Of course AI is a bubble. It has all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Pick up a rental car at SFO and drive in either direction on the 101 – north to San Francisco, south to Palo Alto – and every single billboard is advertising some kind of AI company. Every business plan has the word “AI” in it, even if the business itself has no AI in ...Read More
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Cadigan, Pat: Ultraman (Titan Books UK 9781803362458, $16.95, 288pp, formats: trade paperback, ebook, 12/12/2023)
Tie-in novel based on a movie based on the series. Pursuing a fugitive space monster, a Being of Light enters Earth’s atmosphere. Accidentally colliding with a patrolling jet, piloted by Science Patrol Agent Shin Hayata, the Being merges with the pilot to save his life and vows to defend the Earth. Now whenever the planet is ...Read More
Read moreWriter D.G. Compton, 93, died November 10, 2023 in Maine. David Guy Compton was born in London on August 19, 1930, later settling in the US.
His agents at the Virginia Kidd Agency sent the following tribute.
We had the great pleasure of having David visit us in Milford for the Black Bear Film Festival the year Death Watch, the 1979 Bertrand Tavernier film based on his book, The ...Read More
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The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei (Flatiron Books 978-1-250-88553-1, $29.99, 416pp, hc) July 2023.
In Yume Kitasei’s The Deep Sky, a billionaire offers humanity hope after an overwhelming number of environmental calamities have come home to roost. She’ll provide starter funding for a one-way mission to Planet X. Each government that provides additional cash will get to place its citizens on board in proportion to the donation. That scheme ...Read More
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The Whole Mess and Other Stories, Jack Skillingstead (Fairwood Press 978-1958880128, trade paperback, 334pp, $20.95) November 2023
Reading Jack Skillingstead’s second story collection drives home two things:
One: short stories remain the essential mode whereby fantastika can experiment and develop, while delivering exquisitely compact and powerful aesthetic experiences, much more so than the vast majority of novels, however competent and enjoyable the longer, baggier works might be. (If one ...Read More
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The Wolfe at the Door, Gene Wolfe (Tor 978-1250846204, hardcover, 480pp, $29.99) October 2023
Arriving just a few months after the publication of The Dead Man and Other Stories (my Locus Online review here), this mammoth compilation from Tor Books also helps to ensure—by its high-quality catholic selection (pun entirely intentional)—that Gene Wolfe’s reputation will continue to be justifiably burnished for future generations. There can be no legacy without ...Read More
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Jewel Box: Stories, E. Lily Yu (Erewhon 978-1645660484, hardcover, 336pp, $27.00) October 2023
Recently I had the good fortune to acquaint myself for the first time with a classic of fabulism: Japanese Fairy Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki. Witty, elegant, timeless yet timely, these stories aim straight at the human heart, mind and soul, and lodge therein like arrows variously tipped with balm and bane. And now, encountering ...Read More
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If you’re looking for a high-production, visually slick science fiction movie that isn’t tied to an existing IP monstrosity, The Creator might be the film for you. However, if you’re tired of machine uprisings and AI paranoia, you might want to skip this one.
Broadly, The Creator follows Sgt. Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) on a near-future journey through “New Asia.” The Americans want to kill or capture Nirmata, the ...Read More
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RICHARD BLEILER won the 2023 Munsey Award, given at Pulpfest to “an individual or organization that has bettered the pulp community.” Nominees were selected by the general pulp community, with the winner selected by a vote of past Lamont, Munsey, and Rusty Awards winners.
CARYL LEWIS’s Drift (Doubleday UK) was the Overall Winner at the Wales Book of the Year Award for English-language works, and also won the ...Read More
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OLUWOLE TALABI was born February, 28, 1986 in a steel town on the outskirts of Warri, a city in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria, and grew up there and in Benin City before his family settled in Lagos. He currently lives in Malaysia, where he works as an engineer, but expects to relocate to Australia in the future.
