Author: LocEditor

Zero Bomb by M.T. Hill (Titan 978-1-78909-001-7, $14.95, 304pp, trade paperback) March 2019.

The byline M.T. Hill is a not-too-opaque screen for the writer Matt Hill, whose two previous books under that name have been The Folded Man (2013) and Graft (2016). I mention this fact only because his third novel, Zero Bomb, is so good that you will want to snatch up copies of the first two, as ...Read More

Today I Am Carey by Martin L. Shoemaker (Baen 978-1-4814-8384-1, $16, 336pp, trade paperback) March 2019.

Martin Shoemaker’s debut novel (he had his first story publication in 2011), is based on his tale “Today I Am Paul“. That quietly emotional story about “Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662” garnered Shoemaker a Nebula nomination, and consequently a fair number of readers will certainly be quite interested to see how Shoemaker expands what was ...Read More

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer Press 978-1-61873-155-5, $17, 286pp, trade paperback) March 2019

Having published her first story as recently as 2012 — that date surely seems barely in the rearview mirror to me, although your personal chrono-mileage may vary — Sarah Pinsker has accomplished a lot. With nearly fifty stories to her credit, and a couple of major awards, she has ...Read More

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones by Micah Dean Hicks ((John Joseph Adams 978-1-328-56645-4, $24, 304pp, hardcover, February 2019)

Arguably, we live in a golden age for ghost stories, of an excellence and profusion on a par with the Victorian era classics. Writers such as Mike Carey, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Tim Powers, and Paul Tremblay are working in this mode at the top of their game. As an article in ...Read More

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (Tor 978-0-7653-7996-2, $26.99, 368pp, hardcover, February 2019)

Charlie Jane Anders’s debut novel from 2016, All the Birds in the Sky, marked the emergence of a truly distinctive voice. In her tale of battling magicians and scientists, she managed to gainfully conflate a touching love story with a scary apocalypse, yoking the quotidian with the cosmic, the comic ...Read More

The Plotters by Un-su Kim ((Doubleday 978-0385544382, $25.95, 304pp, hardcover, January 2019)

The theme of secret conspiracies running our mundane world has sunk deep roots into the genre of fantastika. Although quite often such books exhibit no supernatural or SFnal apparatus, they still manage to evoke speculative or weird effects that resonate with the genre, since they demand a kind of cognitive estrangement: everything you know is wrong. John Crowley ...Read More