Paul Di Filippo

Under the Hollywood Sign, Tom Reamy (Subterranean 978-1-64524-131-7, hardcover, 544pp, $50.00) May 2023

I got my first subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1967. By the mid-seventies, I was a veteran F&SF reader, basking in the flow of new and familiar names. What a vintage era, under the editorship of Ed Ferman (who would later ennoble me and enlist me in his pantheon by buying ...Read More

Ragged Maps, Ian R. MacLeod (Subterranean 978-1645240938, hardcover, 456pp, $45.00) April 2023

How best to convey to the uninitiated the contours and pleasures of Ian MacLeod’s fiction? I would start by saying it’s elegant, complex, mysterious, empathetic, melancholy, mystical, and, somehow, quintessentially British; full of startling ideas often verging on the surreal. Then I would say he’s a peer and heir to Aldiss, Peake, Ballard, Priest, and Moorcock. If ...Read More

Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865847, hardcover, 224pp, $27.99) April 2023

I can’t possibly say enough good things about Cory Doctorow’s new novel. It has all the great qualities and features that one expects from a Doctorow tale, but any extra praise it accrues is due to what it does differently from past items in his canon. It shows the writer deliberately moving into fresh territory which—the god ...Read More

Descendant Machine, Gareth L. Powell (Titan 978-1789094312, trade paperback, 336pp, $16.95) April 2023

Fresh off his Embers of War trilogy, Gareth Powell leaped immediately into a new space opera series, the Continuance, with Stars and Bones (2022). It’s a clever, fresh, and open-ended scenario which, despite an absolute au courant, 21st-century-genre vibe, recalls to my mind several classics of the field. All to the good, say I, for ...Read More

And Put Away Childish Things, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris 978-1786188793, hardcover, 208pp, $29.99) March 2023

Although Adrian Tchaikovsky’s career began, in 2008, with a fantasy novel, Empire in Black and Gold, which kicked off a huge sequence titled Shadows of the Apt, and although he has continued to dip into fantasy realms since (the Echoes of the Fall saga), I must confess that those earlier triumphs had receded ...Read More

A Brief History of Living Forever, Jaroslav Kalfař (Little, Brown 978-0316463188, trade paperback, 320pp, $28.00) March 2023

In 2017 I was privileged to review Jaroslav Kalfař’s first novel for The Barnes & Noble Review. (I’d like to point you to the online text of that piece, but when the B&N Review shut down, they shortsightedly wiped their archives bare.) I found Kalfař’s impressive debut to be a Malzbergian journey ...Read More

Infinity Gate, M.R. Carey (Orbit 978-0316504386, trade paperback, 544pp, $18.99) March 2023

During a very brief window in the 1990s, I thought to discern a newish mode of near-future SF being born. It was the period when John Barnes and William Barton were doing their best work. I am hard put to label precisely what they were doing, or even define it properly. Maybe those impediments mean it wasn’t ...Read More

Hopeland, Ian McDonald (Tor 978-0765375551, hardcover, 512pp, $30.99) February 2023

Try to imagine some improbable authorial workmate pairings. Tanith Lee and Andre Norton? Dan Brown and Christopher Priest? Robert Sheckley and M. John Harrison? It’s a given that such mismatches would come to naught. But a similar yoking of semi-antithetical writers—at least in spirit—is at play in Ian McDonald’s big new exciting and tender saga, Hopeland. It’s a ...Read More

High Concepts, Bill Pronzini (Stark House Press 979-8886010176, trade paperback, 234pp, $15.95) February 2023

I love Stark House books. They specialize in reprints of classic and overlooked crime, noir, and mystery books, as well as similarly situated fantastika items. But now and then they also issue something brand-new. In this case, it’s the first collection of SF/F/H from the famed Bill Pronzini, whose bibliography runs to several pages and ...Read More

Victory City, Salman Rushdie (Random House 978-0593243398, hardcover, 352pp, $30.00) February 2023

Salman Rushdie’s new novel is an un-put-down-able narrative feast, rich with character, incident, aphorisms, and meditations on morality, life, and death. It’s a saga so rich and authentic, narrated with so much fluency and ceaseless invention, that it ranks with the other Ur-romances that Rushdie alludes to, such as the Ramayana. Flavors of The Thousand and ...Read More

The Thing in the Snow, Sean Adams (Morrow 978-0063257757, hardcover, 288pp, $27.99) January 2023

An enormous, spooky, half-abandoned, cryptic building, whose inhabitants pursue ceremonies and rituals with unthinking adherence, while menaces hover both within (due to interpersonal conflicts) and also on the perimeters. We must be talking about Peake’s monumental and essential Gormenghast series, right? Not at all. Instead we are concerned with Sean Adams’s second novel, The Thing ...Read More

