Asimov’s 3-4/24
The March/April 2024 issue of Asimov’s is quite a strong one. It opens with a “How Sere Kept Herself Together” by Alexander Jablokov, the third in a series of stories featuring Sere, an investigator, who in this case starts off looking into a kidnapping, but finds herself embroiled in a far more complex case. The worldbuilding is nicely done and the novella does a good ...Read More
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The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 9781250865878, $27.99, 240pp, hc) February 2024.
There are a handful of SF writers so sharply attuned to the arcane systems that underlie contemporary culture that it sometimes becomes a challenge to figure out what’s SF and what’s not; William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson come to mind, as does Cory Doctorow. The Bezzle, Doctorow’s second novel in a new series featuring forensic accountant ...Read More
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Escape Pod 1/25/24, 2/8/24, 2/22/24, 2/29/24 Fusion Fragment 2/24 Strange Horizons 2/19/24, 2/26/24, 3/4/24, 3/11/24 Flash Fiction Online 2/24, 3/24
Catching up with Escape Pod, their January original “The Ballad of Starburst Smith” by David Marino finds a mostly failed musician visiting a special service called a Winnower in order to see a possible future where her music career is more than just disappointing. The downside of using ...Read More
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The Deadlands Winter ’24
The Winter 2024 issue of The Deadlands is full of lovely prose and quiet stories meditating on life and death. In the beautifully written “Threnody in Dark Wood” by Avra Margariti, a professional mourner who sings the dead through the Doorway receives a mysterious assignment to attend an empty funeral with a sealed coffin and soon realizes this is a job unlike any other. ...Read More
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The Climate Action Almanac, Joey Eschrich & Ed Finn, eds. (Center for Science and the Imagination) November 2023.
Edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn, The Climate Action Almanac is an online anthology that brings together a selection of science fiction and non-fiction to fire up our imaginations about climate change and the vast range of possible responses to it. Charmingly illustrated throughout by João Queiroz, the collection strikes a ...Read More
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The Sunday Morning Transport 1/1/24 – 3/17/24 Weird Horror Spring ’24 Uncanny 1-2/24, 3-4/24 Apex #142, #143
Lots to cover this month, so let’s concentrate on the cream of the crop.
The Sunday Morning Transport publishes new fiction almost every Sunday throughout the year. Each of the stories merits a read, but of the first eleven stories of 2024, six stood out for me.
The title of Mary Robinette Kowal ...Read More
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Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard (Tordotcom 978-1-25032-488-7, $20.99, 176pp, hc) July 2024.
With Navigational Entanglements, Aliette de Bodard flexes her space opera muscles in a slightly different direction, in a universe that draws as much on the ‘‘cultivation fantasy’’ of xiānxiá as on the atmosphere and aesthetics that underpin her Xuya universe novels. Navigational Entanglements opens new vistas in a world where space travel is accomplished through the ...Read More
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Escape Velocity, Victor Manibo (Erewhon Books 978-1645660842, hardcover, 368pp, $28.00) May 2024
The Jacobean Revenge Tragedy is a mode not unprecedented in SF. The instance that comes most readily to mind is Bester’s The Stars My Destination, modeled on one of the most famous such, The Count of Monte Cristo. And now, with Victor Manibo’s sophomore novel, the field gets another vivid enactment of injustices avenged. Except ...Read More
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Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, $19.99, 192pp, hc) May 2024.
The idea of social stratification enforced through architecture – in other words, high-rises with the rich living at the top – has been a staple of SF imagery at least since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and it’s been extraordinarily useful as a way of exploring everything from overpopulation to Ballardian alienation to urban dystopia to – more ...Read More
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Moonstorm, Yoon Ha Lee (Delacorte Press 9-780-59348-833-1, $19.99, 352pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Priscilla Kim.
