Books

Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

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The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley (Avid Reader Press, 978-1-66804-514-5, $28.99, 352pp, hc) May 2024.

As Gary Wolfe has long remarked – both in the pages of this magazine and on The Coode Street Podcast – time travel, one of the foundational pillars of science fiction, has been absorbed by the literary mainstream. Starting, arguably, with Audrey Niffenegger, both literary superstars (Kate Atkinson and Emily St. John Mandel) and ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Colleen Mondor Reviews Diavola by Jennifer Thorne

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Diavola, Jennifer Thorne (Nightfire 978-1-250-82612-1, $27.99, hc, 304pp) March 2024. Cover by Judy Jung.

In Jennifer Thorne’s hilarious, scary, brilliant, and all too easily identifiable novel, Diavola, advertising illustrator Anna is determined to be a good daughter, get along with everyone and do what it takes to make her family’s Italian vacation successful. Her parents have paid for two weeks in a villa near the tiny village of ...Read More

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Eugen M. Bacon Reviews Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa edited by Helen Moffett & Rachel Zadok

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Captive: New Short Fiction from Africa, Helen Moffett & Rachel Zadok, eds.(Catalyst Press 978-1-94639-594-8, $19.99, 453pp, tp) May 2024. Cover by Megan Ross.

It’s refreshing to see a robust anthology of African talent featuring eleven writers from nine countries: Eswatini, Guinea-Bissau, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia. Captive: New Short Fic­tion from Africa is an initiative of Short Story Day Africa that celebrates the diversity of ...Read More

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Jake Casella Brookins Reviews Ocean’s Godori by Elaine U. Cho

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Ocean’s Godori, Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books 978-1-63893-059-4, 352pp, $28.00, hc)

Set in a lightly sketched future in which humans have spread into space, terraforming along the way, Elaine U. Cho’s debut novel Ocean’s Godori follows Ocean Yoon, a talented spaceship pilot. Following an initially unexplained fall from grace, Ocean has signed on with the Ohneul, a low-ranking ship. Aloof but comfortable in her ship’s found-family dynamic, Ocean’s biggest ...Read More

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Liz Bourke Reviews Necrobane by Daniel M. Ford

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Necrobane, Daniel M. Ford (Tor 978-1-25081-568-2, $28.99, 304pp, hc.) April 2024.

Speaking of romps, Daniel M. Ford’s Necrobane, sequel to 2023’s The Warden (which concealed much entertainment behind its bland title), is a classic adventure in the sword-and-sorcery mode. It follows The Warden in style, tone, and content, and opens directly after The Warden’s striking cliffhanger.

A Warden is part magistrate, part law enforce­ment, part general magical ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle

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I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, Peter S. Beagle (Saga 978-1-6680-2527-7, $26.00, 280pp, hc) May 2024.

For an author who once seemed an icon of the 1960s, Peter S. Beagle is quite a survi­vor. While on the one hand he’s revisited the beloved worlds of The Innkeeper’s Song and The Last Unicorn (most recently with last year’s The Way Home), he also has produced a series of extraordinarily graceful ...Read More

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Colleen Mondor Reviews The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles by Malka Older

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The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles, Malka Older (Tordotcom 978-1-250-90679-1, $20.99, hc, 224pp) February 2024.

Malka Older follows up her cozy science fiction mystery The Mimicking of Known Successes with the equally cozy science fiction mystery The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. Mossa and Pleiti are still together, although struggling just a bit with long distance due to Investigator Mossa’s job. Valdegeld University is still a bit of a hotbed ...Read More

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Archita Mittra Reviews Sun of Blood and Ruin by Mariely Lares

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Sun of Blood and Ruin, Mariely Lares (Harper Voyager 978-0-06325-431-2, $30.00, 384pp, hc) February 2024.

