Paul Di Filippo

Disavowed, John E. Stith (Experimenter Publishing Company 979-8888315439, trade paperback, 510pp, $16.99) December 2024

I am extremely happy to see that John Stith’s career is experiencing something like a renaissance. His novel, Reckoning Infinity, the last in a continuous flow of fine books, appeared from Tor in 1997. We did not see another until Pushback in 2018—and that one was non-SF. Twenty-one years constituted a long gap for ...Read More

Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner (DAW 978-0756419349, hardcover, 320pp, $28.00) December 2024

Erin Wagner’s debut novel is a highly sophisticated tale, constructed in clever fashion, which revolves around the classic motif of human versus nonhuman, specifically man against android. It does not necessarily expand the frontiers of this theme—Wagner’s sociological and technological speculations about androids and their uses hew pretty closely to the standard SF textbook, ...Read More

Key Lime Sky, Al Hess (Angry Robot 978-1915998125, trade paperback, 304pp, $18.99) August 2024,

It has been said that Irish fantasist Flann O’Brien had a penchant for involving the humble bicycle in his surreal fiction, until the vehicle became a kind of numinous totem or idiosyncratic symbol. A few other writers of fantasy have deployed such a technique—recurring enigmatic touchstone with multiple meanings—and now Al Hess joins their ranks, ...Read More

Time’s Agent, Brenda Peynado (Tordotcom 978-1250854315, trade paperback, 208pp, $16.99) August 2024

Would it be possible to write a piece of fiction that exhibited or contained no emotions? That seems highly unlikely. Humans are made of emotions—and intellect. Those two realms are—to truncate the famous phrase coined by Stephen Jay Gould when he was trying to categorize the barrier between science and religion—“overlapping magisteria.” Two vast territories with a ...Read More

To Turn the Tide, S. M. Stirling (Baen 978-1982193539, hardcover, 464pp, $28.00) August 2024

Time travel novels—recently, a trendy favorite of non-genre slipstream authors—have reached a state of incredible complexity. Multiverses, paradoxes, change wars, closed loops, and doppelgangers proliferate. This is all very entertaining, but sometimes it’s nice to read a simple, straightforward “person visits past, gets stuck, makes do” kind of book. A chrono-Robinsonade. That’s exactly what S. ...Read More

In the Belly of the Whale, Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy 978-1647101015, trade paperback, 400pp, $19.99) July 2024

Why is the field of fantastika like Walt Whitman? Because both are “large and contain multitudes.” (And also, parts of it contradict other parts.)

Seriously, though, for at least the past twenty years or thereabouts, the output of fantastika has been so large that no single reader can keep up ...Read More

Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1399617673, hardcover, 320pp, £22.00) July 2024

The newest novel from Adam Roberts—purveyor of endless unrepeating and unduplicatable narratives—is a utopian metaphysical suspense/thriller space opera—which also happens to be a commentary, I think, on progressive culture and progressive SF. Now, if you imagine that’s an ill-assorted congeries of tropes and styles and themes, you are underestimating the powers of Mr. Roberts. He weaves every ...Read More

Saturation Point, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris 978-1837861743, hardcover, 176pp, $29.99) July 2024

Adrian Tchaikovsky is surely one of the hardest-working writers in fantastika. In 2023, besides a handful of short fiction, he delivered And Put Away Childish Things (which I reviewed here); Lords of Uncreation; and House of Open Wounds. This year has already seen Alien Clay and Service Model. And today we have to hand his ...Read More

Echo of Worlds, M. R. Carey (Orbit 978-0316504690, trade paperback, 512pp, $19.99) June 2024

I pled for the author’s and publisher’s mercy in my review of the first captivating book in this series—Infinity Gate—begging for a quick sequel. Well, about fourteen months later, a reasonable interval, here we are. Prayers answered!

I also mentioned then that Infinity Gate was billed as the first book in a series. ...Read More

Pulsifer: a Fable, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474918, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Jan 2024

Land of Ice, a Velvet Knife, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474932, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Feb 2024

It is very seldom—perhaps almost never—that one opens up one’s copy of the Sunday New York Times and discovers that the lead article in the Magazine section is devoted to a still-living author whose roots ...Read More

Ghost of the Neon God, T. R. Napper (Titan 978-1803368115, hardcover, 128pp, $17.99) June 2024

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and, arguably, 1984 can serve as the birthday of the cyberpunk genre as well or better than any adjacent year. I think at this point, we can cease debating about the nature of cyberpunk, its utility and whether it’s here ...Read More

Escape Velocity, Victor Manibo (Erewhon Books 978-1645660842, hardcover, 368pp, $28.00) May 2024

The Jacobean Revenge Tragedy is a mode not unprecedented in SF. The instance that comes most readily to mind is Bester’s The Stars My Destination, modeled on one of the most famous such, The Count of Monte Cristo. And now, with Victor Manibo’s sophomore novel, the field gets another vivid enactment of injustices avenged. Except ...Read More