Talabi’s first SF story was “The Human Thing” (2011), and his ...Read More
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In Ascension, Martin MacInnes (Atlantic 978-1-83895-624-0, 496pp, £16.99, hc) February 2023. Cover by Carmen R. Balit.
Towards the end of Martin MacInnes’s cerebral third novel, Helena Hasenbosch recalls a moment shared with her older sister Leigh, when they were children. It’s the end of a long summer day, and Helena is sent to call Leigh home for dinner. Leigh doesn’t want to go, and “gently, softly,” she grabs Helena ...Read More
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Hanna Alkaf & Margaret Owen, eds., The Grimoire of Grave Fates (Delacorte 6/23) Students at a prestigious magic school investigate a murder in this entertaining young-adult anthology/novel, a collaborative project created by Alkaf & Owen with 18 stories/chapters by 18 notable authors including Darcie Little Badger, Kat Cho, Hafsah Faizal, Kwame Mbalia, L.L. McKinney, and Tehlor Kay Mejia. Each chapter follows a different student from a highly diverse ...Read More
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Chlorine, Jade Song (William Morrow 978-0-06325-760-3, $27.99, 256pp, hc) March 2023.
From the moment we meet Ren Yu, the narrator and protagonist of Jade Song’s debut novel Chlorine, she leaves us in no doubt about her identity. Ren is a mermaid, though, as she’s quick to point out, nothing like those generic mermaids from movies and ‘‘G-rated fairytales, the blood and dirt in their original drafts scrubbed clean ...Read More
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Analog 3-4/23 Asimov’s 3-4/23
The lead novella in the March/April Analog is ‘‘The Tinker and the Timestream’’ by Carolyn Ives Gilman. Rustem is a young man learning to be the tinker of his colony, which is tenuously living under the threat of a solar eruption wiping them out at any minute. Interstellar travelers arrive, traveling in a fascinatingly complex way involving time currents and bubbles of slow ...Read More
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact
CHERAE LICHELLE CLARK was born August 10, 1990 in Oklahoma and grew up in Kansas City KS. She attended international school just outside London, England, then attended the University of Kansas as an undergrad. She earned her MFA at the University of Indiana, and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow under Dorothy Allison. Clark has worked as an English teacher, editor, and personal trainer. She lives in the UK.
Clark ...Read More
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The annual Rainforest Resort Village writers retreat, hosted by Patrick Swenson and Fairwood Press, took place at Lake Quinault WA with three sessions: Feb 22-26, 2023; March 1-5, 2023; and March 8-12, 2023. For more, see their website.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); This report and more like it in the May 2023 issue of Locus.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a ...Read More
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A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher (Tor 978-1-250-82979-5, $26.99, 256 pg, hc) March 2023. Cover by Karolis Strautniekas.
In A House with Good Bones, T. Kingfisher (AKA Ursula Vernon) travels back into the horror section like she did with What Moves the Dead. This time, the subject is roses rather than fungi, but rest assured, there are still the dead.
Sam, a 30-something archaeoentomologist, returns to ...Read More
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Ausubel, Ramona: The Last Animal (Penguin Random House/Riverhead 9780593420522, $28.00, 288pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, 4/18/2023) In this near-future science fiction novel, teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be ...Read More
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Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Fantasy 12/22 Lightspeed 12/22 Hexagon 12/2
Fantasy closed out 2022 with a bang with an issue full of hauntings, magic, and people desperate for a safe place to be. In ‘‘The End of a Painted World’’ by Sam Kyung Yoo, a painter named Woojin must flee an assault by the emperor’s soldiers. The reason for the attack is never confirmed, but it likely has to do with ...Read More
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Alien Dimensions
Omenana 7/22 Analog 11-12/22 Clarkesworld 11/22
In July Omenana published their 22nd issue, this one in collaboration with the National Democratic Institute titled “Positive Visions of Democracy” featuring a lot of hopepunk and an emphasis on communal decision making. This is part of the same project that inspired Mithila Review’s “Planet Democracy” issue, which I reviewed in November. I’m hugely in favor of anything that nudges speculative fiction to dive ...Read More
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MILESTONES
ROBIN MCKINLEY is the 39th recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial SFWA Grand Master Award. Her award will be presented during the SFWA Nebula Conference, to be held May 12–14, 2023 at the Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort in Anaheim, CA.
