AMAL EL-MOHTAR was born December 13, 1984 in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up there, apart from two years spent in Lebanon, where her family is from. She began publishing short fiction with “The Crow’s Caw” (2006) and has published scores of stories and poems, notably Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award winner “Seasons of Glass and Iron” (2016, also a World Fantasy, Sturgeon Memorial, and Aurora Award finalist); Nebula Award ...Read More
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How old were you when you first met Death?
No, not death (by the way, belated condolences for Mr. Bubbles, the grade three homeroom betta fish, RIP). Capital-D Death, the skeleton in the black robe with the hourglass and the scythe. Was it in a cartoon (maybe the cigar-smoking shade from Woody Woodpecker)? A comic? A book? A trip to an art gallery or museum? Do you remember how you ...Read More
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In my new novel Picks and Shovels, we learn the origins of Martin Hench, my bestselling, two-fisted, scambusting forensic accountant who debuted in 2023’s Red Team Blues and whose adventures continued in 2024’s The Bezzle.
Marty’s origin story starts at MIT in 1982, where he joins the proud lineage of computer science students who flunk out of their degrees because they’re too busy hacking code to do their ...Read More
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The 2024 Locus Awards were held on June 22, online and in-person at the historic Preservation Park in Oakland CA. Author Henry Lien – ‘‘Emperor Stardust’’ – emceed the ceremony, with author, activist, and journalist Cory Doctorow as keynote speaker. The awards ceremony concluded the Locus Weekend, a larger celebration of readings, talks, and meetups from June 19‒22. Full members received access to virtual and in-person events, six months of ...Read More
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During a recent trip to Singapore, I went book shopping. The science fiction and fantasy shelves of the Books Kinokuniya on Orchard Road predominantly featured familiar titles, but there were also a good number of locally published books by writers unknown to me. The specific publisher that caught my eye was Penguin Random House SEA, perhaps because in the UK almost all the SF titles with a penguin on the ...Read More
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It’s been a year, hasn’t it? Has it? Honestly, it feels like 2024 just began, and here we are at the end, staring down the uncertainty of the year to come. However, as always, my fiction reading – both for my review columns and for myself – has been a comfort and a highlight. I know I’ve missed out on many wonderful works. There are sadly only so many hours ...Read More
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Some years, it feels like there’s a central book in SF and fantasy, one around which the conversation orbits. A few obvious examples: Neuromancer in 1984, Ancillary Justice in 2013, This Is How You Lose the Time War in 2019. In my reading, 2024 was not such a year. There were plenty of good books – see below – but as a year it felt curiously decentered, as if the ...Read More
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In the summer of 2024, Briardene Books published Track Changes, a collection of my reviews. There’s nothing like putting a book like that together, combing your way through nearly 20 years of work, to make you think about the project of canon-building. What books still deserve to be talked about decades after you read them? What books represent shifts in the field, or in literature itself, that you were ...Read More
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Once again, whatever else it was, it was a good year for books. Between new releases, revisiting older selections with a book club or two, and a very rewarding set of reads for several projects I’ve been hammering at – the Ancillary Review’s podcast, particularly – I was practically drowning in fascinating titles. For my year-end list, I decided to narrow it down (painfully, regretfully) to my top three choices ...Read More
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I’d be lying if I said I was in a particularly great mental space to look back at the previous year with anything like insight or objectivity. Not only for the most obvious reasons, but because the year took it out of me in ways personal and rather profound. Of course, that seems to be largely par for the course for the last decade, which fittingly coincides with the years ...Read More
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Shane Hawk is a Cheyenne and Arapaho horror writer and high school history teacher from California whose work has been featured in numerous anthologies and the stage. He is the co-editor of Never Whistle at Night, a groundbreaking anthology showcasing Indigenous horror stories that challenge and redefine the genre. Hawk’s writing is inspired by family lore, cryptid sightings, and the haunting legacy of colonialism. When he’s not crafting spine-chilling ...Read More
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Look Back, Look Forward, Look Around
I have a list, every year, of books I wanted to read but for which I ran out of time. This year’s is even longer than usual (and it includes Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man, Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song, Sascha Stronach’s The Sunforge, August Clarke’s Metal From Heaven, and Justinian Huang’s The Emperor and the Endless Palace, to name ...Read More
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Trawling and Tunneling Through the Genres
I did not cast my net very wide this year – nine 2024 titles, with a couple of late 2023s and one early 2025 item included in the calendar year’s columns – and while the catch was small, everything I caught was a keeper, evidence of the variety that the fields of science fiction and fantasy continue to generate. I also noticed (again) how ...Read More
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Oh, we love our magazines! It was a great year for some, but the final year for others. Venues changed frequency (usually down), others moved away from print, some added other forums and opportunities for readers. Overall, we saw fewer new venues than in previous years. Revenue is still coming from Kickstarter, Patreon, and other crowdfunding for a lot of the mags, who are still largely putting fiction up for ...Read More
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What happened, 2024? Where did we all go wrong?
Even if it was a weird, rocky, stressful year in many ways, it was still another great year for fiction! After closing Fantasy Magazine in late 2023 I became a literary agent at kt literary, which meant that a lot of my reading time went to novel submissions. I retained my post as a reviewer for Lightspeed, among various other roles ...Read More
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I’m going to focus here on the best books I read this year by women and nonbinary folks, and also separate them into a few categories; I need some way to organise my thoughts.
Novellas
Three amazing novellas stand out for 2024. Ann LeBlanc’s debut novella, The Transitive Properties of Cheese is superficially a cheese heist in space; it also has a lot to say about bodies and identity and ...Read More
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Ten for 2024 by Tim Pratt
Well, here we are, right down at the closing of the year (though you’ll read this near the beginning of the next one). 2024 was something of an annus horribilis, but as usual, I found comfort and refuge in fiction, and sometimes even inspiration to keep fighting for a chance at better tomorrows.