The Downloaded, Robert J. Sawyer (Shadowpaw Press 978-1989398999, trade paperback, 199pp, $14.95) May 2024

It’s a testament to Robert Sawyer’s skill—and his generational wisdom—that he has created, with his latest book, a novel that is at once exuberantly old-school and utterly au courant. It reads like Greg Egan rebooting Neil R. Jones’s Professor Jameson cycle. This book exemplifies the “best of both worlds” approach that charts a viable future ...Read More

Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, hardcover, 192pp, $19.99) May 2024

Thrillers confined to a single stage set or venue have an admirable lineage. One has only to think of the original Die Hard film or David Morrell’s novel Creepers to provide strong examples. In SF, this approach is often conflated with the Big Dumb Object trope: let’s explore Ringworld or Rama. James Cambias’s The Scarab Mission ...Read More

I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger (Grove ‎ 978-0802162939, hardcover, 336pp, $28.00) April 2024

Brian Aldiss famously coined the label “cozy catastrophe” to designate such books as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, wherein civilization crumbles, but our protagonist manages to carve out a relatively safe and rewarding existence for himself and his posse, a harbor from the storm. Aldiss characterized the plot and atmosphere of such novels ...Read More

A View from the Stars, Cixin Liu (Tor 978-1250292117, hardcover, 224pp, $27.99) April 2024

Most authors segregate their fiction from their non-fiction, compiling the two classes of work into separate collections. I always recall one exception I read as a teen, a minor Frederik Pohl volume titled Digits & Dastards, which featured two essays along with the stories. And I suppose that Harlan Ellison’s inclusion of long anecdotal ...Read More

In Universes, Emet North (Harper 978-0063314870, hardcover, 240pp, $26.99) April 2024

I never would have predicted that the fantastika genre would be graced in 2024 with a novel that resonated so vibrantly with two classics from the 1970s: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. And yet that is precisely the vibe that I feel confident in proclaiming emanates from Emet ...Read More

The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865878, $27.99, hc, 240pp) February 2024.

Cory Doctorow is certainly experiencing a “hot hand” run. That sports phenomenon, where one success impels and invites a subsequent triumph, sometimes in a long streak, can be seen in Doctorow’s two most recent books, which have appeared practically back to back. In November of 2023 came The Lost Cause (reviewed by me for this very publication), which showed ...Read More

Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson (Del Rey ‎ 978-0593497500, hardcover, 384pp, $28.99) March 2024

It seems safe to say that the evergreen SF trope of a high-tech city or culture besieged by low-tech outsiders or “barbarians” goes back at least to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) with its depiction of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Of course, Wells had myriad historical examples to inspire his conception, ...Read More

The Morningside, Téa Obreht (Random House 978-1984855503, hardcover, 304pp, $20.00) March 2024

Is the New Weird still a going concern? Dating roughly from the turn of the century (China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is the Monolith that enlightened the hominid readers), with the term itself harking to the year 2002 (courtesy of M. John Harrison), the subgenre with famously leaky borders and hazy definitions is approaching its 25th birthday. ...Read More

The Stars Turned Inside Out, Nova Jacobs (Atria 978-1668018545, hardcover, 320pp, $27.99) March 2024

With the loss (hopefully not permanent) of Gregory Benford’s talents to a medical incident a bit over a year ago, the SF field was deprived of perhaps the most accomplished voice in depicting the reality of “doing science.” His masterpiece, Timescape, is of course the most salient example of that mode, but the steeped-in-the-academy-and-the-laboratory ...Read More

Tomorrow’s Children, Daniel Polansky (Angry Robot 978-1915202857, trade paperback, 384pp, $18.99) February 2024

Postapocalypse tales don’t get any grimmer or funnier, more slambang or more nuanced, more hopeful or more despairing, than Daniel Polansky’s Tomorrow’s Children. If that catalog of virtues sounds oxymoronic, please restrain your doubts. Polansky’s accomplished novel is large and contains multitudes, and foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind.

This is my ...Read More

Equimedian, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Hex 979-8988082712, hardcover, 326pp, $31.99) February 2024

I would venture to guess that most SF fans know Alvaro Zinos-Amaro as one of our best critics and interviewers. Case in point is his recent volume, Being Michael Swanwick, which I reviewed on this platform just a short time ago. But like Green Arrow or Hawkeye, the man has more than one arrow in his quiver. (I ...Read More

Beggar’s Sky, Wil McCarthy (Baen 978-1982193188, hardcover, 320pp, $28.00) February 2024

Wil McCarthy has had an atypical career that is almost neatly bifurcated. He came out of the gate strong with a duology, Aggressor Six, from 1994-1996. With the dawn of a new century, he delivered an even better, more mature and inventive series, Queendom of Sol (2000-2005). But then, for whatever reason, he fell more or less ...Read More