Inversion, Aric McBay (AK Press 978-1-8493-5504-9, $17.00. 240pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Bob Kayganich & T.L. Simons.
Every once in a while, I run into a new science fiction story that feels remarkably classic, as though it had been written at the height of some previous era and only recently discovered. Or classical, perhaps – so well-versed in its themes and tropes that you can immediately see where ...Read More
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The Wolfe at the Door, Gene Wolfe (Tor 978-1-25084-620-4, $29.99, 480pp, hc) October 2023.
With its punny title, The Wolfe at the Door is the second collection of Gene Wolfe’s work to be published this year (and the third book to come out since his passing in 2019). Where The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories from Subterranean Press assembled Wolfe’s more chilling tales, Tor’s The Wolfe at the ...Read More
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Bloom, Delilah S. Dawson (Titan Books 978-1-80336-575-6, $22.99, 208pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Julia Lloyd.
I’ll admit, it’s been a while since I read anything by Delilah S. Dawson. I enjoyed her young adult speculative novels Hit and Servants of the Storm, comic book Ladycastle, her speculative romance stories, and her Weird West series The Shadow written under the pseudonym Lila Bowen. But for no reason ...Read More
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Cocktails & Chloroform, Kelley Armstrong (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-161-4, $45.00, 136pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
Fans of Kelley Armstrong’s Rip Through Time series with protagonist Mallory Atkinson will be happy with her heroine’s latest exploits in the novella Cocktails & Chloroform. Trapped in the Victorian era after a mysterious circumstance found the homicide detective stuck in the body of Catriona Mitchell, a housemaid who was strangled ...Read More
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The Year’s Top Robot and AI Stories: Fourth Annual Collection, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-261-9, $18.99, 286pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
Discussions around the place of robots and artificial intelligence have grown in relevance and urgency over the last couple of years; AI is gaining ever more presence in our “real” lives rather than just in fiction. Allan Kaster’s fourth collection of stories about robots and ...Read More
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Skin Thief: Stories, Suzan Palumbo (Neon Hemlock Press 978-1-95208-672-4, $18.99, 186pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Mia Minnis.
Anytime a book published by Neon Hemlock lands at my doorstep, I drop everything to read it. Every story is unique in content and powerful in its queerness. I never know what I’m going to get, except that it’s going to be good. When Brent Lambert’s A Necessary Chaos and Suzan ...Read More
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Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, Molly McGhee (Astra House 978-1662602115, $24.95, hc, 304pp) October 2023.
On the fourth page of Molly McGhee’s debut novel, the titular character Jonathan Abernathy is described as a young man drowning in financial debts. They primarily include ‘‘(1) a series of unpaid credit cards inherited after the death of his parents’’ and ‘‘(2) the legal culminations of the decisions he made as a 17-year-old ...Read More
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Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316668903, $18.99, 359pp, tp) October 2023.
Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316668910, $18.99, 352pp, tp) November 2023.
Readers of K.J. Parker are by now familiar with his affable scoundrels – by turns digressive, philosophical, deeply cynical, petulant, and somehow both self-loathing and self-justifying in the same breath. Saevus Corax, the playwright-turned-battlefield-scavenger who is the protagonist of ...Read More
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Horror Unmasked: A History of Terror from Nosferatu to Nope, Brad Weismann (becker&mayer! 978-0760376799, $24.99, 232pp, hc) September 2023.
Brad Weismann, author of Lost in the Dark: A World History of Horror Film, has with his latest offering accomplished something praiseworthy indeed: He has managed to compress a whole century of international genre film history into a concise but highly informative, lavishly illustrated guide that will entrance newcomers ...Read More
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Frost Bite, Angela Sylvaine (Dark Matter INK 978-1-95859-803-0, $17.99. 280pp, tp) October 2023. Cover by Eric Hibbeler.
In Angela Sylvaine’s Frost Bite, winter has hit Demise, North Dakota hard. Snow and ice have blanketed the town, making everything as cold and miserable as Realene feels. She was on her way out of town, but when her mom was diagnosed with a fatal health condition, Realene’s future crumbled away. ...Read More
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Dry Land, B. Pladek (University of Wisconsin Press 978-0-29934-394-1, 264pp, $18.95, tp) September 2023.
