Gary K. Wolfe

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

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

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

The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941, David Ritter, Daniel Rit­ter, Sam McDonald, & John L. Coker III (First Fandom Experience 978-1-73665-965-6, $149.00, 504pp, hc) April 2024.

If someone were to tell me that a lavish 500-page coffee-table book selling for $149 is basically a microhistory describing what a bunch of people I’ve mostly never heard of were doing in 1941, I’d quite reasonably be skeptical; ...Read More

The Brides of High Hill, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 9781250851444, $19.95, 128pp, tp) May 2024.

Over the past few years, Nghi Vo has parlayed the East and Southeast Asia-inspired world of her Singing Hills cycle into not only a delightful playground for the adventures of her itinerant Cleric Chih, whose ostensible mission is to collect stories for his monastery, but also into a kind of laboratory for storytelling itself. Earlier novellas ...Read More

I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons, Peter S. Beagle (Saga 978-1-6680-2527-7, $26.00, 280pp, hc) May 2024.

For an author who once seemed an icon of the 1960s, Peter S. Beagle is quite a survi­vor. While on the one hand he’s revisited the beloved worlds of The Innkeeper’s Song and The Last Unicorn (most recently with last year’s The Way Home), he also has produced a series of extraordinarily graceful ...Read More

The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 9781250865878, $27.99, 240pp, hc) February 2024.

There are a handful of SF writers so sharply attuned to the arcane systems that underlie contemporary culture that it sometimes becomes a challenge to figure out what’s SF and what’s not; William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson come to mind, as does Cory Doctorow. The Bezzle, Doctorow’s second novel in a new series featuring forensic accountant ...Read More

Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, $19.99, 192pp, hc) May 2024.

The idea of social stratification enforced through architecture – in other words, high-rises with the rich living at the top – has been a staple of SF imagery at least since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it’s been extraordinarily useful as a way of exploring everything from overpopulation to Ballardian alienation to urban dystopia to – more ...Read More

The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills (Tachyon 978-1-61696-414-6, $18.95, 336pp, tp) April 2024.

It’s been interesting to watch the rehabilitation of “science fantasy” as a respectable mode of storytelling over the past few decades. Once applied loosely to everything from sword and sorcery to Vancean far futures, it was derided as a “misshapen subgenre” by Darko Suvin and a “bas­tard genre” by The Encyclopedia of Science Fic­tion. ...Read More

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom 978-1-25076-704-2, $20.99, 224pp, hc) April 2024.

Like Chekhov’s famous gun, it seems to be an un­stated principle among writers as diverse as Rob­ert Ludlum and Octavia E. Butler that a character suffering from total amnesia in the first act is in for some world-shaking revelations by the third. The same is true of P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail ...Read More

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar (Tordotcom 978-1-2508-8180-9, $18.99, 128pp, tp) April 2024.

Generation starship stories tend to come in a few distinct flavors, with distinct character types. There are the refugees, trying to keep humanity alive while escaping a dying or overpopulated Earth (the sort of wishful fantasy that Kim Stanley Robinson set out to demolish in Aurora a few years ago). There are the ...Read More

Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction, Ann Leckie (Orbit 978-0-3165-5357-5, $29.00, 416pp, hc) April 2024.

In a Locus interview last year, Ann Leckie noted that, prior to Ancillary Justice, “Nobody paid much attention to my stories,” and she was nei­ther complaining nor being falsely modest. While a few of the stories in Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction made the Locus recommended read­ing list or best-of-the-year ...Read More

Logical Fantasy: The Many Worlds of John Wyndham, John Wyndham (Subterranean 978-1-64524-143-0, $50.00, 424pp, hc) April 2024.

So many impressive writers of short fiction have shown up over the past few decades that it’s worth wondering how the writers of earlier generations seem to be holding up. A couple of new collections from two very different figures, Harlan Ellison and John Wyndham, might offer some clues. There was a ...Read More

The Butcher of the Forest, Premee Mohamed (Tordotcom 978-1250881786, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2024.

I’m pretty sure that tales of forests that are haunted (or enchanted or forbidden or cursed or simply hallucinogenic) predate haunted-house tales by several centuries – in fact, they prob­ably predate houses – and they’ve long provided powerful templates for fantasy (William Morris, George MacDonald, Tolkien, Robert Holdstock), horror (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood) and even ...Read More

The Woods All Black, Lee Mandelo (Tordotcom 978-1-250-79031-6, $19.99, 160pp, hc) March 2024.

