Trawling and Tunneling Through the Genres
I did not cast my net very wide this year – nine 2024 titles, with a couple of late 2023s and one early 2025 item included in the calendar year’s columns – and while the catch was small, everything I caught was a keeper, evidence of the variety that the fields of science fiction and fantasy continue to generate. I also noticed (again) how ...Read More
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Days of Shattered Faith, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-03590-152-4, £22.00, 544pp, hc) December 2024. Cover by Joe Wilson.
Days of Shattered Faith, the third book in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers sequence, continues to examine the effects of the long-running, world-conquering program of the nation of Pallesand, a resolutely rationalist, religion-detesting nation determined to bring its notion of secular perfection to a world that is filled with supernatural ...Read More
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A Conventional Boy, Charles Stross (Tordotcom 978-1-250357-847, $28.99, 224 pp, hc) January 2025.
Charles Stross expands his series about the highly secret and secretive counteroccult-threat agency nicknamed the Laundry with a volume made up of a new short novel, accompanied by a pair of previously published pieces. The novel, A Conventional Boy, is the origin story of a particular Laundry employee, as well as an homage to tabletop fantasy ...Read More
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Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1035013746, £16.99, 400pp, hc) March 2024. (Orbit US 978-0316578974 , $19.99, 432pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.
In Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky continues to build fantastical worlds on sturdy non-fantastic-fictional foundations. Where the secondary-world fantasies of The City of Last Chances and House of Open Wounds make use of occupied-city (say, Alan Furst’s The World at Night) or comic-ironic ...Read More
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The Mercy of Gods, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0-31652-557-2, $30.00, 423 pp, hc) August 2024.
The longer I review science fiction, the more I notice how it much it depends on recycling tropes – not just repeating but extending and varying and inverting them – and, I suspect, refitting them to reflect current anxieties or hopes, conscious or not. This time the recognition lights have been set flashing by ...Read More
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Morphotrophic, Greg Egan (Greg Egan, 978-1922240-53-8, $25.00, 384 pp, hc) April 2024. Cover by Greg Egan.
Much of Greg Egan’s work is driven by single, transformative ideas – not the “gimmick” of the gadget story, but something more like Darko Suvin’s idea of a “novum” – often radical reconsiderations or alterations of basic principles of cosmology or psychology or physics that unfold to generate entire worlds, imagining how things ...Read More
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Beyond the Light Horizon, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51482-6, £10.99, 336 pp, tp) May 2024. Cover by Duncan Spilling. (Pyr 978-1-64506-066-6, $21.00, 336pp, tp) June 2024.
Beyond the Light Horizon picks up right where Beyond the Reach of Earth (click to see review) ends, with Grant figuring out when he has landed and how he might return to his own time. But his problem is only the beginning of a ...Read More
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Beyond the Reach of Earth, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-51480-2, £10.99, 336pp, tp) March 2023. Cover by Duncan Spilling. (Pyr 978-1-64506-665-9, $21.00, 334pp, tp) July 2023.
I reviewed the opening volume of Ken MacLeod’s Lightspeed Trilogy, Beyond the Hallowed Sky, back in 2022, but I didn’t see the second volume, Beyond the Reach of Earth, when it appeared last year. Now, though, I have it and the final ...Read More
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Blade, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press 978-193719-744-5, $7.99, 308pp, eb) March 2024. Cover by Sarah Anne Layton
Subtract the mystery/thriller-family elements and most of the same tropes and devices enable Linda Nagata’s Blade, the fourth entry in her Inverted Frontier sequence, itself a continuation of the Nanotech Succession series. The frontier in question is inverted because the story line reverses the outward-bound pattern of much interstellar adventure by ...Read More
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Machine Vendetta, Alastair Reynolds (Orbit US 978-0316462846, $19.99, 416pp, tp) January 2024.
Synchronicity strikes again with a pair of novels – both parts of long-running future-history series – that show what can be done with a particular set of science-fictional motifs and devices, especially when the series format offers room to stretch out.
Alastair Reynolds’s Machine Vendetta is the third entry in a subseries of his vast Revelation Space ...Read More
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Doorway to the Stars, Jack McDevitt (Subterranean 978-1-64524-188-1, $40.00, 107 pp, hc) February 2024. Cover by Edward Miller.
