Gary K. Wolfe

These Prisoning Hills, Christopher Rowe (Tor­dotcom 978-1250804488, $15.99, 144pp, tp) May 2022.

These Prisoning Hills is the latest installment in Christopher Rowe’s striking vision of a phantasma­gorical future Tennessee that we first encountered in ‘‘The Voluntary State’’ and ‘‘The Border State’’, both included in his 2017 collection Telling the Map. While much of the novella resonates with those earlier tales, familiarity with them isn’t necessary, since Rowe provides ...Read More

Boys, Beasts & Men, Sam J. Miller (Tachyon 978-1-61696-3729, $17.95, 330pp, tp) June 2022.

In reading his new collection Boys, Beasts & Men, it came as a bit of a surprise to remember that Sam J. Miller’s first novel, The Art of Starv­ing, appeared only five years ago, and that the earliest of the 14 stories here date back only to 2013. This may in part be ...Read More

A Mirror Mended, Alix E. Harrow (Tordotcom 978-1-250-76664-9, $18.99, 144pp, hc) June 2022.

Although it hasn’t really caught on much, ‘‘bib­liofantasy’’ has always seemed to me a useful term for describing a certain kind of recursive fantasy, in which protagonists find themselves transported into classic stories or story-worlds. It has a pretty respectable pedigree, and although some of its earlier classics aren’t read much these days, it’s enjoyed a ...Read More

When Women Were Dragons, Kelly Barnhill (Doubleday 978-0385548229, $28.00, 352pp, hc) May 2022.

I suppose there are plenty of human-dragon metamorphoses in fantasy novels, but they aren’t what immediately came to mind when reading Kelly Barnhill’s first adult novel When Women Were Dragons – in which 642,987 American women suddenly transform into dragons on a single day in 1955. Instead, I was reminded of Ionesco’s 1959 play Rhinoceros, ...Read More

The Atlas Six, Olivie Blake (Self-published 978-1-679-91099-9, 383pp, tp) January 2020. (Tor 978-1-25085-451-3, 536pp, $25.99, hc) March 2022.

I am late to the Olivie Blake (AKA Alexene Farol Follmuth) party because I can’t com­mit to TikTok, which is where The Atlas Six first caught the imaginations of thousands of readers. This Tor edition is an expanded and revised edit of the version of the book that made the rounds ...Read More

The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom – Volume Two: 1940, David Ritter & Daniel Rit­ter (First Fandom Experience 978-1-7366596-1-8, $195.00, 484pp, hc) December 2021.

It’s already been a couple of years since David & Daniel Ritter’s The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume One: The 1930s gave us a sort of tomb-raider’s view of the early days of fan culture, more or less concluding with the first ...Read More

Crazy in Poughkeepsie, Daniel Pinkwater (Tachyon 978-1-61696-374-3, $16.95, 192pp hc) April 2022.

There’s always a degree of satisfaction, maybe bor­dering on smugness, in finding that a favorite quirky writer is also a favorite of other writers you respect. In a career of half a century, Daniel Pinkwater has gained the admiration of writers as diverse as Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, and Charlie Jane Anders – some lucky enough to ...Read More

The Long Game, K.J. Parker (Subterranean 978-1-64524-080-0, $44.88, 108pp, hc) March 2022.

K.J. Parker may not have invented the idea of using an exasperated, put-upon narrator to under­cut the implicit pretensions of a classic fantasy setting, but he’s certainly become its reigning virtuoso. His latest novella, The Long Game, is again set in his alternate late-medieval Europe, with its not-quite-recognizable place names like Idalia or Sabades Amar but ...Read More

Kundo Wakes Up, Saad Z. Hossain (Tordotcom 978-1-250-82392-2, $15.99, 208pp, tp) March 2022.

Saad Z. Hossain’s Kundo Wakes Up returns us to the uniquely original vision of a future South Asia plagued by environmental disaster, swarm­ing with airborne nanotech, governed by mostly benevolent AIs, and occasionally plagued by rogue djinns, that we first encountered in The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday back in 2019. Even one of his ...Read More

Spear, Nicola Griffith (Tordotcom 978-1-250-81932-1, $19.99, 192pp, hc) April 2022.

In terms of actual scholarship, it’s probably a good thing that historians have largely aban­doned the pejorative “Dark Ages” to describe the early medieval period, since it had become such a broad-brush pop-culture shorthand that it eventually seemed to refer to everything between the fall of Rome and the rise of Amazon. For fantasy writers, on the other hand, ...Read More

All the Horses of Iceland, Sarah Tolmie (Tor­dotcom 978-1-250-80793-9, $15.99, 112pp, tp) March 2022.

