Reviews

Books Reviews 

Dakini Atoll by Nikhil Singh: Review by Nedine Moonsamy

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Dakini Atoll, Nikhil Singh (Luna Press Publishing 978-1-91555-634-9, £22.99, 252pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Elena Romenkova.

Nikhil Singh has carved out a niche within African SF by bringing the full range of his artistic talents into play in his worldbuild­ing. The dystopian underworlds explored in his earlier works create the unique effect of falling into a sensorial swamp, an enticing feature that is only enhanced in Singh’s third ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

locusmag 0 Comments

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

We have such a cornucopia of dystopias right now, fictional and otherwise, that they’ve really got to do something different to catch my attention. The Repeat Room, the latest novel from the prolific Jesse Ball, captured it thoroughly: haunting, spare, and inventive, it’s a bleak tale that’s nonetheless rich with sparkling turns ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

GigaNotoSaurus, Diabolical Plots, Kaleidotrope, and Small Wonders: Short Fiction Reviews by Charles Payseur

locusmag 0 Comments ,

GigaNotoSaurus 7/24 Diabolical Plots 7/24 Kaleidotrope Summer ’24 Small Wonders 7/24

The latest from GigaNotoSaurus is Gustavo Bon­doni’s “Sambra do Espaço”, which finds Letícia working on an orbiting solar satellite array that gives power to a lot of Earth, including a dis­proportionate number of impoverished people. And though during Carnaval she’d much rather be watching her family dance and remembering her time in Brazil, an attack by ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

Asimov’s: Short Fiction Reviews by A.C. Wise

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Asimov’s 7-8/24

The July/August issue of Asimov’s opens with the novella “Sisters of the Flare” by Stephen Case, set in the same world as the author’s earlier story “Daughters of the Lattice”, though in a differ­ent time period. The story focuses on Tars, who encounters a woman named Petrichora who has forsaken her vows as is now on the run. Tars and Petrichora’s story is interwoven with ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

The Mercy of God by James S.A. Corey: Review by Russell Letson

locusmag 0 Comments ,

The Mercy of Gods, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0-31652-557-2, $30.00, 423 pp, hc) August 2024.

The longer I review science fiction, the more I notice how it much it depends on recycling tropes – not just repeating but extending and varying and inverting them – and, I suspect, refitting them to reflect current anxieties or hopes, conscious or not. This time the recognition lights have been set flashing by ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

The City in Glass by Nghi Vo: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

locusmag 0 Comments ,

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

If you’ve read any of Nghi Vo’s earlier work, you already know that she’s a writer to watch – a masterful stylist with a flair for bringing together magical premises, subtle anthropological worldbuilding, and deep wells of mythic imagery and themes. If you haven’t, Vo’s newest, The City in Glass, is not at all a bad ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet by Molly Morris: Review by Colleen Mondor

locusmag 0 Comments , ,

Annie LeBlanc Is Not Dead Yet, Molly Morris (Wednesday 978-1-250-29006-9, $20.00, 336pp, hc) June 2024.

The town of Lennon, California has a secret that only the residents (and a few chosen former residents) can know. The Welcome Back contest allows the townspeople to nominate someone to come back from the dead for 30 days. This year, Wilson Moss has won, and that means her friend Annie is returning, but ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Model Home by Rivers Solomon: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Model Home, Rivers Solomon (MCD 978-0-374-60713-5, $28.00, 304pp, hc) October 2024.

“Everyone believes in haunted houses,” says Ezri, the narrator of Rivers Solomon’s Model Home, and who’s to argue? Based on the resurgence of the theme in the past couple of years alone, it’s proved to be not only a durable framework for supernatural shenanigans, but a kind of magical mirror for all sorts of issues ranging from ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Asunder by Kerstin Hall: Review by Liz Bourke

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Asunder, Kerstin Hall (Tordotcom 978-1-250-62543-4, $29.99, 432pp, hc) August 2024. Cover art by Greg Ruth.

