Russell Letson

Pride and Prometheus, John Kessel (Saga 978-1-5344-1121-0, $27.99, 371pp, hc) February 2018. Cover by Robert Hunt.

In my 2017 wrap-up essay elsewhere in this is­sue, I wonder at and wander around the matter of sequels, prequels, series, and common-back­ground-setting books. All these present particular challenges to a reviewer: how to deal with a work that may begin in medias res (or, god-help-us, on the far side of a cliff-hanger), or ...Read More

Dark State, Charles Stross (Tor 978-0-7653-3757-3, $25.99, 352pp, hc) January 2018.

Charles Stross has been building – and remodeling and rearranging – his Merchant Princes sequence across seven novels (now in four volumes) over more than a dozen years. The first six books (or three, depending on which packaging one has read) completed a complex arc that focused primarily on how a medieval-level social-political-economic ar­rangement built on the inheritable ability ...Read More

Phoresis, Greg Egan (Subterranean 978-1-59606-866-7, $40.00, 163pp, hc) April, 2018.

Greg Egan’s Phoresis is, at around 40,000 words, a long novella and close to the same length as many of the mass-market, full-length paperback novels I grew up on. Into that relatively small space Egan has packed the story of several multiple-generation, low-tech engineering projects that range from geoengineering to interplanetary exploration and colonization, while also creating an exotic planetary ...Read More

Elysium Fire, Alastair Reynolds (Orbit 978-0-316-55567-8, $15.99, 408pp, tp) January 2018.

Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe is another of those omnium-gatherum future histories that can host almost any kind of SF imaginable. One of its fancier features is the Glitter Band, a 25th-century polity spread across the ten thousand habitats circling the planet Yellowstone in the Epsilon Eridani system. The Band is part of the background for Chasm City (2001), ...Read More

Persepolis Rising, James S.A. Corey (Orbit 978-0-316-33283-5, $28.00, 551pp, hc) December 2017. Cover by Daniel Dociu.

Cover blurbs and media PR keep referring to James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series as space opera, which has always struck me as an inadequate descriptor for a set of nov­els that employs an unusually, um, expansive set of science-fictional tropes. (The television adaptations on Syfy are a bit biased toward space-adventure and -combat, though ...Read More

Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fic­tion, James Gunn (McFarland 978-1-4766-7026-3, $25.00, 209pp, tp) November 2017. Cover photo by Jason Dailey.

I hope I might be excused for injecting personal notes into a review of James Gunn’s autobiog­raphy, Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction. As I read it, I couldn’t help noticing how many times and in how many ways my life in SF was affected by Gunn’s work ...Read More

The Corporation Wars: Emergence, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-356-50504-6, £14.99, 336pp, hc) September 2017.

Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars is presented as a trilogy, but I take it to be another of those increasingly common very-long-novels-in-three-decker-form. Even the title format, which puts the overall series title before the volume title, Emergence, signals a single continuous story spread across multiple volumes, with little more separating the acts than the equivalent of a ...Read More

Austral, Paul McAuley (Gollancz, 978-1-473-21731-7, £14.99, 276pp, tp) October 2017.

As I was preparing this piece, virtual-paging through 26 years’ worth of reviews of Paul McAuley’s work, I recognized (again) how his stories refuse to drop neatly into single categories – they like to squirm out of whatever boxes they’re stuffed into and find their own shapes. What remains stable is the sharp ob­servation of each imagined world, whether it’s ...Read More

Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction, James Gunn (McFarland 978-1-4766-7026-3, $25.00, 209pp, tp) November 2017. Cover photo by Jason Dailey.

I hope I might be excused for injecting personal notes into a review of James Gunn’s autobiography, Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction. As I read it, I couldn’t help noticing how many times and in how many ways my life in SF was affected by Gunn’s work ...Read More

Provenance, Ann Leckie (Orbit, 978-0-316-38867-2, $26.00, 393pp, hc) September 2017. Cover by John Harris.

Ann Leckie’s Provenance takes place in the same far future as her Ancillary novels and shares some of that trilogy’s underlying issues: legal versus actual identity and citizenship status; the burdens, benefits, and oddities of cultural artifice or convention; the ways that polities can be subverted or per­verted. But there are no ancillaries or emerg­ing AIs ...Read More

Iain M. Banks, Paul Kincaid (University of Illinois Press 978-0-252-04101-3, $95.00, hc; -08250-4, $22.00, 190pp, tp) May 2017. Cover by Mark J. Bradley.