Pitched as a reimagining of Zorro against the backdrop of Mexican anticolonial resis­tance, Sun of Blood and Ruin – the debut novel by Mariely Lares – manages to be a fun com­fort read with a distinctively folkloric bent. Like its gender-flipped Zorro protagonist who constantly switches between two identities (Lady Leonora, a member of ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

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The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 9781250865878, $27.99, 240pp, hc) February 2024.

There are a handful of SF writers so sharply attuned to the arcane systems that underlie contemporary culture that it sometimes becomes a challenge to figure out what’s SF and what’s not; William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson come to mind, as does Cory Doctorow. The Bezzle, Doctorow’s second novel in a new series featuring forensic accountant ...Read More

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Colleen Mondor Reviews River Mumma by Zalika Reid-Benta

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River Mumma, Zalika Reid-Benta (Penguin Canada 978-0-73524-476-4, C$24.95, 256pp, tp) August 2023. (Erewhon 978-1-645-66135-1, $27.00, 284pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Rebecca Farrin.

So there you are, grad school completed, back home with degree in hand, and all your hopes and dreams must be shelved because the only job you can get entails a lot of folding clothes, cleaning up fitting rooms, and greeting bored customers. This is the ...Read More

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Books Reviews Short Fiction 

Jake Casella Brookins Reviews The Climate Action Almanac edited by Joey Eschrich & Ed Finn

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The Climate Action Almanac, Joey Eschrich & Ed Finn, eds. (Center for Science and the Imagination) No­vember 2023.

Edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, The Climate Action Almanac is an online anthology that brings together a selection of science fiction and non-fiction to fire up our imaginations about climate change and the vast range of possible responses to it. Charmingly illustrated throughout by João Queiroz, the collection strikes a ...Read More

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Liz Bourke Reviews Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard

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Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom 978-1-25032-488-7, $20.99, 176pp, hc) July 2024.

With Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard flexes her space opera muscles in a slightly different direction, in a universe that draws as much on the ‘‘cultivation fantasy’’ of xiānxiá as on the atmosphere and aesthetics that underpin her Xuya universe novels. Navigation­al Entanglements opens new vistas in a world where space travel is accomplished through the ...Read More

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Alex Brown Reviews Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger

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Sheine Lende, Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido 978-1-64614-379-5, $19.99. 400pp, hc) April 2024. Cover by Rovina Cai.

In 2020, Darcie Little Badger had her YA debut with the utterly delightful mystery novel Elatsoe. Ellie, a 17-year-old asexual Lipan Apache teen, lives in a slightly alternate contemporary version of America where legendary creatures and magic are a normal part of life. In particular, she has the ability to call ...Read More

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Colleen Mondor Reviews Malicia by Steven Dos Santos

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Malicia, Steven Dos Santos (Page Street Pub­lishing 978-1-645-67787-1, $18.99, 352pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Aleksey Pollack.

If you are in the mood for a deeply dark YA fan­tasy, with plenty of terror, gore, and moments of blood splattered dismemberment, then Steven Dos Santos has you covered with his latest, Malicia. Set on a small island off the coast of the Dominican Republic, Malicia is a theme park ...Read More

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Paul Di Filippo Reviews Victor Manibo’s Escape Velocity

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Escape Velocity, Victor Manibo (Erewhon Books 978-1645660842, hardcover, 368pp, $28.00) May 2024

The Jacobean Revenge Tragedy is a mode not unprecedented in SF. The instance that comes most readily to mind is Bester’s The Stars My Destination, modeled on one of the most famous such, The Count of Monte Cristo. And now, with Victor Manibo’s sophomore novel, the field gets another vivid enactment of injustices avenged. Except ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

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Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, $19.99, 192pp, hc) May 2024.

The idea of social stratification enforced through architecture – in other words, high-rises with the rich living at the top – has been a staple of SF imagery at least since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it’s been extraordinarily useful as a way of exploring everything from overpopulation to Ballardian alienation to urban dystopia to – more ...Read More

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Liz Bourke Reviews The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

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The Fireborne Blade, Charlotte Bond (Tordotcom 978-1-25029-031-1, $20.99, 176pp, hc) May 2024.