In two novels nearly 20 years apart, Jack McDevitt offered a platter full of puzzles and oddities. Ancient Shores (1996) and Thunderbird (2015) begin with the discovery of certain artifacts and buildings on what, 12,000 years earlier, had been the shore of the inland sea of Lake Agassiz in North Dakota: ...Read More
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The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler (Tordotcom 978-1-25085-552-7, $26.99, 101pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Faceout Studios.
It is a proposition universally asserted that the novelette and novella are the optimal lengths for science fiction. Or frequently suggested, anyway, despite the number of five-volume trilogies and long-running series out there. And the relatively recent renaissance of small-press operations has certainly given freestanding midlength work renewed visibility outside the pages ...Read More
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House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus, 978-1035901388, $27.99, 585 pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Joe Wilson.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s House of Open Wounds is a follow-on to The City of Last Chances that repeats many of the structural features of its predecessor: a large cast of viewpoint characters; ‘‘mosaic’’ chapters that provide authorial overviews and comments; a rambling story line that nevertheless draws the reader through ...Read More
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Long Games, Nightmares, and Retrospectives by Russell Letson
I look into the tea leaves – well, the coffee grounds – at the bottom of the year’s cup and find no wisdom or insight into either the state of the field or even my own reading patterns. As usual. Nevertheless, I am more than content with where my nose-following and stumbling around in the dark have taken me in 2023, across ...Read More
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Creation Node, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1 473-22895-5, £25.00, 442pp, hc) September 2023.
Stephen Baxter’s Creation Node is a sprawling, multiviewpoint, multithreaded story that eventually knits together its strands and lights out for the cosmic territories, along the way touching on an encyclopedic range of classic science-fictional tropes and influences. Its generating event is the discovery of a mysterious body at the farthest fringes of the Oort Cloud, four light ...Read More
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Defiance, C.J. Cherryh & Jane S. Fancher (DAW 978-0-75641-590-7, $28.00, 368 pp, hc) October 2023. Cover by Todd Lockwood.
Defiance is the 22nd volume in the long-running, mostly contiguous series that began in 1994 with Foreigner, the book that gave the sequence its name. And with this volume, the byline now adds Jane S. Fancher’s name to C.J. Cherryh’s, since, as Cherryh writes in a page of acknowledgments, ...Read More
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War Bodies, Neal Asher (Tor UK 978-1-5290-5008-0, £20.00, 563pp, hc) July 2023. Cover by Steve Stone.
I have been trying to get a line on Neal Asher since first encountering his Polity universe two decades ago. My first thought was, here is a writer taking on many of the features, themes, and tropes that give, say, Iain M. Banks’s Culture books their New Space Opera appeal: a star-spanning, postscarcity ...Read More
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Lockdown Tales II, Neal Asher (NewCon 978-1-914953-43-9, £13.99, tp; £29.99, hc, 372 pp) July 2023. Cover by Vincent Sammy.
Lockdown Tales II is Asher’s second collection of shorter pieces written since COVID prompted the titular restrictions. Of the nine stories (produced between 2020 and 2023), four are new to this volume; three are of novella length; and seven are set in the Polity future history. (Note: These categories overlap.) ...Read More
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Lords of Uncreation, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316705929, 624 pp, $29.00, hc) May 2023. Cover by Steve Stone.
Lords of Uncreation is the third entry in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture sequence that began with Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void, which introduced a menagerie of alien civilizations living and dead, allies and opponents of all species, and a galactic history of interstellar warfare, ruined worlds, and refugees ...Read More
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Ragged Maps, Ian R. MacLeod (Subterranean 978-1-64524-093-8, $45.00, 454 pp, hc) April 2023. Cover by Dominic Harman.
Ian R. MacLeod has produced (depending on how one counts them) a half-dozen or so volumes of short fiction since 1996, and his newest, Ragged Maps, collects thirteen stories from 2016-2022, plus an outlier from back in 1997 and one original to this volume. MacLeod’s range is impressive, and he is ...Read More
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Translation State, Ann Leckie (Orbit US 978-0-31628-971-9, $29.00, 432 pp, hc) June 2023.
Speaking of horror, Ann Leckie’s Radchaai world is one of terrible events, cruel forces, and human and inhuman cultures with conflicting agendas, attitudes, and epistemologies – right next to civilized social rituals and lots of tea. Translation State is set in this universe, but, like Provenance (2017), outside Radch space proper, though still within its considerable ...Read More
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The Best of Michael Swanwick: Volume Two, Michael Swanwick (Subterranean 978-1-64524-112-6, $50.00, 530pp, hc) July 2023. Cover by Lee Moyer.
