Jake Casella Brookins

The Jaguar Mask, Michael J. DeLuca (Stelliform 978-1-77809-260-2, 348pp, $19.00, tp) August 2024. Cover by Julia Louise Pereira.

I was quite charmed by Michael J. DeLuca’s no­vella Night Roll, a solarpunk-adjacent fantasy set in Detroit. In his debut novel, The Jaguar Mask, DeLuca takes up a different kind of magic, but a similar kind of realism: a story of individuals and communities resisting oppression, on wounded but still ...Read More

Toward Eternity, Anton Hur (HarperVia 978-0-06334-448-8, 256pp, $26.99, hc) July 2024. Cover by Stephen Brayda.

Initially set in a near-future Cape Town, South Africa, and eventually taking us to ever more distant times and locales, Anton Hur’s debut novel Toward Eternity begins with scientist Mali Beeko confronting the mysterious disappearance and reapparance of “Patient One.” Mali specializes in a nanotechnology treatment that cures cancer by replacing the host’s cells with ...Read More

The West Passage, Jared Pechaček (Tordotcom 978-1-25088-483-1, 384pp, $28.99, hc) July 2024. Cover by Jared Pechaček.

I went into Jared Pechaček’s debut novel, The West Passage, with absolutely no idea what I was getting into beyond a cool cover. Pechaček’s been a delightful person to follow on various social media for some time now – sharing illustrations and fashion commentary, and one of the hosts of the lovely Tolkeinalia ...Read More

Weird Black Girls, Elwin Cotman (Scribner 978-1-66801-885-9, 330pp, $17.99, tp) April 2024. Cover by Michael Morris.

There are plenty of speculative elements in Elwin Cotman’s newest collection, Weird Black Girls, but his skill at evoking people and situations makes even the nonfantastic entries utterly spellbinding. In “Owen”, for example, a father attempts to bond with his son through a ritual funeral for wrestler Owen Hart, with a kind of ...Read More

The Years Shall Run Like Rab­bits, Ben Berman Ghan (Buckrider Books 978-1-98949-688-6, 300pp, $21.00, tp) May 2024.

Sometimes, I really enjoy speculative fiction that works more by image and dream logic than plot and worldbuilding. Not to say Ben Berman Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits lacks those traditional elements: The ingredients here are quite recognizable – deadly cyborgs and lunar colonies, time travel and genetic engineering. But Ghan ...Read More

Ocean’s Godori, Elaine U. Cho (Hillman Grad Books 978-1-63893-059-4, 352pp, $28.00, hc)

Set in a lightly sketched future in which humans have spread into space, terraforming along the way, Elaine U. Cho’s debut novel Ocean’s Godori follows Ocean Yoon, a talented spaceship pilot. Following an initially unexplained fall from grace, Ocean has signed on with the Ohneul, a low-ranking ship. Aloof but comfortable in her ship’s found-family dynamic, Ocean’s biggest ...Read More

The Truth of the Aleke, Moses Ose Utomi (Tor­dotcom 978-1-2508-4905-2, $24.99, 112pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by Alyssa Winans.

Among the more fascinating things that Moses Ose Utomi seems to be doing with his Forever Desert series is looking at how worldviews change with experience. The protagonist of The Lies of the Ajungo, a young teenage boy, cut through the titular deception with a heroic self-sacrifice. Generations later, ...Read More

The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey 978-1-9848-2070-9, $28.99, 432pp, hc) Feb­ruary 2023.

Robert Jackson Bennett’s previous fantasy works – The Divine Cities and Founders trilogies – were immensely and somewhat unexpectedly delightful for me. I don’t often seek out fantasy series anymore. So, when I encounter an author who writes the kind of fun, propulsive work that kept my teenage self scouring the shelves for the next ...Read More

The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed (Solaris 978-1-8378-6046-3, $27.99, 432pp, hc) March 2023.

“Weird” is a word that’s been worn thin with use, even in regular conversation. I hesitate to apply it in a genre sense – whether old or New – for fear of misusing it, wading too deep into niche catego­rization, or merely adding more wear to the term. But there’s a sense in which its ...Read More

House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-0359-0138-8, $27.99. 608pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Joe Wilson.

Although it is set in the same world as City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds is very much a standalone sequel. The previous novel introduced us to a large cast of characters in Telmark, a formerly independent nation conquered by the aggres­sively expanding Palleseen Sway. ...Read More

Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park (Random House 978-0-8129-9897-9, $30.00. 544pp, hc) November 2023. Cover by Will Staehle.

Framed from the perspective of Soon Sheen, a writer-turned-tech worker, Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams is an intri­cate and entertaining puzzlebox of a novel, an expansive and allusive meditation on Korean history and much else. Soon works for GLOAT, a giant and quietly dystopian tech company in the mold of ...Read More

Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Shay Basham (Harper 978-0-0632-4108-4, $30.00. 240pp, hc) August 2023. Cover by Elina Cohen.

