Reviews

Books Reviews 

Wole Talabi Reviews Ghostroots by ’Pemi Aguda

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Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda (W.W. Norton & Company 978-1-324-06585-2, $26.99, 224pp, hc) May 2024.

Ghostroots, ’Pemi Aguda’s spectacular de­but collection, is an instant classic. These 12 stories feature hauntings, reincarna­tions, invisible markets, dancing masquerades, shapeshifting houses, miracles, and magical transformations. Even the stories that aren’t overtly speculative possess a speculative, surreal sensibil­ity. But regardless of the degree of imaginative calisthenics employed, the roots of every narrative in this collection ...Read More

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Niall Harrison Reviews In Universes by Emet North

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In Universes, Emet North (HarperCollins 978-0-06331-487-0, 240pp, $26.99, hc) April 2024.

Much like time travel, the multiverse, as a scientifi­cally originated but unproven theory, can be used as a narrative conceit with varying degrees of rigour. For every Timescape a Doctor Who; for every Anathem an Everything Everywhere All at Once. I don’t think a work’s placement on this spectrum is a predictor of its quality, but ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to The Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

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The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to The Waste­lands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron Books 978-1-25087-861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) June 2024.

I was surprised to discover that there are few novels, vintage or contemporary, set on the Trans-Siberian Express. There are plenty of memoirs and travel guides, but, unlike the Orient Express, with its Agatha Christies and Graham Greenes, very little fiction. The irony is that Sarah Brook’s eerie debut novel, The Cautious ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Colleen Mondor Reviews Twice Lived by Joma West

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Twice Lived, Joma West (Tordotcom 978-1-250-81032-8, $26.99, hc, 256pp) February 2024. Cover by FORT.

Author Joma West explores the idea of parallel worlds in an unexpected way in her science fic­tion novel, Twice Lived. Canna and Lily are one person, a ‘‘shifter’’ who uncontrollably moves back and forth between the two worlds. Her mothers detected her nature when they were pregnant, as the fetus would disappear and reappear ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Russell Letson Reviews Beyond the Reach of Earth by Ken MacLeod

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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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Reviews Short Fiction 

Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Diabolical Plots, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Kaleidotrope

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Diabolical Plots 4/24 Beneath Ceaseless Skies 4/4/24, 4/18/24 Kaleidotrope 4/24

Anne Liberton’s “Six-Month Assessment on Miracle Fresh” anchors the April Diabolical Plots, and for marketing fans (or soft drink fans) it’s a rather delightful and sharp look at capital­ism, religion, and corporate interests. Framed as an internal document in a soft drink company that produces Miracle Fresh, which contains blood of the Messiah, the assessment looks at ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Alex Brown Reviews Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse

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Mirrored Heavens, Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press 978-1-53443-770-8, $29.99. 608pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by John Picacio.

Black Sun, the first book in Rebecca Roan­horse’s epic fantasy series Between Earth and Sky, opened with one of the most impactful first chapters I’ve read in a long time. Fevered Star, the sequel, contained one of the most intense scenes of people who kinda deserved it getting slaughtered by ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi

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Navola, Paolo Bacigalupi (Knopf 978-0-59353-505-9, $30.00, 576pp, hc) July 2024.

Without meaning to stir up those enthusiastic taxonomists who are determined to Let No Subgenre Go Unlabeled, is there a term for the sort of histori­cal fantasy that draws on recognizable times and places, but replaces familiar geographical, his­torical, or mythical names with invented ones, and often employs only minimal supernatural or magical elements? Guy Gavriel Kay seems to ...Read More

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Gabino Iglesias Reviews Baby X by Kira Peikoff

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Baby X, Kira Peikoff (Crooked Lane 978-1-63910-633-2, $30.99, 336pp, hc) March 2024. Cover by Nicole Lecht.

Kira Peikoff’s Baby X is a solid technothriller that feels very timely while also delivering great entertainment. At once a novel of big ideas that will satisfy fans of science fiction and a fast-paced narrative about crimes that might become a reality sooner rather than later, Baby X pulls readers into a future ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Colleen Mondor Reviews Forgotten Sisters by Cynthia Pelayo

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Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-662-51391-6, $16.99, tp, 284pp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.

Cynthia Pelayo’s Forgotten Sisters begins with a nightmare, then moves to a nuanced family history of sisters Jennie and Anna, who live in a historic bungalow on the Chicago River that was owned first by their grandparents, then their parents, and now is theirs to treasure and maintain. In the second chapter, ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Niall Harrison Reviews Beyond the Light Horizon by Ken MacLeod

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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.