I keep thinking of Michael Swanwick as a Renaissance figure, an image generated by his writing, which includes generous dollops of fancy, baroque turns of imagination, and elegant prose. In 2008 a big chunk of that prose (21 stories) was gathered in The Best of Michael Swanwick, and ...Read More
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Season of Skulls, Charles Stross (Tordotcom 978-1-25083-939-8, $28.99, 384 pp, hc) May 2023.
You never know what revelations lurk in the To Be Reviewed pile. This month, a pair of novels by quite dissimilar writers traverse a range of semi-connected genre spaces and bounce off each other in unexpected ways.
In the case of Charles Stross, genre mix-and-mashing is exactly what is expected, the more mischievous or subversive the ...Read More
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Rose/House, Arkady Martine (Subterranean 978-1-64524-033-4, $45, 125 pp, hc) March 2023. Cover by David Curtis
Arkady Martine’s new novella, Rose/House, is markedly different from the anthropological explorations and space operatics of her two far-future Teixcalaan Empire novels. Instead, it’s an Earthbound 22nd-century murder mystery that combines elements of the locked-room and police-procedural subvarieties, and features a science-fictionized haunted house. Detective Maritza Smith, working out of an understaffed China ...Read More
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Village in the Sky, Jack McDevitt (Saga 978-1-6680-0429-6, $29.99, 341 pp, hc) January 2023. Cover by John Harris.
The possibility that humankind might be alone in a universe empty of intelligent life runs right through Jack McDevitt’s work, from The Hercules Text (1989) to several of the stories in last year’s Return to Glory collection. It is a particularly prominent motif in the Alex Benedict novels, which trace the ...Read More
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Sleep and the Soul, Greg Egan (Self-published 978-1-922240-47-7 $25.00 978-1-922240-45-3, hc) May 2023. Cover by Greg Egan.
Greg Egan’s Sleep and the Soul collects his very newest short-form work: nine stories originally published between 2019 and 2022, plus one that is, as of this writing, not even officially out yet. This is the seventh collection of Egan’s short work I have reviewed over nearly three decades, and I notice ...Read More
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The City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Head of Zeus 978-1-80110-842-3, £20.00, 512 pp, hc) December 2022. Cover by Joe Wilson.
Adrian Tchaikovsky clearly understands genre games quite thoroughly, since he has been working both sides and several alleyways of the great science fiction/fantasy divide in more than three dozen previous titles. For example, Elder Race (2021) built a pseudo-medieval heroic fantasy world on an armature of science-fictional enabling ...Read More
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While groping around for an organizing idea for this annual attempt to impose a shape on my shamble through the field, I kept coming back to maps and territories and borders. What follows is not a map of the field but a hand-drawn sketch of the back yard of my own long-cultivated personal tastes. And now that I’ve introduced the metaphor of the map: my wander through the titles had
Imperium Restored, Walter Jon Williams (Harper Voyager 978-0-06246-705-8, $17.99, 496 pp, tp) September 2022.
Twenty years ago, Walter Jon Williams started a trilogy, Dread Empire’s Fall, that has since grown to seven novels (two trilogies and a standalone short novel), a novella, and a short story, and gotten new series labels: the First and Second Books of the Praxis. The main line of the series is arguably one long ...Read More
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Return to Glory, Jack McDevitt (Subterranean Press 978-1-64524-073-0, $50.00, 569pp, hc) October 2022. Cover by Edward Miller.
Jack McDevitt has been producing SF for more than four decades now, two dozen novels and enough shorter work to fill five previous collections with remarkably little overlap on the contents pages. Now there is a substantial sixth retrospective volume, Return to Glory, which gathers 32 stories from the whole long ...Read More
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The Thousand Earths, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1 473-22890-0, £22.00, 586 pp, hc) September 2022.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Stephen Baxter’s work sprawls, narratively, spatially, temporally, conceptually, and cosmologically. He also has a fondness for extravagantly displacing his protagonists and for setting his stories in strange and mysterious environments. And he does love a comprehensive, apocalyptic disaster – see his recent World Engines: Destroyer or ...Read More
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Eversion, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz 978-0-57509-076-7, £20.00, 320pp, hc) May 2022. (Orbit US 978-0-31646-282-2, $17.99, 304pp, tp) August 2022. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.
The strange shuffling sound you will be hearing is a reviewer tiptoeing around a text filled with spoiler trapdoors. The book in question is Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion, a novel designed to promote puzzlement, and in fact to be a puzzle as much as a story, which means ...Read More
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