Lee Mandelo focuses on the hazardous experi­ences of a trans man in 1929 rural Kentucky in The Woods All Black. Like Wasserstein, Mandelo opens with a classic narrative hook: a stranger arrives in a small town on a new as­signment, and finds the townspeople chilly if not openly hostile, as though they are guarding some ...Read More

Convergence Problems, Wole Talabi (DAW 978-0756418830, $27.00, 320pp, hc), February 2024.

After the exuberant fantasy/heist caper that was his debut novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, it might be easy to overlook Wole Talabi’s background as an engineer and SF writer. His new collection, Convergence Problems, serves as a rewarding reminder of his connections to more-or-less traditional SF themes and techniques. A story like ‘‘Blowout’’, ...Read More

The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler (Tordotcom 978-1-25085-552-7, $26.99, 112pp, hc) January 2024.

Just over a year ago, Ray Nayler offered us a brilliantly original glimpse into the minds of octopuses in The Mountain in the Sea, making a convincing case that this was about as close as we’ve come to encountering a genuine alien intelligence. With The Tusks of Extinction, he turns his attention to the ...Read More

Kinning, Nisi Shawl (Tor 978-1-25021-269-6, $28.99, 432pp, hc) January 2024.

Nisi Shawl’s 2016 Everfair was one of the more provocative alternate histories of the past de­cade, with its steampunk Africa giving birth to a safe-haven country called Everfair, carved out of the oppressively brutal Belgian Congo of King Leopold and financed in part by British social­ists and African-American missionaries. It was a sprawling, ambitious narrative, covering some 30 years ...Read More

Saevus Corax Deals with the Dead, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316668903, $18.99, 359pp, tp) Oc­tober 2023.

Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316668910, $18.99, 352pp, tp) No­vember 2023.

Readers of K.J. Parker are by now familiar with his affable scoundrels – by turns digressive, philo­sophical, deeply cynical, petulant, and somehow both self-loathing and self-justifying in the same breath. Saevus Corax, the playwright-turned-battlefield-scavenger who is the protagonist of ...Read More

The Book of Love, Kelly Link (Random House 978-0-81299-658-6, $31.00, 640pp, hc) Febru­ary 2024.

There are two things to be said up front about Kelly Link’s much-anticipated first novel. One is that it’s not what you’re expecting – although that’s pretty much what we do expect from any Kelly Link story – and the other is that there’s a reason why the title is The Book of Love rather ...Read More

We Are the Crisis, Cadwell Turnbull (Black­stone 978-1-9826-0375-5, $26.99, 322pp, hc) November 2023.

The notion of vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural critters suddenly coming out of the shadows sounds like a formula-driven conceit on the order of World of Darkness games or Underworld movies, but readers of Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods, No Monsters quickly learned it can be a lot more complicated than that. Thematically and struc­turally complex, covering ...Read More

Monstrous Alterations, Christopher Barzak (Lethe 978-1-59021-761-0, $20.00, 206pp, tp) September 2023.

Fiction which deliberately sets itself in dialogue with specific works of earlier fiction is an ancient tradition, but it often seems like catnip for SFF writers. Just in the last few years we’ve seen Nghi Vo on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Hand on Shirley Jackson, Kij Johnson on Kenneth Gra­hame and H.P. Lovecraft, John Kessel on Austen and ...Read More

A Stranger in the Citadel, Tobias S. Buckell (Audible Originals 978-1713646228, $24.99, CD, 7 hr., unabridged [also available as a digital download]) September 2021. (Tachyon 978-1-61696-398-9, $17.98, 256pp, tp) October 2023.

Far-future societies which have forgotten or mythologized their history have been a staple of SF at least since H.G. Wells’s Eloi. If you shift the point of view from that of a visiting time traveler to an inhabitant ...Read More

Menewood, Nicola Griffith (MCD/Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37420-808-0, $35.00, 720pp, hc) October 2023.

When her novel Hild was published back in 2013, Nicola Griffith wrote a short essay for Tor.com addressing reviews which described her as a distinguished SF/F writer who had somehow jumped ship into historical fiction, or which asked whether the novel itself could be read as some sort of fantasy. I even saw it described as ‘‘speculative ...Read More