When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory (Saga 978-1-6680-6004-9, $29.99, 464pp, hc) April 2025.
In a career that has ranged from Dickian SF to rural horror, one scenario that seems to fascinate Daryl Gregory is bringing a small but diverse group of characters together under stress, whether survivors of gruesome horror stories (We Are All Completely Fine) or disparate members of a family gifted with psychic powers ( ...Read More
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The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami (Pantheon 978-0593317600, $29.00, 336pp, hc) March 2025.
This may sound like an odd question, but are algorithms starting to take over the narrative function that psi powers once served in SF? The idea of preventing crimes by pre-emptively arresting supposed perpetrators has been around at least since Orwell’s notion of ‘‘thoughtcrimes,’’ and in the 1950s this became the province of psionically gifted folks like ...Read More
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Keith Roberts’s Pavane: A Critical Companion, Paul Kincaid (Palgrave Macmillan 978-3031715662, $37.99, 86pp, hc) November 2024.
For the past couple of years, Palgrave has been publishing a series of short “critical companion” monographs each focusing on a single title of what it calls the “new canon”; books covered so far include The Last Unicorn, Dune, The Hobbit, Neuromancer, Neverwhere, The Stars My Destination, ...Read More
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One Level Down, Mary G. Thompson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-430-6, $16.95, 176pp, tp) April 2025.
Mary G. Thompson is another middle-grade and young-adult author now venturing into adult SF with One Level Down, an efficient VR thriller with some fairly familiar elements skillfully handled and given additional punch by a memorable narrator, a megalomaniacal villain who echoes the ‘‘mad scientists’’ of yore, and a persistent undertone of psychological horror. While ...Read More
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The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar (Tordotcom 978-1-250-34108-2, $24.99, 144pp, hc) March 2025.
Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots is an absolutely lovely take on classic murder ballads, with distinct echoes of the Tam Lin story and a soundtrack that might as well be wall-to-wall Steeleye Span. It might come as a bit of a surprise to readers who know El-Mohtar’s work only from the popular and multiple award-winning ...Read More
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Picks and Shovels, Cory Doctorow (Ad Astra UK 978-1-8045-4783-0, £20.00, 400pp, hc) January 2025. (Tor 978-1-250-86590-8, $28.99, 400pp, hc) February 2025.
Cory Doctorow’s novels about forensic accountant Martin Hench are playing out as a trilogy-in-reverse: We first met Hench as a wealthy 67-year-old freelance investigator in Red Team Blues (2023), then as he recalled a case from 2006 in The Bezzle, when he was probably approaching 50. Now, ...Read More
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The Garden, Nick Newman (Doubleday UK 978-0-85752-999-2, £16.99, 288pp, hc) January 2025. (Putnam 978-0-59371-773-8, $29.00, 320pp, hc) February 2025.
Depending on your frame of reference, any tale of two sisters living in ritualized isolation until some guy shows up to disrupt everything can evoke anything from Tennessee Williams to Shirley Jackson, especially We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The latter seems especially apt with Nick Newman’s The ...Read More
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2024: Descent (or Ascent) into Multiplicity
It’s a bit bracing to be reminded that I’ve been writing these yearly review columns for more than three decades, but it does put things in perspective. Some of the books mentioned in those first couple of columns, of course, are barely remembered now, but others still seem to be a significant part of the discussion – Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Neal Stephenson’s ...Read More
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Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic, Stefan Ekman (Lever Press 978-1643150642, $26.99, 351pp, tp) August 2024.
Stefan Ekman opens his engrossing new study Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity through Magic by admitting that ‘‘I began reading urban fantasy in the 1990s, not quite knowing that I did so.’’ He’s not the only one. Over the past few decades, the term seems to have evolved into a sort of catchall, defined ...Read More
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At the Fount of Creation, Tobi Ogundiran (Tordotcom 978-1-250-90803-2, $21.99, 224pp, hc) January 2025.
Writers of duologies aren’t doing any favors for book reviewers. With a trilogy, we can blather on about middle-book syndrome and three-act structures; with an ongoing series, we can speculate about metanarratives or simply rate each new volume as though it were the latest album from a familiar band, but a duology somehow seems to ...Read More
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We Lived on the Horizon, Erika Swyler (Atria 978-6680-4959-4, $28.99, 336pp, hc) January 2025.
Despite what Robert Frost may have thought, a lot of SFF writers really do love a wall. Walled and isolated cities, redoubts, or keeps (to use the term favored by The Science Fiction Encyclopedia) have proved useful to SFF for exploring everything from overpopulation to alien invasions to environmental catastrophe to those pesky tech ...Read More
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Death of the Author, Nnedi Okorafor (Morrow 978-0-06-344578-9, $30.00, 448pp, hc) January 2025.
For a certain generation of academics, ‘‘the death of the author’’ is the title of an influential 1967 essay by Roland Barthes arguing against interpreting literature in terms of the author’s identity or psychology. Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author makes a brief and oblique reference to this in an early chapter in which the protagonist, ...Read More
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The Wood at Midwinter, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury 978-1-63973-448-1, $16.99, 64pp, hc) October 2024.
Except for children’s books, I can think of relatively few authors for whom a relatively spare short story would be the occasion for a pricey hardcover, but between the holiday gift-book market, the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and the anticipation surrounding anything Susanna Clarke writes, one can hardly blame Bloomsbury for ...Read More
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The Presidential Papers, John Kessel (PM Press 979-8-88744-058-3 , $16.00, 160pp, tp), October 2024.