Tordotcom editor RUOXI CHEN won the $2,500 Superstar prize at Publishers Weekly’s annual Star Watch awards gala, held November 15, 2022 in New York ...Read More
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Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki announced the finalists for the 2021 Emeka Walter Dinjos Awards for Disability in Speculative Fiction.
Disabled Writers Category
Conjunctions 78: Fear Itself, Bradford Morrow, ed. (Bard 978-0-941964-89-0, $20.00, 322pp, tp) Spring 2022.
My first reaction to picking up Fear Itself, the Spring 2022 issue of the long-running anthology series Conjunctions, was: why? Given everything that’s happening right now – the worsening effects of climate change, never-ending viral pandemics, wars in Ukraine and Tigray, and inflationary pressures forcing so many to go with so little – ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 7/22 Kalicalypse: Subcontinental Science Fiction, Tarun K. Saint, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay & Francesco Verso, eds. (Future Fiction) June 2022.
The stories in July’s Clarkesworld fall all over the genre map, from war stories to meta cyberpunk. My favorite is ‘‘The Sadness Box’’ by Suzanne Palmer. Fundamentally a boy-and-his-(AI)-dog story, this boy is living in suburbia in the midst of a slow-moving, war-torn apocalypse, shuttling between the ...Read More
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GigaNotoSaurus 6/22 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 6/2/22, 6/16/22 Escape Pod 6/22
June’s GigaNotoSaurus explores complicity and empire in Sid Jain’s “To Revolt is to be Undone.” The story finds Mythili becoming aware of the atrocities authored by her country and its ruling party. Here ignorance of the terrible truth is not a passive act, and she must decide how much of her own safety to risk as she uncovers more ...Read More
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Echo, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Tor Nightfire 978-1-250-75955-9, $29.99, 416pp, hc) February 2022.
Reviewing the work of Thomas Olde Heuvelt is no easy task, and Echo, his latest, is no different. Translated from the Dutch by Moshe Gilula, this is a complex, creepy, atmospheric, labyrinthine monster that comes in at more than 400 pages.
Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt is a novel about many things; grief, trauma, unconditional love, ...Read More
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Albert, Melissa: Our Crooked Hearts
(Macmillan/Flatiron 978-1-250-82636-7, $18.99, 352pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, June 28, 2022)
Young-adult contemporary fantasy novel of teens and witchcraft, past and present.
Bazawule, Blitz: The Scent of Burnt Flowers
(Penguin Random House/Ballantine 978-0-593-49623-7, $27.00, 256pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, June 28, 2022)
A Black couple flees 1960s America, seeking a fresh start in Ghana, only to find suspense, lust, magic, and danger.
Beaty, ...Read More
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Glitterati, Oliver K. Langmead (Titan 978-1789097962, trade paperback, 288pp, $15.95) May 2022.
If Jack Vance had scripted the Zoolander movies, the result might look very much like Oliver Langmead’s sophomore novel, Glitterati. It’s an SF version of one of those frothy comedies perfected by Wodehouse and Firbank, Benson and Thirkell, which nonetheless conceals sharp social commentary and a steely lesson in how to learn to live in the only ...Read More
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The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, John Kessel (Subterranean 978-1-64524-058-7, $45.00, 584pp, hc) June 2022.
In his insightful introduction to The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, Kim Stanley Robinson grapples with the somewhat thorny question of how Kessel’s stories relate to the genres of the fantastic, and at one point he even invokes allegory, citing Kessel’s own musing about what ...Read More
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