When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory (Saga 978-1-6680-6004-9, $29.99, 464pp, hc) April 2025.
In a career that has ranged from Dickian SF to rural horror, one scenario that seems to fascinate Daryl Gregory is bringing a small but diverse group of characters together under stress, whether survivors of gruesome horror stories (We Are All Completely Fine) or disparate members of a family gifted with psychic powers ( ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 12/24
“Stranger Seas Than These” by L. Chan in the December issue of Clarkesworld is full of lovely imagery and worldbuilding. Anna Maria, Professor Lin, and Sister Penitence are trapped in a submersible inside a dead Godwhale. When their readings suggest the Godwhale may be alive after all, Anna Maria jacks into the submersible in an attempt to communicate and ask for help getting home. Chan does ...Read More
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The Crimson Road, A.G. Slatter (Titan 978-1-80336-456-8, $18.99, 368pp, tp) February 2025.
Every time I review a new novel by A.G. Slatter set in the Sourdough Universe, I suggest you go back and read the other books – whether it’s the collections Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings or the novels All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, and The Briar ...Read More
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Once Was Willem, M.R. Carey (Orbit 978-0-316-50502-4, $18.99, 320pp, tp) March 2025.
Once Was Willem, M.R. Carey’s new supernatural medieval fantasy, is a gorgeously written visit to 12th century England, a time of murderous lords, preoccupied kings and the life-and-death struggles of a small village called Cosham in the fiefdom of Pennick. This was the place and time of narrator Willem Turling, who died from illness at the ...Read More
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Death and Other Speculative Fictions, Caroline Hagood (Spuyten Duvvil 9781963908503, $18.00, 116pp, tp) January 2025.
Caroline Hagood’s Death and Other Speculative Fictions is an astonishing read, comforting and discomforting in equal measure. A philosophical, poetic meditation on the death of a parent, it’s a whirl of reflections on what fantastic stories can say about death, and vice versa. Don’t be dismayed by the fact that this doesn’t look like ...Read More
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The Dagger in Vichy, Alastair Reynolds (Subterranean 978-1-64524-280-2, $40.00, 120pp, hc) August 2025. Cover by Andrew Davis.
The Dagger in Vichy is very different from Alastair Reynolds’s other recent work. His most recent novel, Machine Vendetta (2024), saw him return to the Revelation Space universe. This novella, on the other hand, is set on Earth – albeit (it becomes clear) many centuries in the future. No space opera, The ...Read More
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Transmentation | Transience, Darkly Lem (Blackstone 979-8-21218-599-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Kathryn English.
I came to this novel with no knowledge of what I was going into. I had heard that Darkly Lem was a collaboration between five authors – Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull, and M. Darusha Wehm – but I hadn’t read any of their individual work. On top of that, ...Read More
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The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami (Pantheon 978-0593317600, $29.00, 336pp, hc) March 2025.
This may sound like an odd question, but are algorithms starting to take over the narrative function that psi powers once served in SF? The idea of preventing crimes by pre-emptively arresting supposed perpetrators has been around at least since Orwell’s notion of ‘‘thoughtcrimes,’’ and in the 1950s this became the province of psionically gifted folks like ...Read More
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Combat Monsters: Untold Tales of World War II, edited by Henry Herz (Blackstone 979-8874748432, trade paperback, 384pp, $18.99) February 2025
Henry Herz, we learn from the ancillary matter in the new original anthology Combat Monsters, has assembled six other anthologies, and yet I found myself unfamiliar with his name. The answer to my lamentable ignorance is that his prior books are intended for the Young Adult market — ...Read More
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Waterblack, Alex Pheby (Tor 978-1-250-81729-7, $32.00, 640pp, hc) January 2025.
Toward the end of Waterblack, in the middle of one of several appendices, the omniscient narrator, who has held our hand across three novels, tells us that the “violent intentions” of one of the novel’s key antagonists, intentions that are to “fuel a series of later events,” intentions that “would end in… success… in the matter of killing ...Read More
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The Legacy of Arniston House, T.L. Huchu (Tor 978-1-250-88309-4, $29.99, 400pp, hc) November 2024. Cover by Leo Nickolls.
When I sat down the week before Christmas to review The Legacy of Arniston House, the latest in T.L. Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights series, I had all four of his books stacked up beside my computer. I began reading the series just after Thanksgiving and quickly blew through the adventures of ...Read More
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We Lived on the Horizon, Erika Swyler (Atria 9781668049594, $28.99, 336pp, hc) January 2025. Cover design by Laywan Kwan.
