Gary K. Wolfe

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