Books

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 by Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds.: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0063315785, $18.99, 384pp, tp) October 2024.

There are a lot of different ways of assembling an anthology, but none seem quite so programmatic as John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Sci­ence Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its tenth year. Adams describes his methodology with admirable clarity: As series editor, he compiles a list ...Read More

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The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois by Ryan Graudin: Review by Alexandra Pierce

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The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois, Ryan Grau­din (Redhook 978-0-31641-869-0, 544pp, $30, hc). Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio. August 2024.

Paris, 1913, saw the first public performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and it caused a sensation – indeed, some have said it caused a riot, but there seems to be disagreement over that interpretation. Whatever the historical truth, it probably didn’t happen because of magic, which is ...Read More

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Darkome by Hannu Rajaniemi: Review by Niall Harrison

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Darkome, Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz 978-1-47320-332-7, 245pp, £18.99, tp). September 2024.

Mind you, better an ending that fades than no ending at all. I’ve had a good run recently, but it turns out that I was overdue an encounter with that frustrating species, the unmarked Book One that cannot be read as a standalone. Hannu Rajaniemi’s Darkome is the offender: After 250-odd brisk pages of biohackers vs. capitalists it ends ...Read More

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Sleep Like Death by Kalynn Bayron: Review by Colleen Mondor

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Sleep Like Death, Kalynn Bayron (Bloomsbury 978-1-547-60976-5, $19.99, 368pp, hc) June 2024.

As she previously did with Cinderella, author Kalynn Bayron turned another classic on its head this year with Sleep Like Death, her smart and scary reimagining of Snow White. There’s a temptation when an author revisits a famous tale to assume they will simply modernize or dress it up a little, all of which can be ...Read More

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A Hunger With No Name by Lauren C. Teffeau: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

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A Hunger With No Name, Lauren C. Teffeau (University of Tampa Press 978-1-59732-207-2, 156pp, $28.00, hc) September 2024. Cover by Madeline M. Eisele.

Lauren C. Teffeau’s novella A Hunger With No Name might take place on a far-future Earth, or in a similar secondary world; regardless, it’s told by a people who have survived some vast disaster, a ‘‘Great Scatter’’ that has receded into a mythic past. The Astravans have ...Read More

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Augur: Short Fiction Reviews by A.C. Wise

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Augur 7.1

Grief, loss, healing, and recovery are themes running through Augur 7.1, and it’s interesting to see how different authors approach similar subject matter. “Sagal, the-Witch-in Training” by Ardo Omer follows the titular witch-in-training on her first solo case, trying to help a young woman with a broken heart. The woman happens to be the sister of one of her classmates, and they work together to convince ...Read More

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The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 4 edited by Allan Kaster: Review by Alexandra Pierce

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The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time 4, Al­lan Kaster, ed. (Infinivox 978-1-88461-258-9, 276pp, $18.99, tp). Cover by Maurizio Manzieri. September 2024.

Allan Kaster’s fourth edition of The Year’s Top Tales of Space and Time collects 14 stories, almost all of which originally appeared in familiar periodicals – including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Sci­ence Fiction, Clarkesworld – and one anthology, Life Beyond Us. Some of ...Read More

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City of Dancing Gargoyles by Tara Campbell: Review by Ian Mond

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City of Dancing Gargoyles, Tara Campbell (Santa Fe Writers Project 978-1-95163-139-0, $16.95, 280pp, tp) September 2024.

What struck me about Tara Campbell’s 2019 collection, Midnight at the Or­ganporium, was the breadth of her imagination and the way she switched between surrealism, revisionist fairytales, and horror. Her story ‘‘Speculum Crede’’ about a very odd work picnic (an understatement) still makes me smile. Campbell’s second novel, City of Danc­ing Gargoyles ...Read More

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The Tapestry of Time by Kate Heartfield: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

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The Tapestry of Time, Kate Heartfield (Harper Voyager 978-0-00-856781-1, £16.99, 384pp, hc) October 2024.

Sometimes a trope seems so familiar that it begins to feel like a tire that’s lost its tread, even though it’s still fun to drive on. The Nazi preoccupation with occult powers has itself been a preoccupation for writers from all over the spectrum – horror (F. Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon), fantasy (Katherine Kurtz, Ian ...Read More

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A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvie Cathrall: Review by Colleen Mondor

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A Letter to the Luminous Deep, Sylvie Cathrall (Orbit 978-0-316-56553-0, $18.99, 352pp, tp) April 2024. Cover by Raxenne Maniquiz.

Sylvie Cathrall starts off her Sunken Archives series with the charming epistolary novel A Letter to the Luminous Deep. Set on a watery planet long after a catastrophic event that dramatically impacted the landscape, Luminous Deep is a ro­mance and mystery spiced with some eye-rolling family moments that gently ...Read More

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Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer: Review by Ian Mond

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Absolution, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD 978-0-37461-659-6, $30.00, 464pp, hc) October 2024.

