Russell Letson Reviews House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky

House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus, 978-1035901388, $27.99, 585 pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Joe Wilson.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds is a follow-on to The City of Last Chances that repeats many of the structural features of its predecessor: a large cast of viewpoint characters; ‘‘mosaic’’ chapters that provide authorial overviews and comments; a rambling story line that nevertheless draws the reader through ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2023 by Russell Letson

Long Games, Nightmares, and Retrospectives by Russell Letson

I look into the tea leaves – well, the coffee grounds – at the bottom of the year’s cup and find no wisdom or insight into either the state of the field or even my own reading patterns. As usual. Nevertheless, I am more than content with where my nose-following and stumbling around in the dark have taken me in 2023, across ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Defiance by C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher

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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Russell Letson Reviews War Bodies by Neal Asher

War Bodies, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-1-5290-5008-0, £20.00, 563pp, hc) July 2023. Cover by Steve Stone.

I have been trying to get a line on Neal Asher since first encountering his Polity universe two decades ago. My first thought was, here is a writer taking on many of the features, themes, and tropes that give, say, Iain M. Banks’s Culture books their New Space Opera appeal: a star-spanning, postscarcity ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Lockdown Tales II by Neal Asher

Lockdown Tales II, Neal Asher (NewCon 978-1-914953-43-9, £13.99, tp; £29.99, hc, 372 pp) July 2023. Cover by Vincent Sammy.

Lockdown Tales II is Asher’s second collection of shorter pieces written since COVID prompted the titular restrictions. Of the nine stories (pro­duced between 2020 and 2023), four are new to this volume; three are of novella length; and seven are set in the Polity future history. (Note: These categories overlap.) ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Lords of Uncreation, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316705929, 624 pp, $29.00, hc) May 2023. Cover by Steve Stone.

Lords of Uncreation is the third entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture sequence that began with Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void, which introduced a me­nagerie of alien civilizations living and dead, allies and opponents of all species, and a galactic history of interstellar warfare, ruined worlds, and refugees ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Ragged Maps by Ian R. MacLeod

Ragged Maps, Ian R. MacLeod (Subterranean 978-1-64524-093-8, $45.00, 454 pp, hc) April 2023. Cover by Dominic Harman.

Ian R. MacLeod has produced (depending on how one counts them) a half-dozen or so volumes of short fiction since 1996, and his newest, Ragged Maps, collects thirteen stories from 2016-2022, plus an outlier from back in 1997 and one original to this volume. MacLeod’s range is impressive, and he is ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Translation State by Ann Leckie

Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US 978-0-31628-971-9, $29.00, 432 pp, hc) June 2023.

Speaking of horror, Ann Leckie’s Radchaai world is one of terrible events, cruel forces, and human and inhuman cultures with conflicting agendas, attitudes, and epistemologies – right next to civi­lized social rituals and lots of tea. Translation State is set in this universe, but, like Provenance (2017), outside Radch space proper, though still within its considerable ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews The Best of Michael Swanwick: Volume Two by Michael Swanwick

The Best of Michael Swanwick: Volume Two, Michael Swanwick (Subterranean 978-1-64524-112-6, $50.00, 530pp, hc) July 2023. Cover by Lee Moyer.

I keep thinking of Michael Swanwick as a Renaissance figure, an image generated by his writing, which includes generous dol­lops of fancy, baroque turns of imagination, and elegant prose. In 2008 a big chunk of that prose (21 stories) was gathered in The Best of Michael Swanwick, and ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Season of Skulls by Charles Stross

Season of Skulls, Charles Stross (Tordotcom 978-1-25083-939-8, $28.99, 384 pp, hc) May 2023.

You never know what revelations lurk in the To Be Reviewed pile. This month, a pair of novels by quite dissimilar writers traverse a range of semi-connected genre spaces and bounce off each other in unexpected ways.

In the case of Charles Stross, genre mix-and-mashing is exactly what is expected, the more mischievous or subversive the ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Rose/House by Arkady Martine

Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean 978-1-64524-033-4, $45, 125 pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by David Curtis

Arkady Martine’s new novella, Rose/House, is markedly different from the anthropological explorations and space operatics of her two far-future Teixcalaan Empire novels. Instead, it’s an Earthbound 22nd-century murder mystery that combines elements of the locked-room and police-procedural subvariet­ies, and features a science-fictionized haunted house. Detective Maritza Smith, working out of an understaffed China ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Village in the Sky by Jack McDevitt

Village in the Sky, Jack McDevitt (Saga 978-1-6680-0429-6, $29.99, 341 pp, hc) January 2023. Cover by John Harris.

