Full Speed to a Crash Landing, Beth Revis (DAW 978-0-756-41946-2, $23.00, tp, 192pp) August 2024.
Beth Revis gives readers an action-packed science fiction adventure in her latest novella, Full Speed to a Crash Landing. Opening with a literal bang, she introduces space salvor Ada Lamarr, who is clinging to life in her space suit after an accident onboard her ship blew a hole in its side and forced ...Read More
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Deep Dream: Science Fiction Exploring the Future of Art, Indrapramit Das, ed. (The MIT Press 978-0-26254-908-0, 229pp, $24.95, tp). October 2024. Cover art by Diana Scherer.
Of the ten stories collected in Deep Dream that aim to, as editor Indrapramit Das has it, “both embody and visualize the future of art,” only one offers an explicit definition of what art might be. Many millennia in the future, the twinned ...Read More
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Kree, Manuela Draeger (University of Minnesota Press 978-1-51791-512-4, $21.95, 280pp, tp) October 2024.
Manuela Draeger’s Kree is so immediately violent that I wasn’t sure it was going to be for me. Somehow, though, within just a few chapters, the novel’s mix of haunting imagery and almost humorous unpredictability grew so compelling that I found myself wanting to track down everything else the author has written. A midapocalyptic story set ...Read More
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State of Paradise, Laura van den Berg (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37461-220-7, $27.00, 224pp, hc) July 2024.
I move from one instance of weird Florida (Area X is a distorted version of North Florida) to another: Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise. I’d say that reading VanderMeer and van den Berg back-to-back (alliterative surnames aside) is a remarkable coincidence, except that Florida, to outsiders such as myself, has ...Read More
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The Ancients, John Larison (Viking 978-0593831168, hardcover, 400pp, $30.00) October 2024
Writers from outside our genre seem to have fixed upon four major themes or topics that they find congenial to their arguably more “literary” way of writing.
Time travel. Robots and Androids. Dystopias. And Apocalypse or After the Collapse scenarios.
You don’t see many “mainstream” folks writing about, say, “talking squids in outer space,” or starship troopers or ...Read More
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A Jura for Julia, Ken MacLeod (NewCon Press 978-1-91495-383-5, 220pp, £26.99, hc) August 2024. Cover by Fangorn.
I don’t think it’s entirely unrecognised that one of the most notable qualities of Ken MacLeod’s fiction is its dry humour, but I’m not sure it’s much discussed. So here’s a moment from “The Shadow Ministers”, one of a baker’s dozen of enjoyable stories collected in A Jura for Julia, that ...Read More
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The Tongue Trade, Michael J. Martineck (Edge 978-1770532410, hardcover, 224pp, $34.95) October 2024
Michael Martineck has had the kind of respectable bubbling-under career that many writers enjoy—but which they also might ambitiously seek to surpass. (Has any writer ever been truly satisfied with his or her current status?) He sold his first story in 1999, then several novels, with the most recent being The Link Boy in 2017. Good ...Read More
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Ultra 85, Logic (Simon & Schuster 978-1-98215-827-9, $18.99, 304pp, tp) September 2024.
I’d never heard of the rapper Logic (AKA Sir Robert Bryson Hall II) or his work (both musical and literary) until I was sent a copy of Ultra 85. That’s not an indictment of Logic but instead speaks to my narrow, stunted musical tastes. Ultra 85 is Logic’s sophomore effort, the follow-up to his debut Supermarket ...Read More
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Nether Station, Kevin J. Anderson (Blackstone 979-8200688449, hardcover, 316pp, $27.99) October 2024
The crew of a small survey spaceship voyages out to investigate a spacetime anomaly, and encounters deadly supernatural (?) entities. Am I about to take a second pass at reviewing Adam Roberts’s recent Lake of Darkness? Not at all! But by phrasing the plot of that novel generically, I can point out that although certain adjacent ...Read More
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Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Tor UK 978-1035013746, 400pp, £16.99, hc) March 2024. (Orbit US 978-0316578974 , $19.999, 432pp, tp) September 2024. Cover by Lauren Panepinto.
Sometimes the way into a story is through another story. Probably the most familiar route is through a genealogical relationship, in which a new story attempts to extend or argue with an old one: All those works unpicking the cold equations or attempting to ...Read More
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Dakini Atoll, Nikhil Singh (Luna Press Publishing 978-1-91555-634-9, £22.99, 252pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Elena Romenkova.
Nikhil Singh has carved out a niche within African SF by bringing the full range of his artistic talents into play in his worldbuilding. The dystopian underworlds explored in his earlier works create the unique effect of falling into a sensorial swamp, an enticing feature that is only enhanced in Singh’s third ...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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The Jaguar Mask, Michael J. DeLuca (Stelliform 978-1-77809-260-2, 348pp, $19.00, tp) August 2024. Cover by Julia Louise Pereira.
