The 2009 Locus Recommended Reading List is now available online. The list is published as part of the 2009 Year in Review issue of Locus (February 2010). An extensive survey of SF publishing for 2009, the issue includes year-end essays by Locus reviewers discussing recommended titles; the Magazine Summary, which covers all the major print and online magazines and tracks numbers of stories published; the Book Summary, which looks at ...Read More
Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThis is the scanned Table of Contents for the issue, embedded as a PDF. It is searchable and includes all of the titles reviewed in the month. These issues are not available digitally yet, but most can be ordered by contacting the Locus offices.
...Read More Read moreThe Internet Archive (IA) has elected not to further appeal its loss in the copyright infringement case upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in September.
Now that the case is settled, IA will remove infringing books from their “lending library” and pay an undisclosed monetary sum to the plaintiff publishers, which the Association of American Publishers says should “substantially” cover the attorney fees and court costs.
The IA ...Read More
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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the lower-court ruling against the Internet Archive (IA).
The suit was first brought in 2020 by HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, and Wiley, alleging “willful mass copyright infringement” by IA’s “National Emergency Library,” which offered unlimited borrows of over a million ebooks. Judge John Koeltl of New York Federal Court issued a summary judgment against IA on March 24, 2023.
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The organizers of the Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Awards) have announced updates and changes, including a streamlined process, and plans to move forward with the award for work published in 2024, after being “on pause” for 2022 and 2023 publications.
We will continue in the tradition of the award, honoring and promoting recent works that explore and expand our ideas of gender.
But we’re improving how we do that, ...Read More
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The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, Ben Berman Ghan (Buckrider Books 978-1-98949-688-6, 300pp, $21.00, tp) May 2024.
Sometimes, I really enjoy speculative fiction that works more by image and dream logic than plot and worldbuilding. Not to say Ben Berman Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits lacks those traditional elements: The ingredients here are quite recognizable – deadly cyborgs and lunar colonies, time travel and genetic engineering. But Ghan ...Read More
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The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Fifteen, edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade 978-1949102727, trade paperback, 432pp, $19.99) January 2024
“Curation” is an overworked word these days, when, on the internet, everything from a collection of Pez dispensers to an Instagram stream of dinner photos is deemed to be “curated.” And yet there’s really no better term to be applied to an assemblage of art put together by ...Read More
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Chengdu Worldcon, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, received 1,674 valid ballots, down from 2,235 at Chicon 8. There were 1,847 valid nominating ballots (1,843 electronic, four paper), up from 1,368.
Nomination statistics weren’t released until the very last of the 90 days allowed, just before our deadline. They don’t include author names for nominees, and generally don’t offer explanations for why several items were dropped as “not eligible.” To ...Read More
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A Traveller in Time: The Critical Practice of Maureen Kincaid Speller, Maureen Kincaid Speller (Luna Press 978-1-91555-620-2, £16.99, 308pp, tp) September 2023.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Maureen Kincaid Speller in person, but we corresponded on email and social media. Talking virtually with Maureen was always a delight, moreso when she approached me to review Rod Duncan’s Unseemly Science for Strange Horizons. The deep sadness I felt ...Read More
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Lords of Uncreation, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316705929, 624 pp, $29.00, hc) May 2023. Cover by Steve Stone.
Lords of Uncreation is the third entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture sequence that began with Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void, which introduced a menagerie of alien civilizations living and dead, allies and opponents of all species, and a galactic history of interstellar warfare, ruined worlds, and refugees ...Read More
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Labyrinth’s Heart, M.A. Carrick (Orbit 978-0-35651-521-2, £9.99, 688pp, tp) August 2023.
Labyrinth’s Heart is the third and final book in the Rook and Rose trilogy, after The Liar’s Knot and The Mask of Mirrors. The writing duo Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms, under their joint M.A. Carrick pseudonym, have given the trilogy a revolutionary, explosive climax – in both political and emotional terms. It’s a fantastic conclusion, ...Read More
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The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories, Gene Wolfe (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-120-1, hardcover, 400pp, $50.00) June 2023
It is so thrilling and rewarding to have a new book from the death-lost pen of Gene Wolfe. The man passed away in 2019, and soon thereafter left us a last posthumous novel (Interlibrary Loan [2020]), but even the recency of those occurrences is beginning to seem like distant ages past. ...Read More
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All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays, Niall Harrison (Briardene Books 978-1-87082-467-5, £20.00, 480pp, tp) April 2023.
It’s a lovely coincidence that I’m reviewing works by Matthew Cheney and Niall Harrison in the same column. They have significantly influenced me as a reader and now as a reviewer. Harrison, along with Cheney, Abigail Nussbaum, Martin ‘‘Lewis’’ Petto, and Jonathan Mccalmont, were the writers I initially gravitated towards when I started ...Read More
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ANN LECKIE was born March 2, 1966 in Toledo OH and grew up in St. Louis MO. She attended Washington University, graduating with a degree in music. She has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer.
Leckie attended Clarion West in 2005, where she wrote her first published SF story “Hesperia and Glory” (2006). Over a dozen stories have appeared ...Read More
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That Self-Same Metal, Brittany N. Williams (Amulet Books 978-1-41975-864-5, $19.99. 352pp, hc) April 2023.
I finished That Self-Same Metal, book 1 of Brittany N. Williams’ Forge and Fracture Saga, about 15 minutes before writing this and I’m already desperate for the sequel. That I have to wait a whole year for it is a crime, plain and simple.
Set in London in 1605 at the beginning of the ...Read More
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Judge John Koeltl of New York Federal Court issued a summary judgment on March 24, 2023, finding in favor of the four publishers who sued the Internet Archive. The suit, brought in 2020 by HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, and Wiley, alleged “willful mass copyright infringement” by IA’s “National Emergency Library,” which offered unlimited borrows of over a million ebooks.
The judge wrote: “At bottom, IA’s fair use ...Read More
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Malarkoi, Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar Press 978-1-91311-130-4, £17.99, 550pp, hc) September 2022.
To begin with a question: have you read Alex Pheby’s Mordew? If not, stop reading this review. Not just because I’m about to spoil the novel, but because Mordew is simply brilliant. If I were prone to sweeping statements, I’d describe it as the best start to a fantasy trilogy in the last decade. If, however, ...Read More
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XIRAN JAY ZHAO is in their twenties, and was born in a small town in China, immigrating to British Columbia in Canada in their early teens.
Zhao attended Simon Fraser University, graduating in 2020 with a degree in biochemical disease research. They finished school at the height of the first COVID wave, and since they were unable to find a job due to the pandemic, they focused on writing and ...Read More
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