Augur 7.2
“Telling the Soul of Mars” by Alina Pete starts Augur 7.2 on a strong note. It’s a lovely story that explores the power and limits of language and narrative, and how the traditions of storytelling might change and evolve with space travel. A storyteller born on Mars visits Earth for the first time and struggles with how to express the essence of her home to those ...Read More
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Remedy, J.S. Breukelaar (PS Publishing 978-1-80394-485-2, £25.00, 208pp, hc) August 2024. Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love.
Imagine suddenly being attacked by a creature that comes down from the sky. The thing, which you can’t see well, has big teeth and powerful, sharp talons that dig into your flesh. Now imagine this: That horror isn’t the worst thing in J.S. Breukelaar’s Remedy, a curious horror novel that explores the ...Read More
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Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, Stefan Ekman (Lever Press 978-1643150642, $26.99, 351pp, tp) August 2024.
Stefan Ekman opens his engrossing new study Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic by admitting that ‘‘I began reading urban fantasy in the 1990s, not quite knowing that I did so.’’ He’s not the only one. Over the past few decades, the term seems to have evolved into a sort of catchall, defined ...Read More
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Edge of the Known World, Sheri T. Joseph (SparkPress 978-1-68463-262-6, $18.99, 328pp, pb) September 2024. Cover by Kathleen Lynch.
In her debut novel, Sheri T. Joseph mixes frustratingly messy politics with painfully messy personal affairs to create a riveting novel of the not-far-enough-away future. It’s a future of familiar challenges – displaced people, xenophobia, technologies that threaten individual privacy. Joseph uses three key characters, and their love triangle, to ...Read More
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The Book of Gold, Ruth Frances Long (Hodderscape 978-1-399-73157-7, £15.99, 340pp, tp) November 2024.
Irish writer Ruth Frances Long has been publishing quite prolifically in recent years, though primarily YA and romantic fantasy under her BOURKE
pen-name Jessica Thorne. The Book of Gold is a historically inspired fantasy caper set in a version of Renaissance Europe that is strikingly different from our own. Magic and hidden gods lurk in ...Read More
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A Vile Season, David Ferraro (Page Street YA 979-8-89003-072-6, $18.99, 400pp, hc) October 2024.
David Ferraro’s new young adult fantasy romance A Vile Season is comped as Bridgerton meets The Bachelor but with vampires. That’s exactly the vibe. Everything from the pacing, the intentionally and flamboyantly anachronistic diversity in the upper classes, the garish wardrobe, the playful disregard for historical accuracy, the overly dramatic relationship conflicts, the marriage competition, ...Read More
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At the Fount of Creation, Tobi Ogundiran (Tordotcom 978-1-250-90803-2, $21.99, 224pp, hc) January 2025.
Writers of duologies aren’t doing any favors for book reviewers. With a trilogy, we can blather on about middle-book syndrome and three-act structures; with an ongoing series, we can speculate about metanarratives or simply rate each new volume as though it were the latest album from a familiar band, but a duology somehow seems to ...Read More
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Fortress Sol, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1-39961-461-0, £25.00, 480pp, hc). October 2024.
Fortress Sol is classic Stephen Baxter. It’s driven by big ideas: Humanity’s response to a perceived existential threat includes both dispersing to the stars and mind-boggling engineering projects. Like 2021’s Galaxias, the focus is not so much on the alien threat as on humanity’s response. There’s a relatively small cast of characters, who are engaging enough but ...Read More
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The Shutouts, Gabrielle Korn (St. Martin’s 978-1-2503-2348-4, $29.00, 304pp, hc) December 2024.
As climate change has become an ever-growing and more insistent presence in our lives, it has also begun inflecting and informing works of fiction, whose authors imagine how the remainder of the 21st century will play out. Interestingly, it is writers coming from outside the traditional venues of SFF writing and publishing who have most readily embraced this ...Read More
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Days of Shattered Faith, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-03590-152-4, £22.00, 544pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Joe Wilson.
Days of Shattered Faith, the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers sequence, continues to examine the effects of the long-running, world-conquering program of the nation of Pallesand, a resolutely rationalist, religion-detesting nation determined to bring its notion of secular perfection to a world that is filled with supernatural ...Read More
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Ludluda, Jeff Noon and Steve Beard (Angry Robot 978-1915998316, trade paperback, 400pp, $18.99) December 2024
I am happy to bring readers this exciting news: the genre known as New Weird is currently alive and kicking, despite any rumors of its moribund state, or lack of recent exemplars. The evidence? The fascinating and thrilling duology set before us, Gogmagog and Ludluda.