PM Press’s series of “Outspoken Author” collections, reaching its 30th volume with John Kessel’s The Presidential Papers, has long provided useful short overviews of the fiction and nonfiction of some of our field’s most distinguished writers (always accompanied by insouciant but revealing interviews by the late series editor Terry Bisson). While some authors have ...Read More
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The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison & J. Michael Straczynski, eds. (Blackstone 979-8-212-18379-6, $27.99, 450pp) October 2024.
Speaking of unusual ways to assemble an anthology, here we have The Last Dangerous Visions, nominally edited by Harlan Ellison, but also by Ellison’s executor J. Michael Straczynski, who added seven stories he solicited himself after Ellison’s death. By my count, nine of the 24 stories were among the nearly 90 ...Read More
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The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024, Hugh Howey & John Joseph Adams, eds. (Mariner 978-0063315785, $18.99, 384pp, tp) October 2024.
There are a lot of different ways of assembling an anthology, but none seem quite so programmatic as John Joseph Adams’s The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series, now in its tenth year. Adams describes his methodology with admirable clarity: As series editor, he compiles a list ...Read More
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The Tapestry of Time, Kate Heartfield (Harper Voyager 978-0-00-856781-1, £16.99, 384pp, hc) October 2024.
Sometimes a trope seems so familiar that it begins to feel like a tire that’s lost its tread, even though it’s still fun to drive on. The Nazi preoccupation with occult powers has itself been a preoccupation for writers from all over the spectrum – horror (F. Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon), fantasy (Katherine Kurtz, Ian ...Read More
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Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, Nalo Hopkinson (Tachyon 978-1-61696-426-9, $15.95, 224pp, tp) October 2024.
Story collections almost never sell as well as novels, but maybe they ought to. A novel is the end product of processes that may have unfolded over months or years, while a collection offers us glimpses into those processes themselves. All of the sixteen stories in Nalo Hopkinson’s Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions were published ...Read More
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The Wilding, Ian McDonald (Gollancz 978-1-39961-147-3, £25.00, 314pp, hc) September 2024.
Ian McDonald may be one of the most accomplished SF writers of his generation, but he isn’t particularly known for horror – though that may change with the very creepy ecological fable The Wilding. I’m using “creepy” in a quite literal sense here: There’s a lot of creeping going on. A project to restore and “rewild” a ...Read More
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The City in Glass, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 978-1250348272, $24.99, 224pp), October 2024.
Nghi Vo is full of surprises. I suppose one could argue that her first novel, the Gatsbyesque The Chosen and the Beautiful, and her second, the very different Hollywood fantasy historical The Siren Queen, had a few things in common – like early 20th-century American settings and the classic themes of the need for acceptance ...Read More
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The Great When, Alan Moore (Bloomsbury 978-1-63557-884-3, $29.99, 336pp, hc) October 2024.
By now there are so many mystical-magical ‘‘hidden London’’ novels that it’s getting hard to keep up – though admittedly there’s something delicious about the notion that in any great city, you’re only being shown what they want you to see, with the real city available only at certain access points for certain chosen adventurers. In his ...Read More
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Model Home, Rivers Solomon (MCD 978-0-374-60713-5, $28.00, 304pp, hc) October 2024.
“Everyone believes in haunted houses,” says Ezri, the narrator of Rivers Solomon’s Model Home, and who’s to argue? Based on the resurgence of the theme in the past couple of years alone, it’s proved to be not only a durable framework for supernatural shenanigans, but a kind of magical mirror for all sorts of issues ranging from ...Read More
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Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1-39961-767-3, £22.00, 320pp, hc) July 2024.
Despite having won BSFA and Campbell Awards for his 2012 novel Jack Glass, Adam Roberts has a good case for being one of the most under-appreciated novelists in the UK – not a single Hugo or Nebula nomination in a career of more than two decades, according to the SFADB. As I and others have argued ...Read More
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Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker (Tordotcom 978-1-250-33026-0, $20.99, 170pp, hc) September 2024.
I seem to have found myself reading a number of haunted house novels in the last year or so, and it’s always fascinating to watch how authors still find ways to ring new changes on a template that goes back to the earliest Gothic novels. In Haunt Sweet Home, Sarah Pinsker’s witty approach is to focus ...Read More
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New Adventures in Space Opera, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Tachyon 978-1-61696-420-7, $18.95, 336pp, tp) August 2024.
Dating back more than 80 years, space opera is almost certainly the longest-running term in continuous use for a particular kind of SF – though we’ll probably never finish arguing over whether it’s a mode, a subgenre, a theme, or (in the eyes of some) a mistake. In 2003, Locus ran a special issue ...Read More
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She Who Knows, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW 978-0-75641-895-3, $23.00, 176pp, hc) August 2024.
As with any good fantasy setting, Nnedi Okorafor’s 2010 World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death introduced us to a world that seemed far more expansive than what was contained in the text. Set in a far-future Sudan in which the Okeke people face brutal oppression by the Nuru, it combined hints of a bygone technological age with ...Read More
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Tomorrowing, Terry Bisson (Duke University Press 978-1-4780-3068-3, $15.95, 168pp, tp) May 2024.
Terry Bisson, who died in January, began writing his ‘‘This Month in History’’ column of hilarious microfictions for Locus on April Fool’s Day 2004, and for the next two decades it became as much a fixture of this magazine as The New Yorker’s cartoons or Alfred Hitchcock’s cameos. (He’d actually begun a similar series for Eileen Gunn’s ...Read More
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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