Gary K. Wolfe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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