New Weird—with undeniably deeper roots, not to be ...Read More
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Crows and Silences, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean 978-1-64524-217-8, $60.00, 520pp, hc) December 2024.
When discussing Lucius Shepard, it’s inevitable to bemoan that despite his abundant talent, his work received little mainstream recognition. I observed this when I reviewed The Best of Lucius Shepard: Volume 2, quoting an obituary of Shepard penned by Christopher Priest for The Guardian. Priest felt that Shepard’s preference for the novella and his association with ...Read More
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And the Mighty Will Fall, K.B. Wagers (Harper Voyager 978-0-06-311524-8, $19.99, 464pp, tp) November 2024.
And the Mighty Will Fall is K.B. Wagers’s tenth and latest space opera novel, the fourth book in the NeoG continuity after 2023’s The Ghosts of Trappist. And the Mighty Will Fall brings the action back to our solar system and the long-running conflict between advocates for an independent Mars and the central ...Read More
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Rest in Peaches, Alex Brown (Page Street YA 979-8-89003-070-2, $18.99, 336pp, hc) October 2024.
Get ready for another great young adult horror comedy with Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown (not me!). Quinn is about to do the biggest, most important thing she’s ever done in her whole 17 years of life. At this year’s Homecoming game, she will don a brand new Peaches the Parrot mascot costume and ...Read More
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The Lies We Conjure, Sarah Henning (Tor Teen 978-1-259-84106-3, $19.99, 400pp, hc) September 2024.
As The Lies We Conjure opens, sisters Ruby and Wren are finishing up a summer stint working at a local Renaissance Fair when they get an offer that impetuous Wren cannot pass up. A customer offers them each $2,000 to attend a family dinner at the local landmark mansion and pretend to be her grandchildren. ...Read More
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Breath of Oblivion, Maurice Broaddus (Tor 978-1-25026-512-8, $30.99, 400pp, hc) November 2024.
Breath of Oblivion is the second instalment in Maurice Broaddus’s highly anticipated Astra Black trilogy. The first book in the series, Sweep of Stars, was a Locus Award finalist in 2023 and garnered favourable reviews for his Afrofuturist space adventure. Sweep of Stars clearly displays Broaddus’s admirable worldbuilding, as he imagines the year 2121, long after ...Read More
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Model Home, Rivers Solomon (MCD 978-0-37460-713-5, $28.00, 304pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Abby Kagan.
Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a novel about a haunted house in which said house sits in the background while haunted people take center stage. Stunningly written and full of the kind of trauma that can only come from family, this novel takes the haunted house trope and turns it into something that feels entirely ...Read More
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The Escher Man, T.R. Napper (Titan 978-1-80336-815-3, $17.99, 368pp, pb) September 2024. Cover by Julia Lloyd.
It’s 2101. Macau is filled with casinos and run by gangsters; Endel (aka Endgame), an Australian, is an enforcer for the main cartel, sent to kill traitors and anyone else who threatens the gang’s livelihood. Endel is a drunk and a gambler, and separated from his wife and child because of his behaviour. ...Read More
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Depth Charge, edited by Hank Davis & Jamie Ibson (Baen 978-1982193829, trade paperback, 288pp, $18.00) December 2024
Not so very long ago, the fantastika publishing ecology held open a niche for a species known as the “reprint anthology.” These creatures flourished under the expert hands of such caretakers as Damon Knight, Groff Conklin, Isaac Asimov, Richard Lupoff, Judith Merril and scores of other expert compilers. Their reason for living ...Read More
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Spells to Forget Us, Aislinn Brophy (Putnam 978-15586-1331-7, $20.99, 432pp, hc) September 2024.
In Aislinn Brophy’s new young adult romantic fantasy Spells to Forget Us, two Black teen girls have to balance falling in love with neglectful parents and harsh community expectations. Luna Gold and Aoife Walsh meet-cute at a high school football game. They flirt, they go out, they get together, they break up. Turns out, this ...Read More
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Disavowed, John E. Stith (Experimenter Publishing Company 979-8888315439, trade paperback, 510pp, $16.99) December 2024
I am extremely happy to see that John Stith’s career is experiencing something like a renaissance. His novel, Reckoning Infinity, the last in a continuous flow of fine books, appeared from Tor in 1997. We did not see another until Pushback in 2018—and that one was non-SF. Twenty-one years constituted a long gap for ...Read More
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The Way, Cary Groner (Spiegel & Grau 978-1-95411-842-3, $29.00, 304pp, hc) December 2024.