Kerstin Hall writes sharp, fierce stories with precise and visceral prose, and with worldbuilding that possesses a keen sense for the weird, the haunting, the marvel­lous, and the twistedly strange. Asunder is only her fourth long-form work, her second novel (after 2021’s Star Eater and the novella duo The Border Keeper and Second Spear ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

The Jaguar Mask by Michael J. DeLuca: Review by Niall Harrison

locusmag 0 Comments ,

The Jaguar Mask, Michael J. DeLuca (Stelliform 978-1-77809-260-2, 348pp, $19.00, tp) August 2024. Cover by Julia Louise Pereira.

The story of The Jaguar Mask does not start on the first page, in which the artist Cristina Ramos relives the murder of her mother in a garish vision – four tattooed mareros with machine pistols, haloed by angels of death, gunning down two government employees, a foreign lobbyist, and Eufemia ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Napalm in the Heart by Pol Guasch: Review by Ian Mond

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Napalm in the Heart, Pol Guasch (Faber & Fa­ber UK 978-0571375257, £6.99, 256pp, hc) July 2024. (FSG Originals 978-0-37461-295-5, $18.00, 256pp, tp) August 2024.

Reading Pol Guasch’s debut, Napalm in the Heart, right after Helen Phillips’ Hum is a disorientat­ing experience. Both authors present us with dystopias, but while Phillips cleaves to our reality, Guasch gives us something more symbolic and experimental, a dystopia unmoored from time and ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

The Dark, Uncanny, Apex, and Weird Horror Fall: Short Fiction Reviews by Paula Guran

locusmag 0 Comments ,

The Dark 6/24 Uncanny 7-8/24 Apex #145 Weird Horror Fall ’24

The Dark #109 features two originals. “The Aban­doned” by Jack Klausner is a haunting story that begins with a little girl finding a box in the schoolyard. It takes us through tragic mystery and ends in resignation. The protagonist in Beth Goder’s interesting “Labyrinth” visits the infa­mous Winchester Mystery House in a story that ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Your Shadow Half Remains by Sunny Moraine: Review by Gabino Iglesias

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Your Shadow Half Remains, Sunny Moraine (Nightfire 978-1-25089-220-1, $16.99, 176pp, tp) February 2024.

If you look at someone, you’re dead. Not just dead, but dead in some horrible, violent way. That’s the premise at the core of Sunny Moraine’s Your Shadow Half Remains. Yes, readers familiar with Josh Malerman’s Bird Box may see a similarity to that novel in that premise, but Your Shadow Half Remains is very different, ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

LocEditor 0 Comments ,

Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316578974, trade paperback, 432pp, $19.99) September 2024

If Michael Bishop and Tom Disch had collaborated to script an episode of the Aliens franchise, and then the result had been filmed by Toho Studios, the result might have well come to resemble Adrian Tchaikovsky’s newest kick in the pants, Alien Clay. This is one of three great books Tchaikovsky has released in 2024; similar ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies: Short Fiction Reviews by Charles Payseur

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Flash Fiction Online 6/24 Strange Horizons 6/9/24, 6/24/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/27/24, 7/11/24

The June Flash Fiction Online features a range of rather grim stories about char­acters caught in oppressive situations. Perhaps the most surprising is Kurt Pankau’s “A Pin Drops”, which imagines bowling tech­nology advancing to the point where pins are made intelligent and sentient in order for them to protect one another and form familial ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

The Deadlands : Short Fiction Reviews by A.C. Wise

locusmag 0 Comments ,

The Deadlands Spring ’24

“The Slave Boy” by Denzel Xavier Scott in the Spring 2024 issue of The Deadlands looks at dif­ferent forms of captivity and freedom. A young boy contemplates his own imprisonment and the imprisonment of the talking animals he’s forced to care for, pitying them, but also resenting them and the way they mock and torment him. He meets a strange man who offers him ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima: Review by Jake Casella Brookins

locusmag 0 Comments , ,

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Ananda Lima (Tor 978-1-25029-297-1, 192pp, $24.99, hc) Cover by Jamie Stafford-Hill. June 2024.

Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is pleasingly hard to classify. One could take the easy route and call it a debut collection – and an exciting one, to be sure, an excellent mix of stories magical, speculative, and wholly grounded. But there’s reason to think ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Cinderwich by Cherie Priest: Review by Colleen Mondor

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Cinderwich, Cherie Priest (Apex Book Com­pany 978-1-955-76520-6, $21.95, 162pp, tp) May 2024.

Cherie Priest’s novella Cinderwich gifts readers with a bit of a haunted tree folktale, some true crime detecting, a frustrated ghost, and a couple of academic ladies with a sometimes prickly friendship who are more than willing to sit through countless diner dinners to get to a much-needed truth. In other words, it’s catnip for readers who ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Hum by Helen Phillips: Review by Ian Mond

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Hum, Helen Phillips (Marysue Rucci Books 978-1-66800-883-6, $27.99, 272pp, hc) August 2024.

The novels I review for this column are not chosen with a theme in mind. If one does pop up, it’s purely coincidental. That goes for this month. I had no idea Hum, Napalm in the Heart, and Ultra 85 would all be dystopian novels. The good news is that they’re very different in tone, ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

No/Mad/Land by Francisco Verso: Review by Paul Di Filippo

LocEditor 0 Comments ,

No/Mad/Land, Franceso Verso (Flame Tree Press 978-1787589278, hardcover, 384pp, $26.95) September 2024

Even when deploying familiar tropes of the genre in totally au courant ways, science fiction by non-Anglo authors always reveals an idiosyncratic slant or attitude or worldview. This has been evident at least since Stanislaw Lem burst onto the English-language publishing scene, and is witnessed more recently in works from such accomplished authors as Cixin Liu, Hannu ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Reactor, The Sunday Morning Transport, and Nightmare: Short Fiction Reviews by Paula Guran

locusmag 0 Comments , , , ,

Reactor 6/5/24 to 7/10/24 The Sunday Morning Transport 5/26/24 to 7/14/24 Nightmare 7/24

Reactor continues to present top-quality fic­tion. Rich Larson’s “Breathing Constella­tions” (June 5) is small-scale but excellent SF story revolving around a struggling human commune in Argentinian Patagonia seeking the permission of a pod of orcas to begin harvesting plankton in their waters.

In the heartwarming “Reduce! Reuse! Re­cycle!” (June 12) by TJ ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Rebel by David Weber & Richard Fox: Review by Paul Di Filippo

LocEditor 1 Comment ,

Rebel, David Weber & Richard Fox (Baen 978-1982193607, hardcover, 496pp, $28.00) September 2024

I seem to be on a bit of a quest lately to try to acquaint myself with authors I’ve shamefully overlooked. That’s always a healthy move, I think—aligned with, but distinct from, keeping up with brand-new debut writers. I reviewed a Michael Flynn book for the first time recently in these pages (alas, only after he ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Lake of Darkness by Adam Roberts: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

locusmag 0 Comments , ,

Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1-39961-767-3, £22.00, 320pp, hc) July 2024.

Despite having won BSFA and Campbell Awards for his 2012 novel Jack Glass, Adam Roberts has a good case for being one of the most under-appreciated novelists in the UK – not a single Hugo or Nebula nomination in a career of more than two decades, according to the SFADB. As I and others have argued ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Merciless Saviors by H.E. Edgmon: Review by Colleen Mondor

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Merciless Saviors, H.E. Edgmon (Wednesday 978-1-250-85363-9, $20.00, 336pp, hc) April 2024.