Paul Kincaid’s Iain M. Banks takes on the task of accounting for a writer whose career sprawled across at least two literary categories and whose primary gifts (at least in the view of this reader) are a dizzying verbal adroitness married to a relentless and hard-edged philosophical ...Read More

Tomorrow’s Kin, Nancy Kress (Tor 978-0-765390295, $25.99, 352pp, hc) July 2017.

I’m going to have the same problem reviewing Nancy Kress’s Tomorrow’s Kin that I did with Steal Across the Sky a few years back: how to describe its virtues without giving away what are clearly meant to be surprises. (As I have not seen the finished book, I don’t know what hints and details the jacket copy might offer.) ...Read More

The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross (Tor.com Publishing 978-0-7653-9466-8, $24.99, 381pp, hc) July 2017. Cover by Peter Lutjen

The harried operatives of the demon-wrangling covert service called the Laundry can’t catch a break in Charles Stross’s The Delirium Brief, which picks up in the aftermath of the disastrous cross-universe invasion of last year’s The Nightmare Stacks. The pitched battles with hordes of elven warriors riding unicorns and dragons ...Read More

The Last Good Man, Linda Nagata (Mythic Island Press, 978-1-937197-23-0, $18.00, 464 pp, tp) June 2017. Cover by Philippe McNally.

Linda Nagata’s The Last Good Man runs a compelling set of variations on motifs and themes introduced in her Red trilogy (2013-15). Once again we have detailed accounts of technologically enhanced near-future warfare, but this time the emphasis is less on uncertain and shifting loyalties and more on the impact ...Read More

Mormama, Kit Reed (Tor 978-0-7653-9044-8. $25.99, 285pp, hc) May 2017.

Kit Reed’s previous novel, Where (2015) gave us an inexplicable and uncanny situation that finally (perhaps reluctantly) almost-but-not-quite collapses into a science-fictional genre-space. Her new book, Mormama, isn’t coy at all: it’s a straight-up ghost story, and everybody inside the story knows it, and in any case the ghost for whom the novel is named is right there ...Read More

Convergence, C.J. Cherryh (DAW 978-0756409111, $26.00, 324 pp, hc) April 2017. Cover by Todd Lockwood.

By happy accident, as I was working on this column I was also paging through Jo Walton’s excellent collection of retrospec­tive review essays, What Makes This Book So Great, and noted her chapter on ‘‘Re-reading long series,’’ in which she points out not only the pleasures of taking extended rambles through invented worlds, ...Read More

Luna: Wolf Moon, by Ian McDonald (Tor 978-0-7653-7553-7, $27.99, 400pp, hardcover) March 2017

Twenty-seven years ago this month [May], Charles Brown took me on as a reviewer – specifically, he said, to cover the hard-SF end of the field. Of course, Locus neither draws nor enforces sharp boundaries among and between reviewers’ beats, so I have spent the decades following my nose all over the genre(s) rather than pursuing ...Read More

The Corporation Wars: Dissidence, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-316-36365-5, $9.99, 349pp, pb) November 2016.

The Corporation Wars: Insurgence, Ken MacLeod (Orbit 978-0-316-36369-3, $9.99, 331pp, pb) December 2016.

Ken MacLeod’s new trilogy-in-progress bears the overall title The Corporation Wars, with US print editions of the first two volumes, Dissidence and Insurgence, appearing just a month apart late in 2016. (The third, Emergence, is due out later this year.) ...Read More

Walkaway, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-0-7653-9276-3, $24.99, 379pp, hc) April 2017.

In last month’s 2016 annual wrap-up essay, I mentioned the Nightmares Are Us side of SF, which was on my mind not (entirely) because of what was running on cable news at the time, but because my recent reading keeps pointing out various ways everything can go to hell in a handbasket. Now, it’s possible that in following my ...Read More

Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Fairwood Press 978-1-933846-63-7, $16.99, 274pp, tp) August 2016. Cover by Patrick Swenson.

Robert Silverberg’s career has spanned more than half the history of modern American science fiction: he began reading SF magazines in 1948, during the ‘‘Golden Age,’’ and by 1954 was writing for the pulps, producing the first entries in a bibliography that now runs to 600-plus items of ...Read More

Revenger, Alastair Reynolds (Orion/Gollancz 978-0575090538, £18.99, 432pp, hardcover) September 2016; (Orbit 978-0-3165-5556-2, $14.99, 560pp, tp)
February 2017.