As Yoon Ha Lee’s YA novel Moonstorm opens, Hwajin is ten years old, living with her extended family on the clanner moon Carnelian, part of the Moonstorm. Carnelian has an eccentric orbit, and its gravity is consistent only when there is harmony amongst the people living on it. On the very first page, ...Read More
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The Downloaded, Robert J. Sawyer (Shadowpaw Press 978-1989398999, trade paperback, 199pp, $14.95) May 2024
It’s a testament to Robert Sawyer’s skill—and his generational wisdom—that he has created, with his latest book, a novel that is at once exuberantly old-school and utterly au courant. It reads like Greg Egan rebooting Neil R. Jones’s Professor Jameson cycle. This book exemplifies the “best of both worlds” approach that charts a viable future ...Read More
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Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, hardcover, 192pp, $19.99) May 2024
Thrillers confined to a single stage set or venue have an admirable lineage. One has only to think of the original Die Hard film or David Morrell’s novel Creepers to provide strong examples. In SF, this approach is often conflated with the Big Dumb Object trope: let’s explore Ringworld or Rama. James Cambias’s The Scarab Mission ...Read More
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The Wings Upon Her Back, Samantha Mills (Tachyon 978-1-61696-414-6, $18.95, 336pp, tp) April 2024.
It’s been interesting to watch the rehabilitation of “science fantasy” as a respectable mode of storytelling over the past few decades. Once applied loosely to everything from sword and sorcery to Vancean far futures, it was derided as a “misshapen subgenre” by Darko Suvin and a “bastard genre” by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. ...Read More
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Clarkesworld 3/24
Clarkesworld’s March issue opens with “Hello! Hello! Hello!” by Fiona Jones, a sweet story about an alien entity encountering a human adrift in a shuttle, eventually realizing that the human is dying, and carrying out a rescue mission. Jones does a wonderful job of presenting a truly alien alien, and showing the difficulties of communication between vastly dissimilar species, but also the possibilities opened up ...Read More
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Power to Yield, Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books 978-1-40372-266-2, $17.99, 203pp, tp) February 2024.
Hungarian American poet, writer, translator, critic, and editor Bogi Takács has spent eir career promoting, encouraging, and showcasing the work of marginalised authors. The anthology Rosalind’s Siblings, edited by Takács and publishing poetry and fiction focusing on scientists erased or diminished because of their gender or sexuality, fittingly featured on the 2023 Locus Recommended ...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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Lightspeed 2/24 GigaNotoSaurus 2/24 Diabolical Plots 2/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 2/8/24, 2/22/24
Phoebe Barton returns to the pages of Lightspeed in their February issue with “But from Thine Eyes My Knowledge I Derive”, which should scratch anyone’s science-fiction procedural mystery itch. In it, Va is the head science officer on a ship sent to examine what could be a miniature black hole. When the discovery turns out to ...Read More
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Greatest Hits, Harlan Ellison (Union Square 978-1-4549-5337-1, $19.99, 466pp, tp) March 2024.
Harlan Ellison’s short fiction is undoubtedly far better known than Wyndham’s, but for readers too young to have followed his prolific and rather spectacular career, which peaked from the mid-1960s to mid-1980s, he might be best known for a handful of stories which have been endlessly anthologized, mostly “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No ...Read More
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Analog 1-2/24
The January/February issue of Analog kicks off with “Kagari” by Ron Collins, which follows the young heir to a kingdom of birdlike beings. He is in love with a commoner, and not overly enamored of the strict rules governing his society, but he is given a human named Kagari as a pet who helps him see he might work within the system to effect change. “ ...Read More
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Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino (Farrar, Straus, Giroux 978-0-37410-928-8, $28.00, 336pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Abby Kagan.
Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is one of the most unique novels I’ve read in a while. A wonderful mix of science fiction and literary fiction, this story is full of humor but also packs a treasure trove of witty observations about the human condition and a sharp dissection of life in small-town America through ...Read More
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Table for One, Yun Ko-Eun (Columbia University Press 978-0-23119-202-6, $20.00, 280pp, hc) April 2024.