In Godly Heathens, the first book in H.E. Edgmon’s duology about American teens who are actually gods from a parallel world, readers met Gem Echols from small-town Georgia, who suffers from truly horrific dreams. Gem’s best friend is Enzo, a Brooklyn teen with whom they share a long-distance (never met in person but plenty of texting, talking ...Read More

Read more
Cover of Termush, a novel by Sven Holm
Books Reviews 

Termush by Sven Holm: Review by Gabino Iglesias

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Termush, Sven Holm (Faber Editions 978-0-57137-915-6, £9.99, 119pp, tp) September 2022. (FSG 978-0-37461-358-7, $16.00, 128pp, tp) January 2024. Cover by Rodrigo Corral & Adriana Tonello

Sven Holm’s Termush, originally published in 1967, is as timely now as it was back then. A narrative that uses a dystopian lens to look at people and their behavior in the aftermath of an apocalypse, the novel is a short but very ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

khōréō: Short Fiction Reviews by A.C. Wise

locusmag 0 Comments , , ,

khōréō 4.1

Anna Bendiy’s ‘‘The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune’’ in khōréō 4.1 effectively explores healing, going back to the place you were born, and the cost of war. Bohdana re­turns to her war-ravaged home and calls on a goddess for help, only to discover the goddess has a bit of an attitude and intends to put Bohdana to work before she’ll get involved. ‘‘Child’s Tongue ...Read More

Read more
Reviews Short Fiction 

Escape Pod, Lightspeed, and Baffling,: Short Fiction Reviews by Charles Payseur

locusmag 0 Comments , , ,

Escape Pod 7/11/24 Lightspeed 7/24 Baffling 7/24

Brian Hugenbruch features in the July Escape Pod with the rather charming “A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls”. The story unfolds with a backdrop of the ruined Earth, humans surviving in orbit of their home and living very different lives. But social awkwardness is still definitely a thing, which the narrator can at­test to, as he finds himself unable to ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker: Review by Gary K. Wolfe

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker (Tordotcom 978-1-250-33026-0, $20.99, 170pp, hc) Septem­ber 2024.

I seem to have found myself reading a number of haunted house novels in the last year or so, and it’s always fascinating to watch how authors still find ways to ring new changes on a template that goes back to the earliest Gothic novels. In Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker’s witty approach is to focus ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

One of Our Kind by Nicola Yoon: Review by Alex Brown

locusmag 0 Comments ,

One of Our Kind, Nicola Yoon (Knopf 978-0-59347-067-1, $28.00. 272pp, hc) June 2024.

Jasmyn, her husband Kingston, and their young son Kamau are excited to move to the new all-Black community of Liberty, just outside Los Angeles in Nicola Yoon’s One of Our Kind. King’s new job and higher income landed them a sprawl­ing home in a luxury community where everyone from the retail workers to the cops ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

Egypt + 100 edited by Ahmed Naji : Review by Niall Harrison

locusmag 0 Comments ,

Egypt + 100, Ahmed Naji ed. (Comma Press 9781912697700, 160pp, £9.99, tp) July 2024.

From the point of view of a science fiction reviewer, Egypt + 100 marks an interesting development in Comma Press’s “Futures Past” series of SWANA-focused anthologies: it is the first in the series to emerge from an ac­tive and substantial science fiction tradition. In the introduction to Iraq + 100, Hassan Blassim lamented the ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

New Adventures in Space Opera edited by Jonathan Strahan : Review by Gary K. Wolfe

locusmag 0 Comments ,

New Adventures in Space Opera, Jonathan Stra­han, ed. (Tachyon 978-1-61696-420-7, $18.95, 336pp, tp) August 2024.

Dating back more than 80 years, space opera is almost certainly the longest-running term in con­tinuous use for a particular kind of SF – though we’ll probably never finish arguing over whether it’s a mode, a subgenre, a theme, or (in the eyes of some) a mistake. In 2003, Locus ran a special issue ...Read More

Read more
Books Reviews 

A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang: Review by Archita Mittra

locusmag 0 Comments ,

A Song to Drown Rivers, Ann Liang (St. Martin’s Press 978-1-25028-946-9, $32.00, 336pp, hc) October 2024.

Inspired by ancient Chinese legends, A Song to Drown Rivers by Ann Liang is an intrigu­ing historical fantasy novel that tempers the logic of trope-driven storytelling with a mature understanding of the futility of war. As a folkloric retelling of the tragic story of Xi Shi, one of the ‘‘Four Great Beauties’’ of ...Read More

Read more