The Scarab Mission, James L. Cambias (Baen 978-1982192396, hardcover, 288pp, $18.00) January 2023

This rousing, unstoppable, non-stop adventure follows Cambias’s The Godel Operation (reviewed here), which introduced his cosmos of the Billion Worlds: a future where our Solar System is overstuffed with a zillion habitats, polities and species (human and other wise), some struggling for supremacy, others just following their mundane blisses. It’s a definite post-scarcity—if not even posthuman—environment, ...Read More

Knot of Shadows, Lois McMaster Bujold (Subterranean 978-1-64524-114-0, hardcover, 160pp, $45.00) January 2023.

It’s time for another nigh-aleatory pairing of two novellas, as we dip into the current state of this fascinating artform, which, it has been said, is almost ideal for works of fantastika: long enough for worldbuilding and deep speculations; short enough not to grow wearisome or bogged down.

Today’s offerings both come from the fabulous Subterranean ...Read More

Illuminations: Stories, Alan Moore (Bloomsbury 978-1635578805, hardcover, 464pp, $30.00) October 2022.

Alan Moore is a sly old devil. Famed for his work in comics, his cultural commentary, and for two massive, sui generis novels (Voice of the Fire [1996] and Jerusalem [2016]), he has managed, all these years, to keep his production of short fiction on the downlow. I myself, reasonably conversant with his oeuvre, would have proclaimed, ...Read More

Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister (Erewhon 978-1645660521, hardcover, 352pp, $26.95) November 2022.

Kay Chronister’s second book, this unforgiving, unforgettable debut novel titled Desert Creatures, follows a highly acclaimed short-story collection, Thin Places, which I reviewed for Asimov’s in 2020. At that time, I said:

Her language crisp and fresh and disturbing, blending the matter-of-fact surrealism of Leena Krohn with the cold deliriums of Shirley Jackson, Kay Chronister is ...Read More

Cold Water, Dave Hutchinson (Solaris 978-1786187222, trade paperback, 464pp, $16.99) November 2022.

Having completed his marvelous main sequence of Fractured Europe books with a fourth installment, Europe at Dawn, in 2018 (you can read my review of three-quarters of the series here), Hutchinson now offers a pendant volume, starring a new lead. But the tale is in no way overly reliant upon, inferior to, or less fully developed ...Read More

Eversion, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz 978-0575090767, hardcover, 320pp, £20.00) May 2022. (US edition Orbit 978-0316462822, 352pp,$17.99 August 2022.)

Alistair Reynolds is a grand writer with many arrows in his quiver. But I never suspected him of having any great fondness for the work of Philip K. Dick, nor of being prone to write an homage to that master of SF metaphysical surrealism. And yet that is just what he delivers, ...Read More

The Citadel of Forgotten Myths, Michael Moorcock (Saga ‎ 978-1982199807, hardcover, 336pp, $28.99) December 2022.

The legendary quip asserting that “The Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen” needs to be modified in my case, and, I suspect, in the case of many other readers. My personal Golden Age of SF lasted a decade: from the moment in 1965 (I was ten) when I discovered Raymond F. Jones’s The ...Read More

Flight from the Ages & other stories, Derek Künsken (Solaris 978-1786187284, trade paperback, 400pp, $16.99) December 2022.

It does one’s heart good to see newer writers working in some of the grand traditions of SF, reinvigorating the Old School lineage with up-to-the-minute attitudes, concepts, and styles. Such a writer is Derek Künsken. Although not a youngster (he was born in 1971), he possesses a fresh and breezy way with ...Read More

Telluria, Vladimir Sorokin (NYRB Classics 978-1681376332, trade paperback, 352pp, $18.95) August 2022.

Vladimir Sorokin is a postmodern, pissed-off Stanislaw Lem. In line with his belonging to a younger generation (Sorokin was born in 1955, Lem in 1921), Sorokin is less cerebral, more emotionally “hot.” But while not necessarily as deeply invested in philosophical/ontological/epistemological issues as Lem was, Sorokin shares Lem’s abilities to push old tropes and novums to the ...Read More

The Carnival and Other Stories, Charles Beaumont (Subterranean Press 978-1645240914, hardcover, 392pp, $45.00) October 2022.

The myths and legends surrounding creative geniuses who died too young are omnipresent and alluring. John Keats, Buddy Holly, Keith Haring, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin— Such names form a pantheon of appreciation for what was accomplished and regrets for the might-have-beens.

Fantastika is not bereft of such a catalogue. Stanley Weinbaum, Cyril Kornbluth, Tom ...Read More

Expect Me Tomorrow, Christopher Priest (Gollancz 978-1473235137, hardcover, 336pp, £22.00) September 2022 (US edition December 2022).