Still, since I’m in a dark turn of mind, I’ll start ...Read More
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IBI AANU ZOBOI was born was born Pascale Philantrope in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on June 22, 1977. She grew up in New York City, and now lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children; she legally changed her name after marriage.
Zoboi attended Clarion West in 2001. She also attended a Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation workshop in 2011, and earned her MFA in Writing for Children and ...Read More
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As we are given carte blanche to write about books however we wish in these annual essays, I am going to indulge myself and share some thoughts on the titles I read in the past year that particularly impressed and/or made me happy. There were several surprises, including Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet by Molly Morris. This coming-of-age drama veers from the expected as soon as the reader realizes ...Read More
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After the slam dunk that was 2023, I had high hopes for 2024 – too high, as it turns out. 2023 was a rare vintage, the 1999 of films in book form (okay, maybe not that good). To expect that 2024 would scale those same heady heights was asking too much of the year, especially one already burdened by a world-shaping American election. Not that genre fiction schedules are influenced ...Read More
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2024 was bit of an irregular year for me, reading-wise. As per my notebooks, I read around 90 books (alas, less than my last year’s score of 110 on Goodreads) – the main course obviously being speculative fiction, with a small dessert sampling of literary fiction, romances, comics and non-fiction. The meal wasn’t entirely satisfying, as there were plenty of anticipated titles that I didn’t get to read, and plenty ...Read More
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GARETH LYN POWELL was born September 3, 1970 in Clifton, Bristol, England; he grew up in Bristol, and lives there still. He studied humanities and creative writing at the University of Glamorgan (later merged with University of Wales, Newport and renamed the University of South Wales) and was fortunate to count Diana Wynne Jones and Helen Dunmore as early mentors. He has taught creative writing at various universities in the ...Read More
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2024: Descent (or Ascent) into Multiplicity
It’s a bit bracing to be reminded that I’ve been writing these yearly review columns for more than three decades, but it does put things in perspective. Some of the books mentioned in those first couple of columns, of course, are barely remembered now, but others still seem to be a significant part of the discussion – Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Neal Stephenson’s ...Read More
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ETHAN PRICE is a visual artist living in Kentucky. His work implements a delicate handling of drawing and painting, punctuated by various textured overlays to create a body of work that evokes mystery, decay, and the passage of time.
His work has been featured in publications like Infected by Art, and has shown in a variety of galleries across the US including Arcadia Contemporary, Arch Enemy Arts, and Nucleus Gallery. ...Read More
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OLUWATOBI AJIBOLA OGUNDIRAN was born August 1, 1995 in Lagos, Nigeria, where he grew up until attending boarding school in Kwara State in Nigeria. At 19, he moved to Russia for medical school, spending seven years there. In addition to his work as a physician, he is currently studying for his MFA at the University of Mississippi.
Ogundiran began publishing with ‘‘Maria’s Children’’ in The Dark in 2018, and has ...Read More
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As a lifelong lover of all things nerdy and a Dungeon Master for my own Dungeons & Dragons group, I’ve spent countless hours weaving intricate worlds, devising devious plots, and watching as my players gleefully derailed them. For me, tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are more than just a pastime. They’re a way of life, a source of endless creativity, and, as it turns out, the perfect training ground for writing ...Read More
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SHANNON EMERY LEE was born April 19, 1969 in Santa Monica CA and grew up in Southern California, apart from a couple of years in Hong Kong as a young child. She is the only daughter of actor and martial arts legend Bruce Lee, and is an actress, businessperson, speaker, and producer. Lee is chairperson of the non-profit Bruce Lee Foundation, which ‘‘provides access to Bruce Lee’s teachings to help ...Read More
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DAPHNE TONGE is the founder and CEO of Illumicrate, the UK’s first specialist book subscription box. She is also the founder and MD of Daphne Press, a science fiction and fantasy publisher. She’s judged for book prizes and is an event chair. Previously, she was an award-winning book blogger. She lives in London, but is Chinese-Filipino born and was raised in Manila.
Tell us about your book subscription box service, ...Read More
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Her imagination, creativity, and thirst for learning have been near-constant companions, but artist/illustrator CHRISTINE MITZUK didn’t initially consider working as an artist. Her career started after college while working as a production artist and graphic designer at a few design and marketing firms for about seven years. She gained insight into client work and procedures to help a project flow along. As a freelance artist she uses several of these ...Read More
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VAJRA CHANDRASEKERA was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he still lives. He began publishing short fiction with ‘‘Pockets Full of Stones’’ in Clarkesworld (2013), and has since published scores of stories in genre magazines and anthologies. ‘‘The Translator, at Low Tide’’ (2020) was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Prize.
Debut novel The Saint of Bright Doors (2023) won Crawford, Ignyte, Locus, and Nebula Awards, and was a ...Read More
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PAOLO TADINI BACIGALUPI was born August 6, 1972 in Colorado Springs CO, moving with his parents to rural western Colorado soon after. When his parents divorced, he split his time between them, finishing high school at the private Colorado Rocky Mountain School. He attended Oberlin College in OH, where he met his wife-to-be Anjula (they married in 1998) and majored in East Asian Studies, spending time in China for foreign-language ...Read More
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VIRGINIA LEE is an artist, illustrator and sculptor based on Dartmoor, England where she was raised in a creative household immersed in myth and fantasy art. She has illustrated several books for children, including the Greek myth of Persephone and the Russian fairy tale ‘‘The Frog Bride’’. She provided illustrations for “The Enchanted Lenormand Oracle”, StoryWorld cards, and The Secret Histories: Mermaids and Hobgoblins books. She also worked as a ...Read More
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