Liz Bourke

The Obsidian Tower, Melissa Caruso (Orbit 978-0-316-42509-4 $16.99, 510pp, tp) June 2020. Cover by Peter Bollinger.

It’s interesting to have read Melissa Caruso’s The Obsidian Tower and Jenn Lyons’s The Memory of Souls very close together. Although these are structurally and stylistically very different novels – The Obsidian Tower opens a new trilogy from Caruso, narrated, like her earlier Tethered Mage trilogy, in a first-person voice, while The Memory ...Read More

Phoenix Extravagant, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris 978-1-78108-794-7, $24.99, 416pp, hc) October 2020.

Yoon Ha Lee is well known for his science fiction and his short fiction. His debut novel, Ninefox Gambit, won the 2017 Locus Award for Best First Novel, and was also nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. His second and third novels, Raven Stratagem and Revenant Gun, picked up Hugo nominations ...Read More

Dangerous Remedy, Kat Dunn (Head of Zeus 978-1-78954-364-3, £12.99, 430pp, hc) August 2020.

Dangerous Remedy is a much-discussed debut novel from translator and podcast host Kat Dunn: I say much discussed, because I first heard of it in flattering terms as ”LGBT fantasy meets The Scarlet Pimpernel,” and I’ve heard much in its favour since. The advance praise may have had the effect of setting my expectations too ...Read More

Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing 978-1-250-31322-5, $26.99, 512pp, hc) August 2020. Cover by Tommy Arnold.

Harrow the Ninth is Tamsyn Muir’s second novel, a direct sequel to last year’s Gideon the Ninth, a novel with a strong voice and appealingly batshit worldbuilding that left me with distinctly mixed feelings at its conclusion: a conclusion that blunted the strength of what came before and left me with ...Read More

Seven of Infinities, Aliette de Bodard (Subterranean Press 978-1-59606-976-3, $40.00, 176pp, hc) October 2020. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

Aliette de Bodard is an author whose works I both like (in several cases, the word adore may be more appropriate) and admire. Seven of Infinities is her latest novella, out from Subterranean Press. Set in the same acclaimed Xuya universe as the award-winning The Tea Master and the Detective, ...Read More

The Worst of All Possible Worlds, Alex White (Orbit 978-0-316-41214-8, $16.99, 544pp, tp) July 2020.

Alex White’s The Worst of All Possible Worlds is the ”what happens next” for their Salvagers trilogy. The final volume in this high-stakes, high-octane space-opera-with-magic series, it sees the crew of the Capricious in a final showdown with the so-called gods of the Harrow for the fate of the universe, and it reminds me ...Read More

Sixteenth Watch, Myke Cole (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-805-9 $14.99, 382pp, tp) March 2020. Cover by Issac Hannaford.

I have mixed feelings about Myke Cole’s Sixteenth Watch. Some of those mixed feelings are undoubtedly rooted in my ongoing ambivalence towards science fiction involving the American military and near-future ‘‘clash of the superpowers’’ stories that leave out the presence and actions of… well, everyone who isn’t a member of the military ...Read More

Shadows of Annihilation, S.M. Stirling (Ace 978-0399586279, $18.00, 400pp, tp) March 2020.

S.M. Stirling’s Shadows of Annihilation is the third volume in his series of spy thrillers set in an alternate history of the early 20th century. It follows 2018’s Black Chamber and 2019’s Theater of Spies, and, like them, it stars clandestine operative Luz O’Malley Aróstegui and her lover, technical genius Ciara Whelan, as they face a ...Read More

Docile, K.M. Szpara (Tor.com Publishing 978-1250216151, $27.99, 496pp, hc) March 2020.

Docile is K.M. Szpara’s debut novel. I’ve been hearing about it for months, and my interlocutors have used words like “kinky,” “sexy,” “hot,” “important,” and “squicky.” Now I’ve read it, I can safely say that while I’m sympathetic to its aims and its thematic arguments – and even though intimate explorations of power differentials in relationships are my ...Read More

Gravity of a Distant Sun, R.E. Stearns (Saga 978-1481476935, $16.99, 432pp, tp) February 2020.

R.E. Stearns’ Gravity of a Distant Sun is the third volume in the trilogy that began with Barbary Station and continued in Mutiny at Vesta. I thoroughly enjoyed both previous in­stalments (two women in a committed relationship do crime in order to stay together in the capitalist hellscape of the future! Space! Piracy! Engineer­ing! ...Read More

A Queen in Hiding, Sarah Kozloff (Tor 978-1250168542, $12.99, 496pp, tp) January 2020.

The Queen of Raiders, Sarah Kozloff (Tor 978-1250168566, $16.99, 512pp, tp) February 2020.

A Broken Queen, Sarah Kozloff (Tor 978-1250168665, $16.99, 448pp, tp) March 2020.

The Cerulean Queen, Sarah Kozloff (Tor 978-1250168962, $16.99, 512pp, tp) April 2020.

Sarah Kozloff is a chair of film studies at Vassar College, where she’s apparently been teaching ...Read More

Upright Women Wanted, Sarah Gailey (Tor.com Publishing 978-1250760654, $20.99, 176pp, hc) February 2020. Cover by Will Staehle.

I’ve read enough of Sarah Gailey’s work at this point that I’m reasonably sure I enjoy their work more in concept than in execution, but they are such appealing concepts and, with Up­right Women Wanted, the concept is squarely in the centre of any graph of things I love in fiction. ...Read More

The Name of All Things, Jenn Lyons (Tor 978-1-250-17553-3, $26.99, 592pp, hc) October 2019. Cover by Lars Grant-West.