Are Ken MacLeod novels realistic? Twenty-five years ago I would have said no. Reading the Fall Revolution series (1995-1999) as a teenager, part of the thrill (I see now) was the vivid granular depiction of a world that (I thought then) didn’t work that ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews Echo of Worlds by M.R. Carey

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Echo of Worlds, M. R. Carey (Orbit 978-0316504690, trade paperback, 512pp, $19.99) June 2024

I pled for the author’s and publisher’s mercy in my review of the first captivating book in this series—Infinity Gate—begging for a quick sequel. Well, about fourteen months later, a reasonable interval, here we are. Prayers answered!

I also mentioned then that Infinity Gate was billed as the first book in a series. ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Liz Bourke Reviews The Knife and the Serpent by Tim Pratt

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The Knife and the Serpent, Tim Pratt (Angry Robot 978-1915202802, $18.99, 400pp, tp) June 2024.

Between Tim Pratt novels, I always forget just how unabashedly pulp he is as a writer. I say pulp as a compliment, not a criticism. Pratt has a gift for embracing the ridiculous and turning it into entertainment: playing the emotional field with seriousness while rolling around in weird and wacky SFFnal propositions. In ...Read More

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Reviews Short Fiction 

Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: GigaNotoSaurus, Fiyah, and Baffling

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GigaNotoSaurus 3/24 Fiyah Spring ’24 Baffling 4/24

GigaNotoSaurus’s April story, “The Grand­mother Hypothesis” by J.S. Richardson, finds the narrator jumping from reality to reality using a machine of her own creation – one that can­not take her home again. But returning to her own world was never the goal, not after losing her child, and the story follows the narrator as she loses herself trying to explore, ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Alexandra Pierce Reviews The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

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The Familiar, Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron Books 978-1-25088-425-1, 400pp, $29.99 hc) April 2024. Cover by Jim Tierney & Emma Pidsley.

Spain in the 1500s was not a great place to be if your family were converso – a term applied to Jews or Muslims who had been (often force­fully) converted to Catholicism – and worse still if you were caught secretly practicing your familial faith: It was the time of the ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Ian Mond Reviews Rakesfall by Vajra Chandrasekera

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Rakesfall, Vajra Chandrasekera (Tordotcom 978-1-25084-768-3, $27.99, 304pp, hc) June 2024.

To quote Tom Clancy (or was it Jeff Bezos?), it takes ten years to become an overnight success. I suspect Vajra Chandrasekera can relate. He spent a decade working on his craft, with short fiction published in various genre magazines and anthologies. Then, last year, Chandrasekera published his first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, which immediately caught ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Colleen Mondor Reviews The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers

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The City of Stardust, Georgia Summers (Redhook 978-0-316-56148-8, $29.00, hc, 352 pp) January 2024.

The City of Stardust by Georgia Summers blends our recognizable world, mostly through the home of the Everly family in the English countryside, with the fictional city of Fidelis, a place of academics and magic that hides a horrific truth. (And that horror really is bad; we’re talking ritual-sacrifice-of-kidnapped-children kind of bad.) Violet Everly lives ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Gabino Iglesias Reviews Forgotten Sisters Cynthia Pelayo

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Forgotten Sisters, Cynthia Pelayo (Thomas & Mercer 978-1-66251-391-6, $16.99, 303pp, tp) March 2024. Cover by Olga Grlic.

Cynthia Pelayo has made a name for herself in horror by bringing to the table a mixture of horror, crime fiction, and folklore that always contains a dash of poetry and by telling stories that invariably take place in Chicago, a city that Pelayo always turns into a character in her work. ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Paul Di Filippo Reviews Two Vancian Novels by Wm. Michael Mott

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Pulsifer: a Fable, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474918, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Jan 2024

Land of Ice, a Velvet Knife, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474932, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Feb 2024

It is very seldom—perhaps almost never—that one opens up one’s copy of the Sunday New York Times and discovers that the lead article in the Magazine section is devoted to a still-living author whose roots ...Read More

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Reviews Short Fiction 

A.C. Wise Reviews Short Fiction: Analog, khōréō, and Clarkesworld

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Analog 3-4/24 khōréō 3.4 Clarkesworld 4/24

