Gary K. Wolfe

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

Starling House, Alix E. Harrow (Tor 978-1-25079-905-0, $28.99, 320pp, hc) October 2023.

Alix E. Harrow is also acutely aware of the traditions behind Starling House, as evidenced by her epigraph from Wuthering Heights and a few passages – including the opening line – that sound like they might have come from du Maurier’s Rebecca. But Harrow’s narrator, a 26-year-old dropout named Opal, has a tough, witty, hardscrabble ...Read More

A Haunting on the Hill, Elizabeth Hand (Mul­holland 978-0-31652-732-3, $30.00, 336pp, hc) October 2023.

Angry architecture of one sort or another has been a fixture of Gothic fiction since Walpole and Radcliffe – long before it evolved into the haunted house story as we know it today–and it shows no sign of loosening its grip on our imagination (even Disney was at it again this summer). Only a few ...Read More

The Circumference of the World, Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon 978-1-61696-362-0, $17.95, 256pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Elizabeth Story.

For an author who I think can lay a reason­able claim to being one of the most innova­tive voices in modern science fiction, Lavie Tidhar never tires of displaying his affection for some of the older classics of the field. His new novel The Circumference of the World man­ages in a ...Read More

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, Garth Nix (Harper Voyager 978-0-06329-196-6, $30.00, 304pp, hc) August 2023.

Although writers as diverse as Joanna Russ and Terry Pratchett have paid tribute to Fritz Leiber’s classic Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, ar­guably the most prominent current descendants of these tales are the Darger and Surplus stories of Michael Swanwick and the Hereward and Fitz stories of Garth Nix, now collected for the ...Read More

Mammoths at the Gates, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 1-250-85413-7, $19.99, 128pp, hc) September 2023

We are our stories. That’s been a recurring theme in Nghi Vo’s ‘‘Singing Hills’’ cycle of novellas, which reaches its fourth volume with Mammoths at the Gates, following last year’s Into the Riverlands. While that novella was peppered with fast-moving martial arts sequences interspersed with tales told by mem­bers of an improvised fellowship on ...Read More

Thornhedge, T. Kingfisher (Tor 978-1-250-24409-3, 128pp., $19.00, hc) August 2023.

A few months ago, in reviewing Kelly Link’s White Cat, Black Dog, I made the thoroughly unoriginal observation that fairy tales seem almost infinitely malleable, and almost irresist­ible to fantasy writers; it’s as though they were the base pairs that make up the very DNA of a lot of Western storytelling. In the last year or so alone, ...Read More

Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon, Wole Talabi (DAW 978-0-756-41826-7, $27.00, 320pp hc) August 2023.

It’s no news to any fantasy reader that gods are having a tough time of it these days. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which is emerging as one of the more influential fantasies of the current century, did much to codify the no­tion that ancient deities, whose very existence depended on belief, could barely ...Read More

Bridge, Lauren Beukes (Mulholland 978-0-316-26788-5, 424pp, $29.00, hc) August 2023.

It’s always fascinating to watch SFF concepts migrate into general fiction (a term which, following the lead of librarians, I have just now decided to use instead of ‘‘mainstream,’’ since ‘‘mainstream’’ is so – well, mainstream). Human cloning was pretty much the province of genre SF, until it wasn’t with novels like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, while ...Read More

Airside, Christopher Priest (Gollancz 978-1-3996-0883-1, £22.00, 298pp, hc) May 2023.

I confess I’ve probably been overus­ing the word ‘‘liminal’’ for a while now, but so has everyone else. If there were a National Critics’ Ex­amination, ‘‘liminal’’ would almost certainly be one of the answers. But Christopher Priest’s Airside is a novel which openly embraces and explores the nature of liminality and liminal spaces such as airports, ho­tels, conventions, and ...Read More

The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis (Del Rey 978-0-593-49985-6, $28.00, 416pp, hc) June 2023.

Connie Willis’s loyal readers have long known of her fascination with the whole Roswell/UFOlogy circus. More than 20 years ago she published a hilarious chapbook called Roswell, Vegas, and Area 51: Travels with Courtney, in which she described extensive road trips over much of the Southwestern United States, visiting those and other oddball land­marks, ...Read More

Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1-250-86584-7, $27.99, 216pp, hc) April 2023.

The first thing to be said about Cory Doctorow’s Red Team Blues is that it’s SF only in the sense that it deals with razor-edge technologies like cryp­tocurrencies, blockchains, secure enclaves, and other issues that Doctorow clearly understands far better than I do. As with midcareer William Gib­son (and some of Doctorow’s own earlier novels), the line ...Read More