Yun Ko-eun (the pen name for Ko Eun-ju) will be unfamiliar to most English-language readers unless they’ve read her one translated novel, The Disaster Tourist. In South Korea, though, she’s the multiple award-winning author of several novels and short story collections and the host of the EBS Radio show Book Cafe. Thankfully, we now ...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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I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger (Grove 978-0802162939, hardcover, 336pp, $28.00) April 2024
Brian Aldiss famously coined the label “cozy catastrophe” to designate such books as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, wherein civilization crumbles, but our protagonist manages to carve out a relatively safe and rewarding existence for himself and his posse, a harbor from the storm. Aldiss characterized the plot and atmosphere of such novels ...Read More
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Reckoning Spring ’24 F&SF 1-2/24 Strange Horizons 1/29/24, 2/5/24, 2/12/24 Worlds of Possibility 2/24
The new year brings a new issue of Reckoning, featuring poetry, fiction, and nonfiction focused on issues of environmental justice. Kelsey Day is among the poets complicating and keenly describing the intersections of ecological and social violation in “50% off Venus Fly Traps”, which finds a person plant shopping and running into the ways ...Read More
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Kurdistan + 100 , Mustafa Gündoğdu & Orsola Casagrande, eds. (Comma Press 978-1-91269-736-6, £10.99, 237pp, tp). November 2023. Cover by David Eckersall.
When you finish reading the last page of the last story in this strong anthology of strong stories, you are not yet done with the book. There is an afterword by editors Mustafa Gündoğdu and Orsola Casagrande, which probably was not part of the original concept. It is ...Read More
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The Man Who Saw Seconds, Alexander Boldizar (Clash 978-1-96098-807-2, $19.95, 325pp, tp) Cover by Joel Amat Güell. May 2024.
A precog, an anarchist, and an assistant director of the NSA walk into a bar….
Preble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future. Fish is an anarchist, lawyer, and Jefferson’s friend. Thad Bigman is an assistant director at the NSA. The action in The Man Who Saw Seconds centres on ...Read More
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Jumpnauts, Hao Jingfang (trans. Ken Liu) (Saga 978-1-53442-211-7, 368pp, $18.99). March 2024.
Deep in the bowels of Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, an alien guide reveals to the human protagonists that what defines civilisational progression, from their elevated perspective, is ‘‘the capacity for information exchange.’’ The development of writing, which allows information to be transmitted widely in space and time, was the necessary precondition to reach the ‘‘zeroth rank’’ of ...Read More
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A View from the Stars, Cixin Liu (Tor 978-1250292117, hardcover, 224pp, $27.99) April 2024
Most authors segregate their fiction from their non-fiction, compiling the two classes of work into separate collections. I always recall one exception I read as a teen, a minor Frederik Pohl volume titled Digits & Dastards, which featured two essays along with the stories. And I suppose that Harlan Ellison’s inclusion of long anecdotal ...Read More
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In Universes, Emet North (Harper 978-0063314870, hardcover, 240pp, $26.99) April 2024
I never would have predicted that the fantastika genre would be graced in 2024 with a novel that resonated so vibrantly with two classics from the 1970s: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. And yet that is precisely the vibe that I feel confident in proclaiming emanates from Emet ...Read More
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Cascade Failure, L.M. Sagas (Tor 978-1-25087-125-1, $17.99, 416pp, tp) March 2024.
Clearly this is the month for me to discuss debut novels. Cascade Failure is the first novel from L.M. Sagas: a science fiction adventure in the high-octane tradition. Stories set in futures ruled by soulless corporations have multiplied in recent years, perhaps as the naked greed of unfettered capitalism has grown more blatant since the decade-defining financial crash ...Read More
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The Mars House, Natasha Pulley (Bloomsbury US 978-1639732333, 480pp, $29.99, hc). March 2024.
If, a century from now, there are enough readers and enough academic presses to warrant reprinting early 21st-century Anglophone science fiction, editors in search of candidates might do worse than considering Natasha Pulley’s The Mars House for their list. In its style, its intellectual interests, and the strengths and weaknesses of its execution, Pulley’s sixth novel ...Read More
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Triangulum: An Epic of the Nine Worlds of Surya, Subodhana Wijeyeratne (Rosarium Publishing 979-8-98661-460-1, $19.95, 300pp, tp) January 2024.
In his first novel, Subodhana Wijeyeratne takes elements of religious stories from the Indian subcontinent and reimagines them in space, with godlike aliens and humanity spread across the solar system. None of these aspects are apparent from the outset, but are gradually revealed as the story unfolds in epic, and ...Read More
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