original glimpse into the minds of octopuses in The Mountain in the Sea, making a convincing case that this was about as close as we’ve come to encountering a genuine alien intelligence. With The Tusks of Extinction, he turns his attention to the ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase

locusmag 0 Comments

Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase (Erewhon Books 978-1-64566-056-9, $27.00, 416pp, hc) January 2024.

Tlotlo Tsamaase’s debut novel, Womb City, ini­tially presents as science fiction. In an evocative opening, our protagonist Nelah tells us that ‘‘in our city, everyone lives forever. But murder hangs in the air like mist.’’ The city is Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. The mist is a ‘‘puff of human corpse-detecting chemicals’’ that can locate where a ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Alexandra Pierce Reviews The Parliament by Aimee Pokwatka

locusmag 0 Comments

The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-25082-097-6, 320pp, $28.99, hc) Cover by Jaya Miceli. January 2024.

Aimee Pokwatka leans into the absurdist, and refuses explanations in her fiction. Her debut, Self-Portrait with Nothing (2022), has an artist with the ability to bring variants of her portrait subjects into this world; how this works is never explained. Rather, the focus is on relationships: between the artist’s own variants, between the artist and ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Liz Bourke Reviews The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohamed

locusmag 1 Comment

The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom 978-1-250-88178-6, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2024. Cover by Andrew Davis.

It seems to me that I’ve read more books that have to do with weird forests over the last couple of years (some kind of Otherness, other land, or strange and inimical powers deep within the woods) than I have in a long while: Hannah Whitten’s fantasy-romance For the Wolf comes ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews Deluge by Stephen Markley

locusmag 2 Comments

The Deluge, Stephen Markley (Simon & Schuster 978-1-98212-309-3, $32.50, 896pp, hc) January 2023.

I won’t lie. I balked at reading Stephen Mark­ley’s second novel, The Deluge. At nearly 900 pages, I knew it would take me two weeks to read, time I could spend working through a back­log of 2023 books that I’ve been meaning to pick up (including new novels from Francis Spufford, Daniel Mason, Emily Habeck, ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Colleen Mondor Reviews The Parliament by Aimee Pokwatka

locusmag 0 Comments

The Parliament, Aimee Pokwatka (Tordotcom 978-1-250-82097-6, $27.99, 320pp, hc) January 2024.

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film The Birds was based, a bit, on a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name which itself was inspired by du Maurier’s experience seeing a farmer attacked by a flock of seagulls. (If you never saw The Birds, head to YouTube for the phone booth scene.) Author Aimee Pokwatka takes the ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Kinning by Nisi Shawl

locusmag 0 Comments

Kinning, Nisi Shawl (Tor 978-1-25021-269-6, $28.99, 432pp, hc) January 2024.

Nisi Shawl’s 2016 Everfair was one of the more provocative alternate histories of the past de­cade, with its steampunk Africa giving birth to a safe-haven country called Everfair, carved out of the oppressively brutal Belgian Congo of King Leopold and financed in part by British social­ists and African-American missionaries. It was a sprawling, ambitious narrative, covering some 30 years ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews Exordia by Seth Dickinson

LocEditor 0 Comments

Exordia, Seth Dickinson (Tordotcom 978-1250233011, hardcover, 544pp, $29.99) January 2024

Seth Dickinson’s Baru Cormorant trilogy, known collectively as The Masquerade, was a splashy debut, earning him many accolades and fans. So when his next book, “a gonzo space opera and alien techno-thriller” titled Exordia, was announced in 2018, excitement grew. Six years later, after some public wistful wondering as to when the book would actually appear, Exordia finally ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Colleen Mondor Reviews Mislaid in Parts Half-Known by Seanan McGuire

locusmag 0 Comments

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom 978-1-250-84850-5, $22.99, 160pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Robert Hunt.

Seanan McGuire’s latest entry in her Wayward Children series includes several old favorites who come together and relearn the meaning of the word ‘‘home.’’ Mislaid in Parts Half-Known opens in Eleanor West’s School for Wayward Chil­dren and includes a foray through some doors that lead into the fairyland of Prism, a visit ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Gabino Iglesias Reviews Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison

locusmag 0 Comments

Black Sheep, Rachel Harrison (Berkley 978-0-59354-585-0, $27.00, 304pp, hc) September 2023. Cover by Katie Anderson.

Horror, perhaps the best dancing partner when it comes to genre because it gets along very well with everyone else, can be a lot of things, and that includes hilarious. Rachel Harrison’s Black Sheep contains all the elements you’d expect from a horror novel – a creepy presence, dread, emotional turmoil, bloody sacrifices, Satan. However, ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Alex Brown Reviews A Feast for Flies by Leigh Harlen

locusmag 0 Comments

A Feast for Flies, Leigh Harlen (Dancing Star Press 978-1-73214-186-5, $11.99. 163pp, pb) November 2023. Cover by Vitalii Ostaschenko.

