Faren Miller

Encompassing the viewpoints of youth and relative maturity, in order to shift between bafflement and occasional epiphanies for both the narrator and the even more clueless reader, while doling out the most crucial back story only when it really counts: that’s what Genevieve Valentine’s Mechanique shares with [China Miéville’s] Embassytown – along with a willingness to discard the completely rational, as needed. Though her book is set in an earthly

While major publishers can be forgiven for emphasizing the familiar in blurbs, especially for the start of a new fantasy series, Orbit’s touting of The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham (Book One of The Dagger and the Coin) as ‘‘the epic fantasy launch of the year,’’ with its ‘‘swords, magic, intrigue, and war,’’ may manage to distort his approach to the genre enough to drive away some potential readers unfamiliar

Discussing the new sequel to his 2007 debut The Name of the Wind in a Locus interview last August, Patrick Rothfuss said ‘‘I’d like to find out how many normal-sized books The Wise Man’s Fear would equal in terms of wordcount (I’m guessing it’s at least three).’’ Name, first in fantasy trilogy The Kingkiller Chronicle, was hardly a slim volume, but you could read it in one or two

Midnight Riot opens in modern police-procedural mode, with the discovery of a dead body and (six meters away) its missing head. Probationary Constable Peter Grant, the book’s young narrator, can only hope that someday he’ll be able to deal with that kind of case, instead of a newbie’s quiet beat or mounds of paperwork. At this point he doesn’t even believe in magic, let alone think that he could play

Few writers have a voice and vision as unique as Catherynne M. Valente’s when she’s delving into arcane realms of myth and legend. She went there in The Book of Dreams (2005), and now in The Habitation of the Blessed. (Last year’s Palimpsest edged closer to contemporary urban fantasy with its sex and tattoos, though it ultimately defied cliché.)

Frame story ‘‘The Confessions of Hiob von Luzern, 1699’’ features

In the PR material for Anthony Huso’s The Last Page, David Drake calls it ‘‘an excellent story told in the High Style,’’ then cites Wolfe, Vance, and Eddison. At 400-plus pages, with maps, sometimes-ornate language, and an apparently familiar plot (raw new king, persecuted-witch girlfriend, a secret text, and a looming war – complete with airships), this first novel might sound like just another hopeful debut. But the writers

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Racing the Dark (opener of the Spirit Binders trilogy) would certainly have made my recommended list for best first novels, if I’d seen it when it came out in 2007. At least I can say something about it now, because it sets the stage for new sequel The Burning City. The first volume opens on an island something like pre-modern Polynesia, although this place has its