In Revenger Alastair Reynolds inserts a distinctly old-fashioned space opera into a Stapledonian milieu right out of Last and First Men, a solar system rendered unrecognizable by millions of years of natural and unnatural processes. Reynolds has used the ancient-far-future trope before in, for example, House of Suns (reviewed in August ...Read More

The Nightmare Stacks, Charles Stross (Ace 978-0-425281-192, $27.00, 385pp, hc) June 2016. Cover by Larry Rostant.

This month’s theme might be horror and the horrific, with the subtheme ‘‘Why am I reading horror when I usually don’t much care for it?’’ Of course, none of the books under consideration here are entirely or even ‘‘really’’ horror, no matter how extensively and elaborately concerned with horrific events, hauntings, or monstrous ...Read More

Visitor, C.J. Cherryh (DAW 978-0-7564-0910-4, $26.00, 376pp, hc) April 2016. Cover by Todd Lockwood.

Visitor is the 17th entry in C.J. Cherryh’s long-running (since 1994) Foreigner Universe series and the middle volume of its sixth sub-trilogy. That means, right up front, that this is not the place to start with these novels, though one might not need to back up all the way to the first book to get ...Read More

Titan’s Fall, Zachary Brown (Saga 978-1-4814-3038-8, $14.99, 204pp, tp) March 2016.

I keep insisting that the usual run of military-SF adventures has a limited appeal for me – a description of the limits of my tastes and interests rather than a judgment on the value of the whole subgenre or even of particular books I might set aside after a chapter or two. And I’m vain enough to believe ...Read More

The Merril Theory of Lit’ry Criticism: Judith Merril’s Nonfiction, Judith Merril (Aqueduct Press 978-1-61976-093-6, $22.00, 348pp, tp) March 2016.

I am a review junkie. As a high-school stu­dent, I loved The Saturday Review, and when I started reading SF magazines, I always turned to the review sections first, not so much for a buyer’s guide (I was omnivorous anyway) as for the conversation about SF. It was from these ...Read More

Transgalactic, by James Gunn (Tor 978-0765380920, $26.99, 224pp, hardcover March 2016

Two books that rose to the top of the stack on the dresser once again have me considering recent online discussions of the relevance of old or old-fashioned SF, of the value of historical perspective in reading a popular genre, of the appeal of deliberately retrospective stories, of the retreading of venerable tropes, and of whether some flavors ...Read More

Gypsy, Carter Scholz (PM Press 978-1-62963-118-9, $13.00, 145pp, tp) December 2015.

Gypsy is the first collection of Carter Scholz material in a dozen years, consisting of the centerpiece title novella, a pair of short stories, an essay, an interview with Scholz (conducted by editor Terry Bisson), and a bibliography. As compelling as the shorter pieces are, it is the novella that grabs and won’t let go. In the interview, ...Read More

The Best of Nancy Kress, Nancy Kress (Subterranean 978-1-59606-721-9, $45.00, 558pp, hc) September 2015. Cover by Thomas Canty.

Theodore Sturgeon used to append to his autographs a Q-pierced-by-an-arrow glyph that stood for ‘‘Ask the next question’’ – advice that would seem to be particularly apt for writers of science fiction. The phrase ought to be the motto on Nancy Kress’s escutcheon. (Appropriately enough, she has won a Theodore Sturgeon ...Read More

The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata (Saga 978-1-4814-4657-0, $27.99, 405pp, hc) June 2015. Cover by Larry Rostant.

The Trials, Linda Nagata (Saga 978-1-4814-4658-7, $27.99, 447pp, hc) August 2015. Cover by Larry Rostant.

Going Dark, Linda Nagata (Saga 978-1-4814-4659-4, $27.99, 454 pp, pb) November 2015. Cover by Larry Rostant.

As I was saying last month, all kinds of in­teresting variations are coming out of the rather fuzzily delimited ...Read More

Killing Titan, Greg Bear (Orbit 978-0-316-22400-0, $26.00, 326pp, hc) October 2015.

I should probably cop to this: I’m fascinated by military history, but I’ve never been much taken by what I think of as genre military SF, by which I mean adventure stories set in the military establishment and emphasizing weaponry, com­radeship, chains of command, career progress, and (of course) combat. As much as I enjoyed and understood Starship ...Read More

Chasing the Phoenix, Michael Swanwick (Tor 978-0-7653-8090-6, $26.99, 316pp, hc) August 2015.

Chasing the Phoenix is part of Michael Swanwick’s continuing account of the adven­tures of far-future con artists Darger and Surplus, which to my chagrin I have heretofore somehow not been following. (I am already remedying that situation as I write this column, starting with the first entry, ‘‘The Dog Said Bow-Wow’’.) The world of Aubrey Darger and ...Read More