Brendan Shay Basham’s debut novel Swim Home to the Vanished is a gorgeously writ­ten story of magical transformations, and of grief. Following a Diné man cast adrift by loss, it’s a novel both fluid and sharp, full of shapeshifters and enchanted landscapes, rich in dialog and insight.

After the death ...Read More

Inversion, Aric McBay (AK Press 978-1-8493-5504-9, $17.00. 240pp, tp) November 2023. Cover by Bob Kayganich & T.L. Simons.

Every once in a while, I run into a new science fic­tion story that feels remarkably classic, as though it had been written at the height of some previous era and only recently discovered. Or classical, perhaps – so well-versed in its themes and tropes that you can immediately see where ...Read More

OKPsyche, Anya Johanna DeNiro (Small Beer 978-1-61873-208-8, $15.00. 160pp, tp) September 2023. Cover by Karl Joseph Aloys Agricola.

I was completely unprepared for how powerful Anya Johanna DeNiro’s OKPsyche is. Told in second person by a carefully unnamed narrator, the novel blends fantasy, science fic­tion, and absurdism; it’s also a very grounded and personal work. The narrator, a trans woman trying to reconnect with her young son, trying to ...Read More

The Museum of Human History, Rebekah Berg­man (Tin House 978-1-95353-491-0, $17.95, 256pp, tp) August 2023. Cover by Beth Steidle & Yang Cao.

Told in chapters that jump between disparate characters and across years, Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History is very loosely centered on twin sisters, Evangeline and Maeve Wilhelm. Following an initially unexplained accident, Maeve falls into an uninterrupted and ageless sleep. As the narrative loops around ...Read More

Prophet, Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald (Grove Press 978-0-8021-6202-1, 480pp, hc) August 2023.

Seeing Helen Macdonald’s name show up on a speculative fiction list immediately fixated my attention. H is for Hawk is, without a doubt, the most mesmerizing combination of memoir, nature writing, and mini-T.H. White biography out there, and so I knew Prophet was not one to skip. Written together with Sin Blaché, the novel is a ...Read More

The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom 978-1-250-84738-6, 368pp, hc) July 2023.

Books that are good to mediocre, but enter­taining or idea-filled, are easy to talk about. Books that are troubling or problematic are easy to talk about. Even badly written books, if they’re entertaining or problematic, are easy to talk about. Truly superb books – ones that are complete, that are organic, that invite themselves into your ...Read More

Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean 978-1-64524-033-4, $45, 125 pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by David Curtis.

Arkady Martine’s Hugo-winning novels are delightfully huge, sprawling affairs. It’s a different kind of delight to see her approach some of the same themes and influences in a new style, as she does in her latest: the tight and unsettling novella Rose/House. Against the backdrop of the near-future California desert, two small-town detectives ...Read More

A Brief History of Living Forever, Jaroslav Kalfař (Little Brown 978-0-31646-318-8, $28.00, 320pp, hc) March 2023.

‘‘The downsides of living forever’’ is practically a genre unto itself at this point, with all manner of fiction devoted to the philosophical and existential crises likely to crop up when faced with eternal life. And, on a slightly different tack, realistic AI and brain-uploading technologies have their own sets of ethical complications, ...Read More

Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo (Tordotcom 978-1-2508-2450-9, $19.99, 112pp, hc) March 2023.

I am a sucker for contact stories – aliens, ani­mals, strange fantasy creatures; that feeling of an encounter with otherness is one of the recurring delights of speculative literature. Tolkien noted it as “one of the primal desires that lie near the heart of Faërie.” But there’s more than enchantment pos­sible with these stories – once we ...Read More

Extended Stay, Juan Martinez (University of Ari­zona Press 978-0-81654-797-5, $19.95, 320pp, tp) January 2023. Cover by Leigh McDonald.

I don’t know if “refreshing” is quite the right word to use for a book this horrifying, but it’s fascinating to see well-worn horror tropes re­mixed and reinvigorated this well. Juan Martinez’s Extended Stay is an excellent and unsettling riff on the haunted house – a genre that seems to be ...Read More

The Two Doctors Górski, Isaac Fellman (Tor­dotcom 978-1-25084-093-6, $16.99, 176pp, tp) November 2022.

It’s trite but true to say that reading is a kind of magic. Likewise, that it’s a kind of mind read­ing, and that writing characters is a fraught kind of creation. Isaac Fellman’s debut novella is a sharply-focused picture of the dangers these kinds of magic: an acerbic and atmospheric tale of power abused and survived. ...Read More

Titan, Mado Nozaki (Airship 978-1-68579-318-0, $14.99, 496pp, tp) October 2022.

In Mado Nozaki’s Titan (translated by Evan Ward), humans of the 23rd century have it pretty easy – a life of fully automated luxury, all facili­tated by omnipresent, omnibenevolent AI. All of that is threatened when one node of the Titan network – Coeus – begins to suffer mysterious problems, and Seika Naisho, an average citizen who studies psychology ...Read More