The possibility that humankind might be alone in a universe empty of intelligent life runs right through Jack McDevitt’s work, from The Hercules Text (1989) to several of the stories in last year’s Return to Glory collection. It is a particularly prominent motif in the Alex Benedict novels, which trace the ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Sleep and the Soul by Greg Egan

Sleep and the Soul, Greg Egan (Self-published 978-1-922240-47-7 $25.00 978-1-922240-45-3, hc) May 2023. Cover by Greg Egan.

Greg Egan’s Sleep and the Soul collects his very newest short-form work: nine stories originally published between 2019 and 2022, plus one that is, as of this writ­ing, not even officially out yet. This is the seventh collection of Egan’s short work I have reviewed over nearly three decades, and I notice ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews The City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchai­kovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-80110-842-3, £20.00, 512 pp, hc) December 2022. Cover by Joe Wilson.

Adrian Tchaikovsky clearly understands genre games quite thoroughly, since he has been working both sides and several alleyways of the great science fiction/fantasy divide in more than three dozen pre­vious titles. For example, Elder Race (2021) built a pseudo-medieval heroic fantasy world on an armature of science-fictional enabling ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2022 by Russell Letson

While groping around for an organizing idea for this annual attempt to impose a shape on my shamble through the field, I kept coming back to maps and territories and borders. What fol­lows is not a map of the field but a hand-drawn sketch of the back yard of my own long-cultivated personal tastes. And now that I’ve introduced the metaphor of the map: my wander through the titles had

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Russell Letson Reviews Imperium Restored by Walter Jon Williams

Imperium Restored, Walter Jon Williams (Harper Voyager 978-0-06246-705-8, $17.99, 496 pp, tp) September 2022.

Twenty years ago, Walter Jon Williams started a trilogy, Dread Empire’s Fall, that has since grown to seven novels (two trilogies and a standalone short novel), a novella, and a short story, and gotten new series labels: the First and Second Books of the Praxis. The main line of the series is arguably one long ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Return to Glory by Jack McDevitt

Return to Glory, Jack McDevitt (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-073-0, $50.00, 569pp, hc) October 2022. Cover by Edward Miller.

Jack McDevitt has been producing SF for more than four decades now, two dozen novels and enough shorter work to fill five previous collections with remarkably little overlap on the contents pages. Now there is a substantial sixth retrospective volume, Return to Glory, which gathers 32 stories from the whole long ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter

The Thousand Earths, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1 473-22890-0, £22.00, 586 pp, hc) Septem­ber 2022.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Stephen Baxter’s work sprawls, narratively, spatially, temporally, conceptually, and cosmologically. He also has a fondness for extravagantly displacing his protagonists and for setting his stories in strange and mysterious environments. And he does love a comprehensive, apocalyptic disaster – see his recent World En­gines: Destroyer or ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Eversion, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz 978-0-57509-076-7, £20.00, 320pp, hc) May 2022. (Orbit US 978-0-31646-282-2, $17.99, 304pp, tp) August 2022. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.

The strange shuffling sound you will be hear­ing is a reviewer tiptoeing around a text filled with spoiler trapdoors. The book in question is Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion, a novel designed to promote puzzlement, and in fact to be a puzzle as much as a story, which means ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Needle by Linda Nagata

Needle, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island 978-1-937197-40-7, $19.00, 356pp, tp) July 2022. Cover by Sarah Anne Langton.

Decades ago, my imagination of the far, far future of humankind was formed by Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker: melancholy, long-lens scenarios that lack individual characters and conventional plot-lines but whose visions of the possible range of thinking beings and civilizations and deep time were simultaneously breathtaking and ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Eyes of the Void, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316705875, $28.00, 608 pp, hc) May 2022. Cover by Steve Stone.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Eyes of the Void is the sequel to Shards of Earth, second in a sprawling, gaudy space opera series featuring a menagerie of space-traveling life­forms, a galactic history of warfare and ruined civilizations, and entire species on the run from inscrutable, invulnerable planet-killers. Human­kind is a latecomer to ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel by John Kessel

The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, John Kessel (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-058-7, $45.00, 582pp, hc) June 2022.

I love big career-retrospective single-author collections, especially when the author provides notes on genesis and biographical context. John Kessel’s turn has come with The Dark Ride, a gathering of 20 stories from 1981-2021 that shows his command of a wide range of motifs and styles and his recurring ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Aspects by John M. Ford

Aspects, John M. Ford (Tor 978-1-250-26903-4 $26.99, 496 pp, hc) April 2022.