In 2023, Christopher Priest turns eighty, a non-trivial milestone. His first short story sale dates to 1966, giving him a career, so far, of over 55 years. And, remarkably, as his new novel amply illustrates, he is still working at the top of his form. SFWA Grand Master nomination, anyone?

Expect Me Tomorrow ...Read More

Redspace Rising, Brian Trent (Flame Tree Press 978-1787586581, hardcover, 432pp, $26.95) September 2022.

Brian Trent’s fourth novel is a plasma-propelled, gore-violence-war-and-politics fueled waking dream of a military-conspiracy-techno novel, as sleek and fast as an alien spaceship. It calls to mind a delightfully lunatic but irresistible fusion of such writers as John Barnes, A.E. van Vogt, and Neal Asher—along with one other seminal figure whose role I shall discuss below ...Read More

The Genesis of Misery, Neon Yang (Tor 978-1250788979, hardcover, 432pp, $27.99) September 2022.

I have been lamentably unhip to Neon Yang’s previous books and short fiction, but was delighted to make their acquaintance with their latest, a rousing postmodern space opera that has flavors of Frank Herbert, Cordwainer Smith, and Orson Scott Card, all blended into a uniquely tasty dish. As the book’s early promoters have observed, the core ...Read More

Jack Dann: Masters of Science Fiction, Jack Dann (Centipede Press 978-1-61347-304-7, hardcover, 752pp, $65) July 2022.

I think I am going to have to set up a new creditor in my bank’s automatic withdrawal system. That would be Centipede Press, who insists on issuing a steady stream of must-have volumes, all crafted to the heights of bibliophile perfection. They can just take my money automatically every month without quibble. ...Read More

The Spear Cuts Through Water, Simon Jimenez (Del Rey 978-0593156599, hardcover, 544pp, $28.99) August 2022.

There are some works of SF which are so unique that they don’t really inspire any scions, homages or imitations. The Stars My Destination is one such. Tau Zero is another. And Lord of Light is a third. It’s not that another author could not take the work of Bester, Anderson, or Zelazny and ...Read More

No Enemy but Time: Revised Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Michael Bishop (Fairwood Press 978-1933846194, trade paperback, 326pp, $19.99) August 2022.

Somehow, forty years have slipped by since I first read Michael Bishop’s Nebula-Award-winning novel, scarfing it up eagerly (in its quite appropriately named Timescape edition) as part of my quest to read everything by this intriguing author whom I had first encountered in the pages of Galaxy magazine in 1970. ...Read More

Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman (Soho Press 978-1641294126, hardcover, 336pp, $27.95) July 2022.

I have been a fan of Ned Beauman’s work since his first book (Boxer, Beetle) and on through The Teleportation Accident; Glow; and Madness Is Better Than Defeat, reviewing them all at our happy Locus home here. If you click through to my review for Madness, you can follow the chain ...Read More

Hokuloa Road, Elizabeth Hand (Mulholland 978-0316542043, hardcover, 368pp, $28.00) July 2022.

In days of yore, when the actual internet was merely science fiction, curious fans found out scarce biographical tidbits about their favorite authors in whatever manner they could: from fanzines, or dustjacket flaps, or occasional media articles and even the rare autobiographical essay. Heinlein lived on a walled estate in Colorado Springs. Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert and Jack ...Read More

The Moonday Letters, Emmi Itäranta (Titan 978-1803360447, trade paperback, 368pp, $15.95) July 2022.

One of John Campbell’s prescriptions for the kind of science fiction he wanted to see was to say, paraphrased, “Give me a story which could legitimately be presented as contemporary fiction in a magazine of the year 2100.” In other words, a story narrated out of a deep and implicit and shared set of assumptions about ...Read More

Ymir, Rich Larson (Orbit 978-0316416580, trade paperback, 416pp, $17.99) July 2022.

If one tried to engineer a young writer who would embody all the core values, tactics, and ambiance of Classic SF while still conveying ultra-contemporary attitudes, ambiance, and affect, one could hardly produce a better candidate than Rich Larson. Just turned thirty years old, he’s already delivered over a hundred fine stories and now brings us his third ...Read More

Among Strangers, Robert Silverberg (Subterranean Press 978-1645240693, hardcover, 760pp, $50.00) June 2022.

This generous new compilation containing a choice selection from Robert Silverberg’s vast output from his mid- to late-career apex allows us to do several things simultaneously. First, and primarily, we get to enjoy some excellent fiction which might be otherwise hard to come by. (I note on ISFDB that recent editions for the three novels herein are ...Read More