Gary K. Wolfe

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

Silver Nitrate, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey 978-0-59335-536-7, $28.00, 324pp, hc) July 2023.

Since her first novel in 2015, Silvia Moreno-Garcia has demonstrated an almost aston­ishing degree of versatility, ranging from historical fiction to vampire horror to romantic noir, classic Gothic, sword and sorcery, and even H.G. Wells with last year’s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau. Characteristically, she has invested these familiar genres with a complex multicul­tural sensibility, at ...Read More

Flight & Anchor, Nicole Kornher-Stace (Tachy­on 978-1-61696-392-7, $16.95, 192pp, tp) June 2023.

Superbright kids on the run, sometimes from shadowy institutions and sometimes with para­normal powers, have been a staple of SF at least since van Vogt’s Slan back in 1940, although an argument could be made that Wilmar H. Shiras’s 1950 fix-up Children of the Atom traces a more direct line to comparatively recent iterations like X-Men or ...Read More

All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays, Niall Harrison (Briardene Books 978-1-870824-67-5, £20.00, 394pp, tp) April 2023.

I suppose it’s way past time for me to stop think­ing of Niall Harrison as one of the UK’s bright young critics. His work is meticulous and prob­ing, but his first collection, All These Worlds: Reviews & Essays, which includes pieces from 2005 all the way up until this year and serves as ...Read More

The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar, Indra Das (Subterranean 978-1-64524-087-7, $40.00, 120pp, hc) June 2023. Cover by Tran Nguyen.

Indra Das’s The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar is a gorgeously written novella which is part coming-of-age tale, part love letter to fantasy, part family mystery, and part elegantly understated fable of identity. Set in the Bowbazar neighborhood of Calcutta in the 1990s (which presumably accounts for the anglicized colonial spelling), its ...Read More

Untethered Sky, Fonda Lee (Tordotcom 978-1-250-84246-6, $22.99, 160pp, hc) April 2023

Fonda Lee won considerable acclaim for the worldbuilding skills on display in her award-winning Green Bone series, but she also knows the power of restraint. Her new novella, Unteth­ered Sky, borrows its key elements from Persian and Greek legends – ravenous manticores with a taste for human flesh and monstrous rocs who are the manticores’ sole predators ...Read More

The Way Home, Peter S. Beagle (Ace 978-0-593-54739-7, $27.00, 224pp, hc) April 2023.

For decades Peter S. Beagle rebuffed sug­gestions that he write a sequel to his 1968 novel The Last Unicorn, arguing that ‘‘it was a young man’s work, and I am not quite him anymore in so many different ways.’’ When he finally relented in 2005, he came up with an ingenious way to reintroduce some ...Read More

Conquest, Nina Allan (riverrun 978-1-52942-803-2, £16.99, 308pp, hc) May 2023.

One of the first things you learn about Nina Allan’s novels is that there are virtually no minor characters – everyone has a story, and the stories are likely to weave together in unexpected ways. Another is that some of these stories involve speculative elements, although assigning a genre label like SF – or mysteries, as with her new ...Read More

The Voice That Murmurs in the Darkness, James Tiptree, Jr. (Subterranean 978-1-64524-107-2, $45.00, 376pp, hc) May 2023.

The last line in James Tiptree, Jr.’s last story is “He headed down the highway, to encounter the ex­istential Unknown.” The story, “In Midst of Life”, is haunting for a number of reasons, not least of which is its description of the surprisingly gentle afterlife of a man who has just committed ...Read More

Behold the Ape, James Morrow (WordFire 978-1-68057-406-7, $32.99, 162pp. hc) April 2023.

Satire has been a significant aspect of SF since long before anyone called it SF, so it’s a bit surpris­ing to realize that relatively few SF authors have built their reputations largely as satirists. James Morrow has been at it for four decades, although it’s only one aspect of a career that has cham­pioned a kind of ...Read More

Lost Places, Sarah Pinsker (Small Beer 978-1-61873-199-9, $17.00, 288pp, tp) May 2023.

As with Valente, much of the appeal of Sarah Pinsker’s stories, 12 of which are collected in Lost Places, is her contagious enthusiasm for story in all its forms – not just short stories, fables, and fairy tales, but tacky old kids’ TV shows, improvised campfire tales, urban legends, mysterious ancient ballads, fading memories, even compulsive ...Read More

Under My Skin, K.J. Parker (Subterranean 978-1-64524-079-2, $50.00, 680pp, hc) March 2023.

Under My Skin is the third major collection from K.J. Parker, and like Academic Exercises in 2014 and The Father of Lies in 2018, it’s a hefty one. This is mostly because Parker tends to favor novella and novelette-length stories, and four of the 13 stories here – “Mightier Than the Sword”, “My Beautiful Life”, “Prosper’s Demon”, and ...Read More

The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volume I: Lila the Werewolf and Other Stories, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon 978-1-61696-388-0, $28.95, 352pp, hc) May 2023.

The Essential Peter S. Beagle, Volume II: Oak­land Dragon Blues and Other Stories, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon 978-1-61696-390-3, $28.95, 352pp, hc) May 2023.

Before anyone starts explaining it to me, I am fully aware that a word like “es­sential,” like most other words in pub­lishing, ...Read More

Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo (Tordotcom 978-1-25082-450-9, $19.99, 112pp, hc) March 2023.

Last year, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea invited us to think about how the world might be perceived by nonhuman species right here on Earth – in that case, octopuses – but some version of that question has been remarkably persistent in SF at least since Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (which, as if ...Read More

White Cat, Black Dog, Kelly Link (Random House 978-0-59344-995-0, $27.00, 272pp, hc) March 2023.

There are a lot of things you can do with fairy tales, but leaving them alone doesn’t seem to be one of them. Even the Brothers Grimm themselves messed around with the stories they collected, and various redactions, reinterpretations, satires, and improvisations have been with us pretty much as long as the tales themselves. Kelly ...Read More

The Crane Husband, Kelly Barnhill (Tor­dotcom 978-1-250-85097-3, $19.99, 128pp, hc) February 2023.

Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Drag­ons ranked pretty high on my list of last year’s outstanding fantasy novels, a highly original combination of feminist coming-of-age tale, alternate history period piece, and metamor­phosis myth, all cast in the form of a memoir, or what used to be called a personal history. That combination of domestic realism and family ...Read More

The Scarlet Circus, Jane Yolen (Tachyon 9781616963866, $17.95, 256pp, tp) February 2023.

If you’re thinking about catching up on reading Jane Yolen, forget it. She’s already way ahead of you, with (by her own count) ‘‘well over 400 books, plus thousands of poems and a huge bas­ket load of stories.’’ Of course, a lot of those are children’s and YA titles, but even excluding those, there is a daunting ...Read More