Dry Land, B. Pladek’s debut novel, is historical climate fiction that meditates upon man’s fraught relationship with the natural environment and the limits of magical powers, enlivened with evocative sketches of the Wisconsin wilderness. Set against the backdrop of the First World War, the story revolves around Rand Brandt, a young man whose ...Read More
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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023, R.F. Kuang & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0-06-331574-7, $18.99, 292pp, tp) October 2023.
Now in its ninth year, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 predictably offers a stimulating and eclectic selection of tales, three of which made the Hugo ballot and a few of which are nothing short of brilliant. But it also raises a few questions of ...Read More
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The Reformatory, Tananarive Due (Saga Press 978-1-982-188344, $28.99, 567pp, hc) October 2023.
Nothing is more horrific than real life. Tananarive Due takes a personal family connection to the terrors of the Dozier School – a reform school operated by the state of Florida from 1900 to 2011 known for its brutal abuse and deaths of incarcerated boys – and the abomination of the Jim Crow South and combines them ...Read More
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What Kind of Mother, Clay McLeod Chapman (Quirk Books 978-1-68369-380-2, $21.99, 304pp, hc) September 2023.
Clay McLeod’s Chapman’s What Kind of Mother is a great horror novel in which creepiness and body horror take a back seat to grief and the horror it pushes people to do. A story that’s as harrowing as it is sad and strange, What Kind of Mother is a superb addition to McLeod’s catalog and ...Read More
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These Burning Stars, Bethany Jacobs (Orbit US 978-0-316-46332-4, $19.99, 423pp, tp) October 2023.
These Burning Stars is Bethany Jacobs’s debut novel, and it’s an interesting and ambitious space opera – and a surprisingly self-contained narrative for an entry in that typically sprawling subgenre. Jacobs has the confidence to go big, and the control to bring her debut to a satisfying conclusion: I feel that fans of Megan E. O’Keefe’s ...Read More
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Bittersweet in the Hollow, Kate Pearsall (Putnam 978-0-59353-102-0, $18.99, 384pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Imogen Oh.
Linden James is the third of four sisters, and like all the James women, she and her sisters have some sort of magical ability. Linden can taste and recognize other people’s emotions; her second sister can tell when someone is lying, while the fourth sister can contact the spirits of the dead. ...Read More
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The September House, Carissa Orlando (Berkley 978-0-59354-861-5, $27.00, 352pp, hc) September 2023. Cover by Daniel Brount.
Books that can make you feel things are special, and Carissa Orlando’s The September House will make readers feel a lot of different things. The September House is a strange horror novel in which the horror elements are mostly dealt with using the kind of nonchalance people display while waiting in line at the ...Read More
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Short, Michael Blumlein (Subterranean Press 978-1645241522, hardcover, 424pp, $45.00) December 2023
Long, Michael Blumlein (Subterranean Press 978-1645241539, hardcover, 360pp, $45.00) December 2023
For many years, I saw Michael Blumlein regularly at Readercon. We had pleasant chats, for he was congenial, simpatico, funny, and smart. Then one year I asked him if he were returning to the West Coast immediately after the con. “No, we’re going to Rhode Island ...Read More
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Creation Node, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1 473-22895-5, £25.00, 442pp, hc) September 2023.
Stephen Baxter’s Creation Node is a sprawling, multiviewpoint, multithreaded story that eventually knits together its strands and lights out for the cosmic territories, along the way touching on an encyclopedic range of classic science-fictional tropes and influences. Its generating event is the discovery of a mysterious body at the farthest fringes of the Oort Cloud, four light ...Read More
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The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House 978-0-81299-658-6, $31.00, 640pp, hc) February 2024.
There are two things to be said up front about Kelly Link’s much-anticipated first novel. One is that it’s not what you’re expecting – although that’s pretty much what we do expect from any Kelly Link story – and the other is that there’s a reason why the title is The Book of Love rather ...Read More
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Dead Eleven, Jimmy Juliano (Dutton 978-0-59347-192-0, $27.00, 448pp, hc) June 2023.
Jimmy Juliano’s Dead Eleven is one of the most impressive debuts of 2023. The narrative, which follows a woman’s disappearance on a strange island, has a unique approach that makes it read like a found-footage film. It also mixes a lot of creepy lore, a secretive community stuck in the past in a strange island, and something stalking people ...Read More
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Midnight at the Houdini, Delilah S. Dawson (Delacorte 978-0593486795, $18.99, hc, 357pp) September 2023. Cover by Aurelie Maron.