Leigh Harlen has only published a collection and one novella, but I loved the latter so much that they immediately became one of my auto-buy authors. Queens of Noise is a riot of a novella, a fierce, funny story about were-punks trying to stop a corporate takeover of their favorite ...Read More

Read more
Geoff Ryman Him cover
Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews Him by Geoff Ryman

locusmag 0 Comments

Him, Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot 978-1-91520-267-3, $18.99, 376pp, tp) December 2023.

The central conceit of Geoff Ryman’s Him is to imagine an alternative history where Jesus is born biologically female but identifies as male. It’s a provocative premise that seems designed to of­fend many people of faith. And yet, while gender identity is a crucial aspect of the novel, Him is, in fact, a respectful and somewhat authentic rendi­tion ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 15 edited by Ellen Datlow

LocEditor 0 Comments

The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Fifteen, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade 978-1949102727, trade paperback, 432pp, $19.99) January 2024

“Curation” is an overworked word these days, when, on the internet, everything from a collection of Pez dispensers to an Instagram stream of dinner photos is deemed to be “curated.” And yet there’s really no better term to be applied to an assemblage of art put together by ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Liz Bourke Reviews All the Hidden Paths by Foz Meadows

locusmag 0 Comments

All the Hidden Paths, Foz Meadows (Tor 978-1-250-82930-6, $29.99, 520pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.

Foz Meadows’s All the Hidden Paths is a direct sequel to their A Strange and Stubborn Endur­ance. Velasin and Caethari have survived the plot against their diplomatic marriage, though it cost the lives of Caethari’s father and his sister Laecia. Their newlywed status and tentative happiness, however, is about to run ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews Short Fiction 

Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Understudies by Priya Sridhar, Diabolical Plots, Samovar, and Strange Horizons

locusmag 0 Comments

Diabolical Plots 10-11/23 Understudies, Priya Sridhar (Hiraeth) Febru­ary 2023. Samovar 10/23/23 Strange Horizons 10/30/23, 11/6/23

Over at Diabolical Plots, the publishing schedule has been temporarily compacted, leading to an October and November with only one story each instead of the regular two. Both stories are quite good, though, and both stay in the Halloween spirit with witches and ghosts aplenty. Both also twist expectations regarding these classic elements, as ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Glass Box by J. Michael Straczynski

LocEditor 0 Comments

The Glass Box, J. Michael Straczynski (Blackstone 979-8212007795, hardcover, 350pp, $25.99) January 2024

We are lucky that Mr. Straczynski—hereafter, the familiar JMS—has taken some time off from his comics and television work to gift us with a fine new novel. Considering also his heavy duties administering the estate of Harlan Ellison—I for one eagerly await the reprinting of Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, and the birth of ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Alexandra Pierce Reviews Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty

locusmag 0 Comments

Chaos Terminal, Mur Lafferty (Ace 978-0-59309-813-4, 369pp, $17.00, tp) Cover by Will Staehle. November 2023.

I have watched a lot of episodes of the British TV show Midsomer Murders. They follow a predict­able format: There’s the murder (or three) and the investigation, and the final triumphant reveal of whodunit. In the course of the investigation far more problems than just the murder will turn up, some of which are ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews Short Fiction 

Niall Harrison Reviews Nordic Visions edited by Margrét Helgadóttir

locusmag 0 Comments

Nordic Visions, Margrét Helgadóttir, ed. (Solaris 978-18378-60296, 341pp, $16.99, tp) October 2023.

The most haunting story in Nordic Visions is one of the shortest. “I am hanging from the lowest bar,” says the narrator of Rakel Helmsdal’s “The Abyss”, by way of introduction, “as I have been for a while now. Knowing there is nothing to see I still stare into the fog.” They cannot recall when they were ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews Short Fiction 

Alex Brown Reviews A Necessary Chaos by Brent Lambert

locusmag 0 Comments

A Necessary Chaos, Brent Lambert (Neon Hem­lock Press 978-1-95208-646-5, $13.99. 156pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Cathy Kwan.

Switching gears, let’s dive into novella A Neces­sary Chaos by Brent Lambert. In a world where technology and magic collide live two gay Black men, Althus and Vade. Every so often, the boy­friends are able to carve time out of their busy work schedules to meet, usually at some touristy party ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Liz Bourke Reviews Fallen by Melissa Scott

locusmag 0 Comments

Fallen, Melissa Scott (Candlemark & Gleam 978-1-952456-20-6, $22.45, 302pp, tp) December 2023. Cover by Eleni Tsami.

Melissa Scott’s Fallen might lack the sheer bloody energy of These Burning Stars, but it has instead the precise and understated competence of a writer who’s been honing her craft for four decades. Few of Scott’s novels are alike: while Fallen returns to the space opera universe that made its debut in ...Read More

Read more