It’s always interesting to review a novella, and this month I have three. Or three very short novels, at least: the line blurs. Charlotte Bond’s The Fireborne Blade harks back to the adventure style of sword-and-sorcery fantasy that had its most recent great flowering (to the best of my knowledge) in the 1980s. Everything old is new ...Read More

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Gabino Iglesias Reviews Small Town Horror by Ronald Malfi

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Small Town Horror, Ronald Malfi (Titan Books 978-1-80336-565-7, $27.99, 400pp, hc) June 2024.

It’s hard to find fresh, unique ghost stories. It’s probably even harder to find original narra­tives – horror, mystery, crime, whatever – in which someone is forced to go back to their home­town to face their past. In Small Town Horror, author Ronald Malfi manages to do both. At once a spooky tale about a ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Alexandra Pierce Reviews Moonstorm by Yoon Ha Lee

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Moonstorm, Yoon Ha Lee (Delacorte Press 9-780-59348-833-1, $19.99, 352pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Priscilla Kim.

As Yoon Ha Lee’s YA novel Moonstorm opens, Hwajin is ten years old, living with her extended family on the clanner moon Carnelian, part of the Moonstorm. Carnelian has an eccentric orbit, and its gravity is consistent only when there is harmony amongst the people living on it. On the very first page, ...Read More

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Ian Mond Reviews Changes in the Land by Matthew Cheney

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Changes in the Land, Matthew Cheney (Lethe Press 978-1-59021-526-5, $3.00, 90pp, eb) April 2024.

If you read my 2023 Year in Review essay pub­lished in the February edition of Locus, you’ll know my favourite collection was Matthew Cheney’s The Last Vanishing Man and Other Stories. I’m not going to repeat what I said about the book other than to note that while the stories tended to be grim ...Read More

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Paul Di Filippo Reviews Robert J. Sawyer’s The Downloaded

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The Downloaded, Robert J. Sawyer (Shadowpaw Press 978-1989398999, trade paperback, 199pp, $14.95) May 2024

It’s a testament to Robert Sawyer’s skill—and his generational wisdom—that he has created, with his latest book, a novel that is at once exuberantly old-school and utterly au courant. It reads like Greg Egan rebooting Neil R. Jones’s Professor Jameson cycle. This book exemplifies the “best of both worlds” approach that charts a viable future ...Read More

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Alexandra Pierce Reviews Song of the Huntress by Lucy Holland

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Song of the Huntress, Lucy Holland (Redhook 978-0316321655, $19.99, 448pp, tp) March 2024.

I’ve read a lot of Greek and Roman mythology retell­ings recently, so it’s nice to see Celtic/ British mythol­ogy getting some love too. In Song of the Huntress, Lucy Holland (Sistersong, 2021) brings the Wild Hunt to Cornwall and Wessex in the mid-700s. This is some centuries after the Roman conquest and departure; Saxons ...Read More

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Paul Di Filippo Reviews Suyi Davies Okungbowa’s Lost Ark Dreaming

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Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, hardcover, 192pp, $19.99) May 2024

Thrillers confined to a single stage set or venue have an admirable lineage. One has only to think of the original Die Hard film or David Morrell’s novel Creepers to provide strong examples. In SF, this approach is often conflated with the Big Dumb Object trope: let’s explore Ringworld or Rama. James Cambias’s The Scarab Mission ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Wings Upon Her Back by Samantha Mills

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The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills (Tachyon 978-1-61696-414-6, $18.95, 336pp, tp) April 2024.

It’s been interesting to watch the rehabilitation of “science fantasy” as a respectable mode of storytelling over the past few decades. Once applied loosely to everything from sword and sorcery to Vancean far futures, it was derided as a “misshapen subgenre” by Darko Suvin and a “bas­tard genre” by The Encyclopedia of Science Fic­tion. ...Read More

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Books Reviews Short Fiction 

Ian Mond Reviews Power to Yield by Bogi Takács

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Power to Yield, Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books 978-1-40372-266-2, $17.99, 203pp, tp) February 2024.