Sarah Tolmie’s All the Horses of Iceland might also be described as a concise epic, purporting to describe how horses came to Iceland, but it’s cast more in the form of a chronicle than a plot­ted tale. Its narrator is a priest named Jor, who is reconstructing from a distance of centuries the story of ...Read More

The Cartographers, Peng Shepherd (William Morrow 978-0062910691, $27.99, 400pp, hc) March 2022.

Speaking of maps, thanks largely to Tolkien they’re all but inescapable in modern secondary-world fantasy, but fantasies about maps are much less common. With her second novel The Cartog­raphers, Peng Shepherd sets out to correct that, focusing in part on the actual practice by early commercial mapmakers of inserting fake ‘‘phan­tom settlements’’ in their maps as ...Read More

Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor Teen 978-1250317391, $18.99, 320pp, hc) April 2022.

It’s practically an unwritten rule that middle vol­umes of trilogies should shade a bit darker, with higher stakes, unexpected complications, dimmer hopes, and a growing sense of desperation. If you’re going to (apparently) kill off Frodo, volume two is the place to do it. The second volume of Charlie Jane Anders’s YA Unstoppable trilogy, ...Read More

Sea of Tranquility, Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf 978-0-593321447, $25.00, 272pp, hc) April 2022.

One of the central characters in Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility is a novelist known for a bestseller about a worldwide pandemic, published just a few years before an actual pandemic makes it a bestseller all over again, with a blockbuster film adaptation in the works. Not surprisingly, she’s on a world­wide book ...Read More

51, Patrick O’Leary (Tachyon 978-1-61696-348-4, $16.95, 304pp, tp) February 2022.

Patrick O’Leary hasn’t been the most prolific of writers (it’s been almost 20 years since his last novel, The Impossible Bird, and that was only his third), but he’s certainly among the most unex­pected. He characteristically begins with familiar SF/F devices (time travel in Door Number Three, alien invasions and immortality in The Impossible Bird), and ...Read More

The Long Game, K.J. Parker (Subterranean 978-1-64524-080-0, $40.00, 108pp, hc) March 2022.

K.J. Parker may not have invented the idea of using an exasperated, put-upon narrator to under­cut the implicit pretensions of a classic fantasy setting, but he’s certainly become its reigning virtuoso. His latest novella, The Long Game, is again set in his alternate late-medieval Europe, with its not-quite-recognizable place names like Idalia or Sabades Amar ...Read More

Moon Witch, Spider King, Marlon James (Riv­erhead 978-0-735-22020-1, $30.00, 656pp, hc) February 2022.

The narrative trick of telling the same story from different viewpoints has yielded some genuine classics, from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet to Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and it would seem especially well suited to fantasy epics – which too often tend to have far more characters and settings than actual plot lines. So when readers of Marlon ...Read More

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, Kai-Fu Lee & Chen Qiufan (Currency 978-0-593-23829-5, $30.00, 452pp, hc) September 2021.

I’ve generally been skeptical of efforts to match up SF stories with ‘‘science fact’’ essays, partly because ‘‘science fact’’ has always seemed a redundant back-formation that no one would use at all, if it weren’t for the supposed need to remind us that science fiction is, well, fiction. (Most of ...Read More

Cyber Mage, Saad Z. Hossain (Unnamed Press 978-1-951213-28-2, $18.00, 350pp, tp) December 2021.

In a remarkably short period, the Bangladeshi author Saad Z. Hossain has emerged as one of the most distinctive new voices in SF, earning comparisons to everyone from Joseph Heller to Quentin Tarantino, and as a major figure in an apparent renaissance in South Asian SF (see the next two books under review). Of course, “renaissance” ...Read More

Noor, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW 978-0756416096, $23.99, 224pp, hc) November 2021.

As vibrant and inventive as her settings are, Nnedi Okorafor’s most consistent theme may simply be the discovery of unexpect­ed inner powers. Zahrah the Windseeker finds that her dreadlocks give her the power to levitate and fly; Ejii in The Shadow Speaker learns she can hear at great distances and even read minds; On­yesonwu in Who Fears Death? not ...Read More

The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Volume 2, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Saga 978-1534449626, $18.99, 624pp, tp) September 2021.

In his introduction to his second Year’s Best Sci­ence Fiction for Saga Press, Jonathan Strahan observes, surprising no one, that 2020 was an extremely strange year, and not only for science fiction. But readers expecting this strangeness to show up in Strahan’s customarily eclectic selec­tion (27 stories from 18 different sources) are ...Read More

The Hood, Lavie Tidhar (Head of Zeus 978-1-838-93131-5, £18.99, 448pp, hc) October 2021.

Lavie Tidhar’s ambitious four-novel re­visiting of British mythology – which he calls the Anti-Matter of Britain – began with last year’s By Force Alone, a cheerfully anarchic and thoroughly entertaining assault on Arthuriana, and now, with The Hood, it moves forward a few centuries to the 12th-century era of Robin Hood legends. But while ...Read More