In Cary Groner’s second novel, The Way, a heavily mutated and infectious avian flu wipes out 80 percent of humanity. The event, dubbed ‘‘Mayhem’’ by the survivors, leads to the expected breakdown of civilisation – ‘‘starvation; migration; a brief, limited nuclear exchange; then finally the return of endemic diseases like TB, diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, malaria, ...Read More
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Castle of the Cursed, Romina Garber (Wednesday Books 978-1-250-86389-8, $21.00, 304pp, hc) July 2024.
The cover of Romina Garber’s Castle of the Cursed includes the line “The House is Always Hungry,” and readers should consider that a fair comment on the story within. As soon as recently orphaned Estela arrives at what she has only recently learned is her family’s “ancestral Spanish castle,” the house plays a huge part ...Read More
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Vilest Things, Chloe Gong (Saga Press 978-1-66800-026-7, $28.99, 384pp, hc). September 2024. Cover by Will Staehle.
Vilest Things picks up about ten minutes before the end of Immortal Longings. This review contains significant spoilers for that first book so interested readers should see my review in the August 2023 issue of Locus.
Vilest Things opens with Anton Makusa having just jumped his qi to crown prince August Shenzhi’s ...Read More
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We Lived on the Horizon, Erika Swyler (Atria 978-6680-4959-4, $28.99, 336pp, hc) January 2025.
Despite what Robert Frost may have thought, a lot of SFF writers really do love a wall. Walled and isolated cities, redoubts, or keeps (to use the term favored by The Science Fiction Encyclopedia) have proved useful to SFF for exploring everything from overpopulation to alien invasions to environmental catastrophe to those pesky tech ...Read More
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Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner (DAW 978-0756419349, hardcover, 320pp, $28.00) December 2024
Erin Wagner’s debut novel is a highly sophisticated tale, constructed in clever fashion, which revolves around the classic motif of human versus nonhuman, specifically man against android. It does not necessarily expand the frontiers of this theme—Wagner’s sociological and technological speculations about androids and their uses hew pretty closely to the standard SF textbook, ...Read More
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Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star, George R.R. Martin, art and adaptation by Raya Golden (Ten Speed Graphic, 978-1-98486-10-8-5, $19.99, 192pp. tp) October 2023. Cover by Raya Golden.
Hugo Award-nominated artist Raya Golden (Meathouse Man, Starport) brings her acclaimed expressive drawing skills, imagination, and sense of humor to Voyaging, Volume 1: The Plague Star, the winding tale of Haviland Tuf, tall, bald, eccentric space merchant ...Read More
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The Spellshop, Sarah Beth Durst (Bramble 978-1-250-33397-1, $29.88, 384pp, hc) July 2024.
Author Sarah Beth Durst notes in her Acknowledgements to The Spellshop that writing her novel was sparked by hot chocolate and raspberry jam and a desire for “a book that felt like a warm hug.” (I get that sentiment because boy howdy, 2024 has been some kind of tough for a lot of us.) Plenty of pastries ...Read More
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Interstellar MegaChef, Lavanya Lakshminarayan (Solaris 978-1-83786-233-7, $16.99, 400pp, tp) November 2024.
I’ve always loved a good cooking show. Back in the day, it was Top Chef (where a contestant always undercooked the chicken) and Great British Menu (where every pudding had to include rhubarb). Now, I’m obsessed with Uncle Roger’s YouTube channel. His takedown of Jamie Oliver’s Egg Fried Rice, with 28 million views and over one million likes, ...Read More
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Compound Fracture, Andrew Joseph White (Peachtree Teen 978-1-68263-612-1, $19.99, 384pp, hc) September 2024.
Teens fighting against the forces of empire or capitalism is a common theme in young adult fiction. Oftentimes, the teen protagonist has a couple sidekicks and a love interest or two who help them wage battle, but it’s up to our hero to defeat the Big Bad and save the day. The empire or corporation is ...Read More
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Dungeon Crawler Carl, Matt Dinniman (Dandy House 979-8-6885-9150-7, $13.99, 400pp, tp) September 2020. (Ace 978-0-59382-024-7, $30.00, 464pp, hc) August 2024. Cover by George Towne.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is not really a book; it’s a long joke, a gimmick, a video game turned into fiction. The thing is, it works. It has spots where it is juvenile or a little slow, but author Matt Dinniman clearly had a blast writing ...Read More
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Countess, Suzan Palumbo (ECW Press 978-1770417571, $16.95, 168pp, tp) September 2024
Trinidadian-Canadian author Suzan Palumbo draws on Caribbean history, culture, and experience in her space opera novella Countess. Palumbo has been previously best known for short fiction: Her collection Skin Thief was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2023.
As a novella, Countess is a mixed bag. Its first half is genuinely compelling, while its second feelts to me ...Read More
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