Hungarian American poet, writer, trans­lator, critic, and editor Bogi Takács has spent eir career promoting, encouraging, and showcasing the work of marginalised authors. The anthology Rosalind’s Siblings, edited by Takács and publishing poetry and fiction focus­ing on scientists erased or diminished because of their gender or sexuality, fittingly featured on the 2023 Locus Recommended ...Read More

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Alex Brown Reviews Dead Girls Walking by Sami Ellis

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Dead Girls Walking, Sami Ellis (Amulet Books 978-1-41976-676-3, $19.99, 368pp, hc) March 2024.

Serial killing runs in the family in Dead Girls Walking, Sami Ellis’s debut young adult hor­ror novel. Several years ago, Thomas Baker was arrested, his reign of terror finally ended. He confessed to kidnapping, torturing, branding, and murdering more than a dozen people, burying their bodies on his sprawling farm. Temple grew up surrounded by ...Read More

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Russell Letson Reviews Blade by Linda Nagata

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Blade, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press 978-193719-744-5, $7.99, 308pp, eb) March 2024. Cover by Sarah Anne Layton

Subtract the mystery/thriller-family elements and most of the same tropes and devices enable Linda Nagata’s Blade, the fourth entry in her Inverted Frontier sequence, itself a continuation of the Nanotech Succession series. The frontier in question is inverted because the story line reverses the outward-bound pattern of much in­terstellar adventure by ...Read More

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Colleen Mondor Reviews The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat by Camille Gomera-Tavarez

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The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat, Camille Gomera-Tavarez (Levine Querido 978-1-646-14265-1, $19.99, 391pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Dotun Abeshinbioke.

The Girl, the Ring, & the Baseball Bat by Ca­mille Gomera-Tavarez is about navigating high school, finding true friends (and romance), and a magic jacket, magic ring, and magic baseball bat. (I’m not going to lie, while all of them are cool, the baseball bat really rocks.) ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Greatest Hits by Harlan Ellison

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Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison (Union Square 978-1-4549-5337-1, $19.99, 466pp, tp) March 2024.

Harlan Ellison’s short fiction is undoubtedly far better known than Wyndham’s, but for readers too young to have followed his prolific and rather spectacular career, which peaked from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, he might be best known for a handful of stories which have been endlessly anthologized, mostly “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No ...Read More

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Gabino Iglesias Reviews Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

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Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37410-928-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Abby Kagan.

Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is one of the most unique novels I’ve read in a while. A wonderful mix of science fiction and literary fiction, this story is full of humor but also packs a treasure trove of witty observations about the human condition and a sharp dissection of life in small-town America through ...Read More

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Liz Bourke Reviews A Magical Girl Retires by Park Seolyeon

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A Magical Girl Retires, Park Seolyeon (HarperVia 978-0-06337-326-6, $21.99, 176pp, hc) April 2024. Cover art by Kim Sanho.

A Magical Girl Retires is award-winning Korean writer Park Seolyeon’s first novel to be translated into English. It’s a weird, delightful little book, simultaneously grim and breezy, and the trans­lation (by Anton Hur) communicates a fluid, straightforward and self-deprecatingly humorous first-person narration. This breezy grit is further illuminated by Kim Sanho’s ...Read More

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Ian Mond Reviews Table for One by Yun Ko-Eun

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Table for One, Yun Ko-Eun (Columbia Univer­sity Press 978-0-23119-202-6, $20.00, 280pp, hc) April 2024.

Yun Ko-eun (the pen name for Ko Eun-ju) will be unfamiliar to most English-language readers unless they’ve read her one translated novel, The Disaster Tourist. In South Korea, though, she’s the multiple award-winning author of several novels and short story collections and the host of the EBS Radio show Book Cafe. Thankfully, we now ...Read More

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