Blackheart Man, Nalo Hopkinson (Saga 978-1-6680-0510-1, $28.99, 384pp, hc) August 2024.

Those who have been following Nalo Hop­kinson’s fascinating (and Grand Master-winning) career have long been aware that a major novel titled Blackheart Man has been in the works for some time. In a Locus interview a couple of months ago, Hopkinson said she’d been working on it for more than fifteen years, and she even mentioned the book ...Read More

The Melancholy of Untold History, Minsoo Kang (William Morrow 978-0-06333-750-3, $28.00, 240pp, hc) July 2024.

Early in Minsoo Kang’s remarkable first novel The Melancholy of Untold History, a character known only as the historian makes an interest­ing observation about how civilizations tell their own stories. First, he says, come ‘‘tales of gods, monsters, and heroes,’’ followed by historical narratives of ‘‘important personages of the past who achieved great things ...Read More

The Collapsing Frontier, Jonathan Lethem (PM Press 978-1-62963-488-3, $16.00, 160pp, tp) March 2024.

With all the much-deserved tributes to the late Terry Bisson and his work (which included a long-running and very funny column for this magazine), it’s easy to overlook the brilliant se­ries of author chapbooks he edited for PM Press for the past 15 years. A virtual who’s who of our field, it has included authors such ...Read More

A Voice Calling, Christopher Barzak (Psycho­pomp 979-8-89116-001-9, $13.99, 108pp, tp) March 2024.

There has been no shortage of good haunted-house tales in the past year or so, with contri­butions from Elizabeth Hand, Alix E. Harrow, T. Kingfisher, and others. Christopher Barzak’s A Voice Calling (his first novella, he tells us in an afterword) might seem to be hopping on the bandwagon, but in fact it’s an expansion of a ...Read More

In the Shadow of the Fall, Tobi Ogundiran (Tordotcom 978-1-25090-796-7, $20.99, 160pp, hc) July 2024.

There are probably hundreds of examples of how the Chosen One motif has served SF and fantasy, and there’s a certain boldness in the way in which Tobi Ogundiran hints at it on the very first page of In the Shadow of the Fall, the first in a two-novella sequence called Guardian of ...Read More

The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Waste­lands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron 978-1-25087-861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) June 2024.

Fantastical train journeys are pretty much a sub­genre unto themselves, and no wonder. There’s a huge amount of imaginative space between, say, Snowpiercer and The Polar Express, or between Miéville’s Railsea and anything else at all – though Sarah Brooks’s debut novel, The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, carries a few ...Read More

Navola, Paolo Bacigalupi (Knopf 978-0-59353-505-9, $30.00, 576pp, hc) July 2024.

Without meaning to stir up those enthusiastic taxonomists who are determined to Let No Subgenre Go Unlabeled, is there a term for the sort of histori­cal fantasy that draws on recognizable times and places, but replaces familiar geographical, his­torical, or mythical names with invented ones, and often employs only minimal supernatural or magical elements? Guy Gavriel Kay seems to ...Read More

The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941, David Ritter, Daniel Rit­ter, Sam McDonald, & John L. Coker III (First Fandom Experience 978-1-73665-965-6, $149.00, 504pp, hc) April 2024.

If someone were to tell me that a lavish 500-page coffee-table book selling for $149 is basically a microhistory describing what a bunch of people I’ve mostly never heard of were doing in 1941, I’d quite reasonably be skeptical; ...Read More

The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 9781250851444, $19.95, 128pp, tp) May 2024.

Over the past few years, Nghi Vo has parlayed the East and Southeast Asia-inspired world of her Singing Hills cycle into not only a delightful playground for the adventures of her itinerant Cleric Chih, whose ostensible mission is to collect stories for his monastery, but also into a kind of laboratory for storytelling itself. Earlier novellas ...Read More

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

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

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

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

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom 978-1-25076-704-2, $20.99, 224pp, hc) April 2024.

Like Chekhov’s famous gun, it seems to be an un­stated principle among writers as diverse as Rob­ert Ludlum and Octavia E. Butler that a character suffering from total amnesia in the first act is in for some world-shaking revelations by the third. The same is true of P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail ...Read More

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom 978-1-2508-8180-9, $18.99, 128pp, tp) April 2024.

Generation starship stories tend to come in a few distinct flavors, with distinct character types. There are the refugees, trying to keep humanity alive while escaping a dying or overpopulated Earth (the sort of wishful fantasy that Kim Stanley Robinson set out to demolish in Aurora a few years ago). There are the ...Read More