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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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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Asimov’s 11-12/23 Clarkesworld 11/23 khōréō 3.2
Asimov’s November/December issue includes three novellas, along with an assortment of short stories and novelettes. The wide variety of themes and styles in this issue work well, with stories evoking classic science fiction, stories with an epic science fantasy feel, and others taking a quiet slice-of-life approach. “Berb by Berb” by Ray Nayler is one of the most effective pieces in the ...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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Lightspeed 11/23 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 11/2/23, 11/16/23 GigaNotoSaurus 11/23 Flash Fiction Online 11/23 F&SF 11-12/23
The November Lightspeed shows a keen interest in storytelling forms, with stories framed as recipes, as reviews, as confessions, and with Regina Kanyu Wang’s “A Record of Lost Time” (translated by Rebecca F. Kuang) as a series of personal narratives surrounding a new technology called FastForward, which allows users to experience “sped ...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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