While I try not to pick favourites, I have been looking forward to this month’s column (and not just because October is my birth month). Jeff VanderMeer, Laura van den Berg, and Jesse Ball are three authors who have made an art form of the weird, and, as you already know, I love my fiction seasoned with a generous ...Read More

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Cicada by Tanya Pell: Review by Gabino Iglesias

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Cicada, Tanya Pell (Shortwave 978-1-95956-534-5, $13.99, 192pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Alan Lastufka.

Tanya Pell’s Cicada is a fun, fast, pulpy horror novel that’s part survival narrative and part crea­ture feature. It’s also a book that’s packed with tips of the hat and the kind of writing that lets you know an author is really a fan of the genre and has a great time doing what they ...Read More

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Remember You Will Die by Eden Robins: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

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Remember You Will Die, Eden Robins (Source­books Landmark 978-1-72825-603-0, $16.99, 336pp, tp) October 2024. Cover by Erin Fitzsim­mons.

After reading Manuela Draeger’s fascinating novel Kree, about afterlives and reincarnation, and translator and anthologist Anton Hur’s ex­cellent debut novel Toward Eternity, in which artificial intelligences and nanite-transformed humans have found a strange immortality, the centrality of mortality in Eden Robins’s Remem­ber You Will Die is almost refreshing. While ...Read More

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Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions by Nalo Hopkinson: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

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Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, Nalo Hopkinson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-426-9, $15.95, 224pp, tp) October 2024.

Story collections almost never sell as well as novels, but maybe they ought to. A novel is the end product of processes that may have unfolded over months or years, while a collection offers us glimpses into those processes themselves. All of the sixteen stories in Nalo Hopkinson’s Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions were published ...Read More

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Playground by Richard Powers: Review by Niall Harrison

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Playground, Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Company 978-1-32408-603-1, 383pp, $29.99, hc). September 2024.

Richard Powers is another writer whose work – omnivorous, full-bodied novels of both character and idea – you would think difficult to replicate via generative technologies, but his new novel Playground suggests the man himself is not convinced that will always be the case. Genera­tive tools owned by one of the protagonists, the tech billionaire Todd ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky: Review by Russell Letson

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Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1035013746, £16.99, 400pp, hc) March 2024. (Orbit US 978-0316578974 , $19.99, 432pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.

In Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to build fantastical worlds on sturdy non-fantastic-fictional foundations. Where the secondary-world fantasies of The City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds make use of occupied-city (say, Alan Furst’s The World at Night) or comic-ironic ...Read More

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Hampton Heights by Dan Kois: Review by Gabino Iglesias

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Hampton Height, Dan Kois (Harper Perennial 978-0-06335-875-1, $16.99, 208pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Jackie Alvarado

Dan Kois’s Hampton Heights: One Har­rowing Night in the Most Haunted Neighborhood in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is very much like its title in that it shouldn’t work, but it somehow does. Entertaining, touching, and funnier than I expected, this short novel about a group of kids spending a night trying to sell newspaper subscriptions in ...Read More

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The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball: Review by Ian Mond

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The Repeat Room, Jesse Ball (Catapult 978-1-64622-140-0, 256pp, $27.00, hc) Cover by Sara Wood. September 2024.

I first came across Jesse Ball back in 2007 when his debut, Samedi the Deafness, was shortlisted for the Believer Book Award (a terrific prize that introduced me to authors as varied as Bennett Sims, Keith Ridgway, Valeria Luiselli, and Danielle Dutton. I miss it… and the magazine). I bought the novel ...Read More

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The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

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The Bog Wife, Kay Chronister (Counterpoint 978-1-64009-662-2, $28.00, 336pp, hc) October 2024. Cover by Nicole Caputo.

Isolated on their West Virginia estate, the five Haddesley siblings have a troubled and trou­bling relationship with their magical heritage. Charlie, the next in line to be patriarch, has been severely injured by a falling tree, and doubts his ability to fulfill his part of the bargain with the bog that supports and ...Read More

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Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud: Review by Gabino Iglesias

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Crypt of the Moon Spider, Nathan Ballingrud (Nightfire 978-1-25029-173-8, $17.99, 85pp, tp) August 2024. Cover by Sam Araya.

Nathan Ballingrud is one of the finest purveyors of speculative fiction working today, and Crypt of the Moon Spider, the first book in what will be The Lunar Gothic Trilogy, further cements him as one of the strongest voices in the field. Wonderfully atmospheric and very strange, Crypt of the ...Read More

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The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: Review by Liz Bourke

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The City in Glass, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 978-1-25037-682-4, 224pp, $24.99, hc) October 2024.

Nghi Vo has a Hugo Award and a Crawford Award to her credit for The Empress of Salt and Fortune, the opening novella in the Singing Hills Cycle, as well as an Ignyte for Into the Riverlands. The City in Glass, her latest work – a short novel – is unrelated to her ...Read More

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Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Fu­ture of Art edited by Indrapramit Das: Review by Niall Harrison

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Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Fu­ture of Art, Indrapramit Das, ed. (The MIT Press 978-0-26254-908-0, 229pp, $24.95, tp). October 2024. Cover art by Diana Scherer.