I read Jenn Lyons’ debut, The Ruin of Kings, around the time it was published in early 2019. It’s a brick of a book – traditional, for epic fan­tasy, in terms of its size. Even if it proceeded to make several rather less-traditional choices in its worldbuilding, structure, and characters, ...Read More

The Bone Ships, RJ Barker (Orbit 978-0-316-48796-2, $15.99, 500pp, tp) September 2019. Cover by Edward Bettison.

The Bone Ships is RJ Barker’s fourth novel, the first in a new series after his well-received Wounded Kingdom trilogy. I haven’t read the Wounded King­dom books (Age of Assassins, Blood of Assassins, and King of Assassins), which makes The Bone Ships my first encounter with Barker’s work. I ...Read More

The Forbidden Stars, Tim Pratt (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-769-4, $8.99, 400pp, pb) October 2019. Cover by Paul Scott Canavan.

Tim Pratt’s Axiom novels (The Wrong Stars, The Dreaming Stars, and now The Forbidden Stars) have delighted me since almost the first chapter of the first book, back in 2017. They’re a very modern iteration of action-heavy pulp, with appealing characters and worldbuilding that hints at more ...Read More

Chilling Effect, Valerie Valdes (Harper Voy­ager 978-0-06287-723-9, $16.99, 448pp, tp) September 2019.

I met Valerie Valdes briefly at the Dublin 2019 Worldcon. Part of me wishes I’d already read Chilling Effect, her debut space opera novel, at that point, because I’d like to ask how many of the little things that look like nods to Mass Effect and the likes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are there ...Read More

Sisters of the Vast Black, Lina Rather (Tor.com Publishing 978-1-250-26025-3, $14.99, 170pp, tp) October 2019. Cover by Drive Com­munication.

I’d never heard of Lina Rather before I was informed I should keep an eye out for Sisters of the Vast Black. The words used to engage my attention were “nuns, lesbians, living ships, and murderous political conspiracies,” and that definitely worked, so maybe I should have heard of ...Read More

To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton 978-1-473697164, £12.99, 140pp, hc) August 2019. (Harper Voyager 978-0-062-93601-1, $12.99, 176pp, tp) September 2019.

I wish I had enjoyed Becky Chambers’s To Be Taught, If Fortunate nearly as much. Where Chambers’s previous works (The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few) took place in ...Read More

The House of Sundering Flames, Aliette de Bodard (Gollancz 978-1-473-22340-0, £16.99, 550pp, tp) July 2019.

Also on the list of books I can’t recommend highly enough: Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Sundering Flames, the latest – and for now final – novel-length instalment in the series that began with The House of Shattered Wings and continued in The House of Binding Thorns. It’s worth reading the ...Read More

Time’s Demon, D.B. Jackson (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-793-9, $14.99, 490pp, pb) May 2019. Cover by Jan Wessbecher.

D.B. Jackson’s Time’s Demon is the sec­ond book in a series, the Islevale Cycle, that began with Time’s Children. I had been under the impression that it was the second book in a duology, but events proved this assump­tion wrong. It does its readers the courtesy of recapping the events of the ...Read More

The Ascent to Godhood, JY Yang (Tor.com Publishing 978-1-250-16587-9, $12.99, 120pp, tp) July 2019. Cover by Yuko Shimizu.

JY Yang’s Tensorate novellas have always been inventive and ambitious, an ambition and a sense of verve and innovation that’s been recognised by several award nominations. All three of those novellas to date have stood more or less alone, but with the fourth, this year’s The Ascent to Godhood, Yang ...Read More

Velocity Weapon, Megan O’Keefe (Orbit US 978-0-356-51222-8, $15.99, 544pp, tp) June 2019.

There’s really only one problem with Velocity Weapon, Megan E. O’Keefe’s first novel-length space opera, and that problem is something which ultimately isn’t a problem at all: the cover copy makes it sound like a vastly different novel than it really is, and kept me from enthusiastically devouring it for ages.

The last thing Sanda remembers is ...Read More

The Outside, Ada Hoffmann (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-813-4, $12.99, 346pp, tp) May 2019.

The Outside is Ada Hoffmann’s much-anticipated debut novel. Well, much anticipated in my circles and, I have to say, the novel lives up to its buzz. (If you take nothing else away from this review, take away that it’s well worth checking out.)

In Hoffmann’s space opera universe, artificial intelligences have become Gods. These AI-Gods don’t exist ...Read More

Brightfall, Jaime Lee (Jo Fletcher 978-1-78747-920-3, £18.99, 312pp, hc) August 2019.

Brightfall is Jaime Lee Moyer’s first novel since her debut trilogy (Delia’s Shadow, A Barricade in Hell, and Against A Brightening Sky, the last of which came out in 2015). Brightfall is both like and unlike these previous books. Like, in that it shares a similar tone and a similar interest in women’s lives ...Read More

Five Unicorn Flush, T.J. Berry (Angry Robot US 978-0-85766-783-0, $12.99, 314pp, tp) May 2019. Cover by Lee Gibbons.

T.J. Berry’s debut novel, Space Unicorn Blues, took place in a fantastical space opera world, one in which creatures from human mythology, possessing magical powers, live and struggle alongside humans. These beings are known as the Bala, and the totalitarian, genocidal human government known as the Reason went to war ...Read More

Broken Shadow, Jaine Fenn (Angry Robot US 978-0-85766-803-5, $12.99, 432pp, tp) May 2019. Cover by Andreas Rocha.

Jaine Fenn’s Hidden Sun, out from Angry Robot Books last year, introduced the reader to the world of shadowlands and skylands. In the shadowlands, or at least the ones with which the novel concerns itself, a powerful Church restricts scientific development and unorthodox thought, while a patriarchal society relegates women to ...Read More