Sixteen years after his untimely death, we finally have John M. Ford’s last novel, Aspects, or at least a substantial portion of it. The whole would have been even more substantial, since a half dozen completed sonnet-epigraphs suggest a six-part structure that could have run to more than 1000 pages, so perhaps a two-decker or even ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection by James S.A. Corey

Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US 978-0-316-66919-1, $28.00, 422 pp, hc) March 2022. Cover by Daniel Dociu.

The long main storyline of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series – nine volumes released over a decade – wrapped up with last year’s Leviathan Falls. At various points along the way, though, Corey (AKA Daniel Abraham & Ty Franke) produced shorter pieces that did not ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Quantum of Nightmares by Charles Stross

Quantum of Nightmares, Charles Stross (Tor­dotcom 978-1-25083-937-4, $27.99, 368 pp, hc) January 2022.

Charles Stross’s Quantum of Nightmares is the 11th of the Laundry Files books, a series whose trademark is the blending of tropes, motifs, and narrative conventions from the supernatural-horror and intrigue/crime/spy-thriller genre families. At the beginning, these struck me as light entertainment, part Lovecraftian-gothick, part secret-agent adven­ture, with a generous dollop of political-social satire, all delivered ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Galaxias by Stephen Baxter

Galaxias, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1473228856, $26.99, 538 pp, hc) May 2022.

Stephen Baxter’s Galaxias poses an inter­esting case of the Spoiler Problem. The publisher’s promotional Tweet offers a dra­matic teaser: ‘‘What would happen to the world if the sun went out? The end is nigh. Someone has sent us a sign.’’ And indeed the opening chapters describe the sudden disappearance of the sun at the moment of totality of ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Escape from Yokai Land by Charles Stross

Escape from Yokai Land, Charles Stross (Tordotcom 978-1-25080-570-6, 96 pp, $19.99, hc) March 2022.

Charles Stross continues to figure out ingenious extensions of and variations on the givens of his Laundry series of horror/secret-agent/comedy entertainments. A while back I decided that the recipe for these stories is ‘‘one-third eldritch threat, one-third workplace comic satire, and one-third spy-thriller action,’’ with the mix allowing a range of comedic-horrific effects. The latest ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod

Beyond the Hallowed Sky, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51479-6, £8.99, 336pp, pb) November 2021. Cover by Duncan Spilling.

Ken MacLeod has long been deploying a useful kind of what-iffery, in which the futures he depicts are not ours but alternate futures, branched off from crucial events in our past – a strategy that powers the Fall Revolution and Engines of Light sequences. It’s a useful way of generating scenarios that ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tordotcom 978-1-250-76872-8, $14.99, 199 pp, tp) Novem­ber 2021. Cover by Emmanuel Shu.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race puckishly mixes ingredients from both science fiction and fantasy cookbooks. The usual science-fantasy recipe is a setting that presents as fantasy – medieval/feudal-ish societies with aristocrats, magicians, monsters, and warrior-heroes – but that finally explains the magic in material rather than supernatural terms (Arthur C. Clarke’s sufficiently advanced technology, ...Read More

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The Year in Review 2021 by Russell Letson

Here we are, two years into a pandemic, with half of the nation arguing with the other half like grumpy uncles at a holiday dinner, and the planet deciding whether it’s time to raise those sea levels a meter or ten or just blow us all away in megastorms, and I’m sitting at home, reading. And not books about stopping climate change or improving our civic character, but space operas. ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey

Leviathan Falls, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0-31633-291-0, $30.00, 528pp, hc) November 2021. Cover by Daniel Dociu.

Leviathan Falls, the ninth volume of The Expanse, completes the long and com­plicated story that began with Leviathan Wakes (2011). Over its ten-year run, this series by James S.A. Corey (which is to say Daniel Abraham & Ty Franck) has mixed, matched, and stretched genres, sprung surprises, killed off im­portant cast members ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews The Book of All Skies by Greg Egan

The Book of All Skies, Greg Egan (Greg Egan 978-1-922240-38-5, $12.99, 236 pp, tp) September 2021.

Speaking of skies – when Greg Egan leaves our familiar cosmological or geometrical framework, he really leaves it, as he does in The Book of All Skies, which is set on a planet that has been sliced up like a spiral-carved ham by structures called Hoops. (At least that’s what I get ...Read More

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