fantasy

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

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