The story of The Jaguar Mask does not start on the first page, in which the artist Cristina Ramos relives the murder of her mother in a garish vision – four tattooed mareros with machine pistols, haloed by angels of death, gunning down two government employees, a foreign lobbyist, and Eufemia ...Read More
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Napalm in the Heart, Pol Guasch (Faber & Faber UK 978-0571375257, £6.99, 256pp, hc) July 2024. (FSG Originals 978-0-37461-295-5, $18.00, 256pp, tp) August 2024.
Reading Pol Guasch’s debut, Napalm in the Heart, right after Helen Phillips’ Hum is a disorientating experience. Both authors present us with dystopias, but while Phillips cleaves to our reality, Guasch gives us something more symbolic and experimental, a dystopia unmoored from time and ...Read More
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Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316578974, trade paperback, 432pp, $19.99) September 2024
If Michael Bishop and Tom Disch had collaborated to script an episode of the Aliens franchise, and then the result had been filmed by Toho Studios, the result might have well come to resemble Adrian Tchaikovsky’s newest kick in the pants, Alien Clay. This is one of three great books Tchaikovsky has released in 2024; similar ...Read More
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Hum, Helen Phillips (Marysue Rucci Books 978-1-66800-883-6, $27.99, 272pp, hc) August 2024.
The novels I review for this column are not chosen with a theme in mind. If one does pop up, it’s purely coincidental. That goes for this month. I had no idea Hum, Napalm in the Heart, and Ultra 85 would all be dystopian novels. The good news is that they’re very different in tone, ...Read More
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No/Mad/Land, Franceso Verso (Flame Tree Press 978-1787589278, hardcover, 384pp, $26.95) September 2024
Even when deploying familiar tropes of the genre in totally au courant ways, science fiction by non-Anglo authors always reveals an idiosyncratic slant or attitude or worldview. This has been evident at least since Stanislaw Lem burst onto the English-language publishing scene, and is witnessed more recently in works from such accomplished authors as Cixin Liu, Hannu ...Read More
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Reactor 6/5/24 to 7/10/24 The Sunday Morning Transport 5/26/24 to 7/14/24 Nightmare 7/24
Reactor continues to present top-quality fiction. Rich Larson’s “Breathing Constellations” (June 5) is small-scale but excellent SF story revolving around a struggling human commune in Argentinian Patagonia seeking the permission of a pod of orcas to begin harvesting plankton in their waters.
In the heartwarming “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” (June 12) by TJ ...Read More
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Rebel, David Weber & Richard Fox (Baen 978-1982193607, hardcover, 496pp, $28.00) September 2024
I seem to be on a bit of a quest lately to try to acquaint myself with authors I’ve shamefully overlooked. That’s always a healthy move, I think—aligned with, but distinct from, keeping up with brand-new debut writers. I reviewed a Michael Flynn book for the first time recently in these pages (alas, only after he ...Read More
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Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1-39961-767-3, £22.00, 320pp, hc) July 2024.
Despite having won BSFA and Campbell Awards for his 2012 novel Jack Glass, Adam Roberts has a good case for being one of the most under-appreciated novelists in the UK – not a single Hugo or Nebula nomination in a career of more than two decades, according to the SFADB. As I and others have argued ...Read More
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Termush, Sven Holm (Faber Editions 978-0-57137-915-6, £9.99, 119pp, tp) September 2022. (FSG 978-0-37461-358-7, $16.00, 128pp, tp) January 2024. Cover by Rodrigo Corral & Adriana Tonello
Sven Holm’s Termush, originally published in 1967, is as timely now as it was back then. A narrative that uses a dystopian lens to look at people and their behavior in the aftermath of an apocalypse, the novel is a short but very ...Read More
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khōréō 4.1
Anna Bendiy’s ‘‘The Goddess of Loneliness and Misfortune’’ in khōréō 4.1 effectively explores healing, going back to the place you were born, and the cost of war. Bohdana returns to her war-ravaged home and calls on a goddess for help, only to discover the goddess has a bit of an attitude and intends to put Bohdana to work before she’ll get involved. ‘‘Child’s Tongue ...Read More
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Escape Pod 7/11/24 Lightspeed 7/24 Baffling 7/24
Brian Hugenbruch features in the July Escape Pod with the rather charming “A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls”. The story unfolds with a backdrop of the ruined Earth, humans surviving in orbit of their home and living very different lives. But social awkwardness is still definitely a thing, which the narrator can attest to, as he finds himself unable to ...Read More
Read moreDuring the long, long break, I re-read Glory Road. And, again, by way of caveat, there is no particular reason – other than sheer whimsy – I chose this particular title off of my Heinlein shelf.
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