The ingredients of Erika Swyler’s We Lived On the Horizon are familiar enough: embodied AI, a highly stratified society, a postapocalyptic city ossifying from techno-utopia to classist nightmare. But Swyler’s combination feels fresh; the main characters here move almost, though not entirely, outside the “real” plot, the revolution planners and ...Read More
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The Year’s Best Science Fiction on Earth 2, Allan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-276-3, $19.99, 275pp, tp) December 2024. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.
With anthology series that focus on robots and AI, and on space and time, I was surprised to come across Infinivox and Allan Kaster doing a series about science fiction on Earth itself; it seemed too mundane. Kaster addresses this in the first line of his introduction, ...Read More
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The Garden, Nick Newman (Putnam’s 978-0593717738, hardcover, 400pp, $29.00) February 2025
Any SF reader worthy of the name must be conversant with The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, helmed by John Clute, et al. An online treasure house of knowledge, continuously updated and freely accessible, it’s a reference work I have relied on and quoted from innumerable times.
Less well-known is that team’s Encyclopedia of Fantasy. This mammoth ...Read More
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Galaxy Raiders: Abyss, Ian Douglas (Harper Voyager 978-0063205741, trade paperback, 400pp, $18.99) February 2025
I think most folks are well aware of how SF/F/H concepts trickle out into the public domain, and percolate through the minds of citizenry who might never have read a relevant book or even experienced a relevant media presentation. Take “teleportation,” for instance. Once an abstruse notion that meant nothing to the average citizen of ...Read More
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Zodiac Rising, Katie Zhao (Random House 978-0-593-64641-0, $19.99, 416pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Deb JJ Lee.
Author Katie Zhao opens her young adult fantasy thriller Zodiac Rising with a brief prologue explaining the history behind 12 Chinese warriors, based on the zodiac calendar, who were summoned centuries ago in response to a royal plea to battle monsters known as Wrathlings. Their lineage brought peace to the land until ...Read More
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Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion, Paul Kincaid (Palgrave Macmillan 978-3031715662, $37.99, 86pp, hc) November 2024.
For the past couple of years, Palgrave has been publishing a series of short “critical companion” monographs each focusing on a single title of what it calls the “new canon”; books covered so far include The Last Unicorn, Dune, The Hobbit, Neuromancer, Neverwhere, The Stars My Destination, ...Read More
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Goblins & Greatcoats, Travis Baldree (Subterranean) June 2024. Unquiet on the Eastern Front, Wole Talabi (Subterranean) October 2024. Flash Fiction Online 11/24
Subterranean Press has recently been offering short fiction online for free, and I’m catching up with June’s “Goblins & Greatcoats” by Travis Baldree, which follows Zyll, a goblin escaping the rain and road at a small inn which just happens to be at ...Read More
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Juice, Tim Winton (Picador 978-1-76134-489-3, AUD$45.00, 528pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Adam Laszczuk.
Here’s an admission that would elicit a gasp from the Australian literary elite: I have never read a Tim Winton novel. Worse, I read the opening of one of his most famous novels and I hated it. But then I read Juice. And if all his novels hit like that for people who like realism… ...Read More
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Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids, Leyna Krow (Penguin 9780593299654, $19.00, 304pp, tp) January 2025. Cover design by Nerylsa Dijol.
Leyna Krow’s Sinkhole, and Other Inexplicable Voids is a dazzling, vivid collection. Throughout its 16 stories, Krow expertly threads together a handful of elements: magical or absurd developments, incisive snapshots of familial loves and fears, and haunting reflections on climate change disasters. Shared thematic concerns and a handful of connected ...Read More
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One Level Down, Mary G. Thompson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-430-6, $16.95, 176pp, tp) April 2025.
Mary G. Thompson is another middle-grade and young-adult author now venturing into adult SF with One Level Down, an efficient VR thriller with some fairly familiar elements skillfully handled and given additional punch by a memorable narrator, a megalomaniacal villain who echoes the ‘‘mad scientists’’ of yore, and a persistent undertone of psychological horror. While ...Read More
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Coup de Grâce, Sofia Ajram (Titan Books 978-1-80336-962-4, $19.99, 144pp, hc) October 2024.
Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce is a relentlessly dark and visceral novel about a man on his way to commit suicide who somehow becomes trapped in the endless liminal space of an empty subway station. Beautifully written and claustrophobic in the way only empty liminal spaces can be, this short novel delivers breathtaking lines along with ...Read More
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The Tomb of Dragons, Katherine Addison (Tor 978-1-250-81619-1, $28.99, 352pp, hc) March 2025. Cover by Chris Gibbs.
It is impossible for me to overstate how much I enjoy the novels of Katherine Addison set in the world of The Goblin Emperor. Their only real competition, for me, is the ‘‘World of the Five Gods’’ continuity of Lois McMaster Bujold: the sense of being in the hands of a ...Read More
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The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34108-2, $24.99, 144pp, hc) March 2025.
Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is an absolutely lovely take on classic murder ballads, with distinct echoes of the Tam Lin story and a soundtrack that might as well be wall-to-wall Steeleye Span. It might come as a bit of a surprise to readers who know El-Mohtar’s work only from the popular and multiple award-winning ...Read More
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Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner (DAW 978-0-7564-1934-9, $28.99, 309pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Faceout Studio, Tim Green.
From a novel in which voice overmasters genre we move to one in which genre more or less overmasters voice. Erin K. Wagner’s debut novel, Mechanize My Hands to War, isn’t badly told or badly imagined per se, but most of what is imagined is familiar and, ...Read More
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The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34108-2, $24.99, 144pp, hc) March 2025.
Amal El-Mohtar is perhaps most famous as the co-author (with Max Gladstone) of the justly lauded bestselling novella This Is How You Lose the Time War. Her independent talents, however, are numerous, and in her new solo novella The River Has Roots, several of them are on display.
The River Has Roots is intertwined ...Read More
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The Orb of Cairado, Katherine Addison (Subterranean 978-1-64524-213-0, 120pp, $45.00, hc) January 2025. Cover by Tom Canty.
A similar question arises for the protagonist of the standalone novella The Orb of Cairado. Like the Cemeteries of Amalo books, it is an offshoot of Addison’s Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-nominated novel The Goblin Emperor (2014) – more directly, perhaps, as their actions kick off from the same event, ...Read More
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Good Night, Sleep Tight, Brian Evenson (Coffee House Press 978-1-56689-709-9, $19.00, 229pp, hc) September 2024. Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love.
When it comes to inhabiting and traversing the interstitial spaces between genres, no one does it better than Brian Evenson. Science fiction, horror, and literary fiction are the main three genres Evenson writes, but the bridges he builds between those genres – and the brilliant way in which he ...Read More
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Fusion Fragment 11/24 GigaNotoSaurus 11/24 Diabolical Plots 11/24
November’s Fusion Fragment starts strong with Emry Jordal’s novelette “The Little Black Wand for Every Occasion”, in which a technology known as Serendipity is growing in popularity, though not without some controversy. It allows people a redo, erasing six minutes or so of time so that people can undo any “mistakes” they just made. In practice, it allows people ...Read More
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The Way Up Is Death, Dan Hanks (Angry Robot 978-1915202949, trade paperback, 368pp, $18.99) January 2025
Dan Hanks’s third novel (I remain sheepishly ignorant of his first two: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire [2020] and Swashbucklers [2021]) is built around a very familiar concept: the physical, mental, and moral testing, by unknown agents, of a pack of aspirants or seekers or, as in this case, kidnapped ...Read More
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Hot Singles in Your Area, Jordan Shiveley (Unbound 978-1-80018-341-4, $18.00, 208pp, tp) February 2025. Cover by Jack Smyth.
Some books are hard to categorize. Jordan Shiveley’s Hot Singles in Your Area is one of those books. Strangely funny and dancing to the strange sound of its own drum, this novel has one foot in body horror and one foot in something akin to bizarro fiction (think authors like Carlton ...Read More
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Hammajang Luck, Makana Yamamoto (Gollancz 978-1-39961-679-9, £20.00, 336pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Jordan Wolfe. (Harper Voyager 978-0-06343-082-2, $19.99, 368pp, tp). January 2025. Cover by Janelle Barone.
I love a heist story. Getting the conspirators together, finding out the plan, overcoming obstacles, finding out the real plan, watching it all unravel and then neatly come back together… I know the beats of the story, and that’s part of what ...Read More
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