Russell Letson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needle, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island 978-1-937197-40-7, $19.00, 356pp, tp) July 2022. Cover by Sarah Anne Langton.

Decades ago, my imagination of the far, far future of humankind was formed by Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Star Maker: melancholy, long-lens scenarios that lack individual characters and conventional plot-lines but whose visions of the possible range of thinking beings and civilizations and deep time were simultaneously breathtaking and ...Read More

Eyes of the Void, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316705875, $28.00, 608 pp, hc) May 2022. Cover by Steve Stone.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Eyes of the Void is the sequel to Shards of Earth, second in a sprawling, gaudy space opera series featuring a menagerie of space-traveling life­forms, a galactic history of warfare and ruined civilizations, and entire species on the run from inscrutable, invulnerable planet-killers. Human­kind is a latecomer to ...Read More

Aspects, John M. Ford (Tor 978-1-250-26903-4 $26.99, 496 pp, hc) April 2022.

Sixteen years after his untimely death, we finally have John M. Ford’s last novel, Aspects, or at least a substantial portion of it. The whole would have been even more substantial, since a half dozen completed sonnet-epigraphs suggest a six-part structure that could have run to more than 1000 pages, so perhaps a two-decker or even ...Read More

Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US 978-0-316-66919-1, $28.00, 422 pp, hc) March 2022. Cover by Daniel Dociu.

The long main storyline of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series – nine volumes released over a decade – wrapped up with last year’s Leviathan Falls. At various points along the way, though, Corey (AKA Daniel Abraham & Ty Franke) produced shorter pieces that did not ...Read More

Quantum of Nightmares, Charles Stross (Tor­dotcom 978-1-25083-937-4, $27.99, 368 pp, hc) January 2022.

Charles Stross’s Quantum of Nightmares is the 11th of the Laundry Files books, a series whose trademark is the blending of tropes, motifs, and narrative conventions from the supernatural-horror and intrigue/crime/spy-thriller genre families. At the beginning, these struck me as light entertainment, part Lovecraftian-gothick, part secret-agent adven­ture, with a generous dollop of political-social satire, all delivered ...Read More