Of the ten stories collected in Deep Dream that aim to, as editor Indrapramit Das has it, “both embody and visualize the future of art,” only one offers an explicit definition of what art might be. Many millennia in the future, the twinned ...Read More

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Bringer of Dust by J.M. Miro: Review by Alex Brown

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Bringer of Dust, J.M. Miro (Flatiron Books 978-1-25083-383-9, $29.99. 608pp, hc) September 2024. Cover by Keith Hayes.

Bringer of Dust, the second doorstopper of a novel in J.M. Miro’s The Talents Trilogy, picks up not long after the events of the first book, Ordinary Monsters. Several adults, beloved and despised, and children, in­nocent and manipulated, lost their lives in the course of the first book, sometimes due ...Read More

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The Wilding by Ian McDonald: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

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The Wilding, Ian McDonald (Gollancz 978-1-39961-147-3, £25.00, 314pp, hc) September 2024.

Ian McDonald may be one of the most accom­plished SF writers of his generation, but he isn’t particularly known for horror – though that may change with the very creepy ecologi­cal fable The Wilding. I’m using “creepy” in a quite literal sense here: There’s a lot of creeping going on. A project to restore and “rewild” a ...Read More

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The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love by India Holton: Review by Colleen Mondor

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The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love, India Holton (Berkley 978-0-593-54728-1, $19.00, tp, 384pp) July 2024.

Romantasy is a subgenre getting considerable attention and India Holton enters the field with a new series, that is a lot of fun. The first book, The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love, introduces two academics, Beth Pickering and Devon Lock­ley, who specialize in the study and, if necessary, capture of thaumaturgic birds. These ...Read More

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Kree by Manuela Draeger: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

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Kree, Manuela Draeger (University of Min­nesota Press 978-1-51791-512-4, $21.95, 280pp, tp) October 2024.

Manuela Draeger’s Kree is so immedi­ately violent that I wasn’t sure it was going to be for me. Somehow, though, within just a few chapters, the novel’s mix of haunting imagery and almost humorous un­predictability grew so compelling that I found myself wanting to track down everything else the author has written. A midapocalyptic story set ...Read More

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Drill by Scott R. Jones: Review by Gabino Iglesias

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Drill, Scott R. Jones (Word Horde 978-1-95625-209-5, $19.99, 256pp, tp) August 2024. Cover by Matthew Revert.

Sometimes you’re reading a book and suddenly ask yourself, “What the hell am I reading?” This can be a bad thing or an excellent thing. In the case of Scott R. Jones’s Drill, it’s the latter. Slightly surreal, angry, smart, Lovecraftian, chaotic, and written with the kind of prose that dances between ...Read More

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State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg: Review by Ian Mond

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State of Paradise, Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37461-220-7, $27.00, 224pp, hc) July 2024.

I move from one instance of weird Florida (Area X is a distorted version of North Florida) to another: Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise. I’d say that reading VanderMeer and van den Berg back-to-back (alliterative surnames aside) is a remarkable coincidence, except that Florida, to outsiders such as myself, has ...Read More

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Smothermoss by Alisa Alering: Review by Colleen Mondor

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Smothermoss, Alisa Alering (Tin House 978-1-959-03058-4, $17.95, tp, 256pp) July 2024.

Alisa Alering’s debut novel Smothermoss is a master class in conveying both a physically and psychologically oppressive atmosphere. Set in a small rural Appalachian town in the early 1980s, the novel follows the tough adventures of sisters Sheila and Angie. At seventeen years old, Sheila is acutely aware of her ‘‘otherness,’’ a kid all too often bullied and ...Read More

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The Ancients by John Larison : Review by Paul Di Filippo

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The Ancients, John Larison (Viking 978-0593831168, hardcover, 400pp, $30.00) October 2024

Writers from outside our genre seem to have fixed upon four major themes or topics that they find congenial to their arguably more “literary” way of writing.

Time travel. Robots and Androids. Dystopias. And Apocalypse or After the Collapse scenarios.

You don’t see many “mainstream” folks writing about, say, “talking squids in outer space,” or starship troopers or ...Read More

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Wish I Was Here by M. John Harrison: Review by Niall Harrison

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Wish I Was Here, M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail 978-1-80081-297-0, £16.99, 224pp, hc) May 2023. (Saga Press 978-1-66806-304-0, 224pp, $26.99, hc). September 2024.

It’s hard to know where to start writing about a book that knows exactly what it is and knows that knowledge doesn’t help much. “When [a piece of writing] has been assembled like this one,” writes M. John Harrison, “from so many layers of your life… ...Read More

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The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

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The City in Glass, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 978-1250348272, $24.99, 224pp), October 2024.

Nghi Vo is full of surprises. I suppose one could argue that her first novel, the Gatsbyesque The Chosen and the Beautiful, and her second, the very different Hollywood fantasy historical The Siren Queen, had a few things in common – like early 20th-century American settings and the classic themes of the need for acceptance ...Read More

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