Initially, Delilah S. Dawson’s Midnight at the Houdini is all about 16-year-old Anna Alonso’s very stressed-out day. Her beloved older sister is getting married, and because no one else in her family seems to worry about details to the degree that Anna does, she has organized the whole thing. While checking ...Read More
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HIM, Geoff Ryman (Angry Robot 978-1915202673, trade paperback, 366pp, $18.99) December 2023
The subgenre of SF that deals with religion is a copious, healthy, and growing one, albeit not as large as some branches of fantastika. From del Rey’s “For I Am a Jealous People!” to Blish’s A Case of Conscience; from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land to Russell’s The Sparrow; from Bishop’s “The Gospel According ...Read More
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The Death I Gave Him, Em X. Liu (Solaris 978-1-78618-998-1, $26.99, 351, hc) September 2023. Cover by James Macey.
With a tagline like ‘‘Something is rotten in Elsinore Labs,’’ a reader with a background knowledge of Shakespeare knows exactly what they’re getting with The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu: Hamlet, but make it science.
The book’s foreword explains that the following events all occurred over ...Read More
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Collected Ogoense and Other Stories, Rebecca Ore (Aqueduct Press 978-1619762480, trade paperback, 222pp, $20.95) November 2023
Aqueduct Press reaches its twentieth anniversary in 2024. Helmed for all these years by the talented and dedicated L. Timmel Duchamp, the firm has—under the rubric of “Bringing challenging feminist science fiction to the demanding reader”—offered a wide range of stellar fiction and nonfiction that any of the Big Five would have been ...Read More
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Mad Sisters of Esi, Tashan Mehta (HarperCollins India 978-93569-94188, 412pp, INR599.00, tp). September 2023. Cover by Upamanyu Bhattacharyya.
Towards the end of Tashan Mehta’s scintillating second novel, Mad Sisters of Esi, there is a single-page chapter titled “Breathe”. “We pause here,” the narrator tells us. “We sit down. We rest…. There is no rush.” It comes at exactly the right time. The “we” speaking at this point (this ...Read More
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Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37410-928-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) January 2024.
While reading Marie-Helene Bertino’s offbeat third novel, Beautyland, I was regularly reminded of the work of other authors. The central premise – the narrator believes she’s from another planet – brought to mind Sayaka Murata’s 2020 novel Earthlings. As a first-contact novel that reshapes rather than subverts the trope, it bears similarity with Adam Soto’s ...Read More
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The Art of Destiny, Wesley Chu (Del Rey 978-0-59323-766-3, $29.99, 651pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Tran Nguyen.
The second book in a trilogy is always a rough go. You can’t pay off any of the larger story arcs you set up in the first book, but you still have to close out book two with a sense something has changed within your characters – but that they haven’t ...Read More
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Human Sacrifices, María Fernanda Ampuero (The Feminist Press at CUNY 978-1-55861-298-3, $17.99, 144pp, pb) May 2023. Cover by Sukruti Anah Staneley.
María Fernanda Ampuero’s Human Sacrifices is one of the best short story collections of 2023, regardless of genre. With superb writing and a seemingly endless barrage of ideas, turns of phrase, and dark imagery that goes from the supernatural to the unremarkable, this superb collection, translated from the Spanish ...Read More
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Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford (Faber & Faber 978-0-57133-687-6, £20.00, 496pp, hc) October 2023. (Scribner 978-1-66802-545-1, $28.00, 464pp, hc) February 2024.
Francis Spufford’s enthusiasm for science fiction, and the variants of it that engage with historical process, is hardly a secret, but it’s taken a while for him to move from observer to participant. As long ago as 1996 he published a thoughtful essay on William Gibson & Bruce Sterling’s The ...Read More
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We Are the Crisis, Cadwell Turnbull (Blackstone 978-1-9826-0375-5, $26.99, 322pp, hc) November 2023.
The notion of vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural critters suddenly coming out of the shadows sounds like a formula-driven conceit on the order of World of Darkness games or Underworld movies, but readers of Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters quickly learned it can be a lot more complicated than that. Thematically and structurally complex, covering ...Read More
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Defiance, C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher (DAW 978-0-75641-590-7, $28.00, 368 pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Todd Lockwood.
Defiance is the 22nd volume in the long-running, mostly contiguous series that began in 1994 with Foreigner, the book that gave the sequence its name. And with this volume, the byline now adds Jane S. Fancher’s name to C.J. Cherryh’s, since, as Cherryh writes in a page of acknowledgments, ...Read More
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