The March/April 2024 issue of Analog opens with “Enough” by William Ledbetter, wherein a graffiti artist en­counters tech designed to resist tagging and report the location of artists to authorities. Working with his ex-girlfriend and her new partner, he finds a way to co-opt the tech and broadcasts a message of hope and resistance. “A Long Journey into Light” ...Read More

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Paul Di Filippo Reviews Ghost of the Neon God by T.R. Napper

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Ghost of the Neon God, T. R. Napper (Titan 978-1803368115, hardcover, 128pp, $17.99) June 2024

This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and, arguably, 1984 can serve as the birthday of the cyberpunk genre as well or better than any adjacent year. I think at this point, we can cease debating about the nature of cyberpunk, its utility and whether it’s here ...Read More

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Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941 by David Ritter, Daniel Ritter, Sam McDonald, & John L. Coker III

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The Visual History of Science Fiction Fandom, Volume Three: 1941, David Ritter, Daniel Rit­ter, Sam McDonald, & John L. Coker III (First Fandom Experience 978-1-73665-965-6, $149.00, 504pp, hc) April 2024.

If someone were to tell me that a lavish 500-page coffee-table book selling for $149 is basically a microhistory describing what a bunch of people I’ve mostly never heard of were doing in 1941, I’d quite reasonably be skeptical; ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Liz Bourke Reviews Foul Days by Genoveva Dimova

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Foul Days, Genoveva Dimova (Tor 978-1-250-87731-4, $17.99, 368pp, tp) June 2024. Cover by Rovina Cai.

Foul Days is Scotland-based Genoveva Dimova’s debut novel. It mixes folklore and modernity, setting itself between the walled ghetto-city of Chernograd – where monsters roam the streets, magic is as commonplace as poverty, and in order to leave you have to pay people-smugglers to get you across the wall – and the prosperous city ...Read More

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Reviews Short Fiction 

Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Escape Pod, Three-Lobed Burning Eye, and Strange Horizons

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Escape Pod 3/21/24, 3/28/24 Three-Lobed Burning Eye 3/24 Strange Horizons 3/18/24, 3/25/24, 4/1/24, 4/8/24

March’s Escape Pod features a unique post-catastrophe world in Pragathi Bala’s “Summitting the Moon”, which unfolds on an Earth that has experienced the Landing of the Moon, where an asteroid impact has pushed the Moon’s orbit so close to the planet that it has created a Rut and altered not only the world’s ...Read More

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Books Reviews 

Paula Guran Reviews Wild Cards: Sleeper Straddle edited by George R.R. Martin & Melinda M. Snodgrass

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Wild Cards: Sleeper Straddle, George R.R. Mar­tin & Melinda M. Snodgrass, eds. (Bantam 978-0-59335-783-5, 402pp, $28.00, hc) February 2024.

The Wild Cards universe is a fertile play­ground for writers, as its premise encour­ages a wide creative range. Created by George R.R. Martin, the universe departs from ours in 1946, when an alien virus arrives on Earth. Ninety percent of those who contract it die; the DNA of the ten percent ...Read More

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Niall Harrison Reviews Elephants in Bloom by Cécile Cristofari

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Elephants in Bloom, Cécile Cristofari (NewCon Press 978-1-91495-367-5, 240pp, £26.99, hc) Janu­ary 2024. Cover by Enrique Meseguer.

Cécile Cristofari’s debut collection El­ephants in Bloom is, as debut collections so often are, exciting but uneven. Perhaps my favourite story, “Soaring, the World on Their Shoulders” (2020), demonstrates the combination of imagination and precision that she can bring to bear. What begins as a relatively standard dystopian setting, with France voting ...Read More

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Colleen Mondor Reviews The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee by Ellen Oh

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The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee, Ellen Oh (Crown 978-0-593-12594-6, $19.99, hc, 295pp) January 2024. Cover by Audrey Mok.

In Ellen Oh’s The Colliding Worlds of Mina Lee, the title character has a big problem: She does not want to pursue the life her father has mapped out for her. High school senior Mina is an artist and desperate to follow in her deceased mother’s footsteps and attend ...Read More

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Adrienne Martini Reviews The Hermit Next Door by Kevin Hearne

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The Hermit Next Door, Kevin Hearne (Subter­ranean Press 978-1-64524-195-9, $40.00, 96pp, hc) June 2024. Cover by Dominic Harmon.

The Hermit Next Door, a novella by Kevin Hearne, is a lighthearted romp about grief. Really. Winnie Mae is newly widowed and decides to move from Tennessee to ex-urban Oregon. She finds a house that meets her needs: The neighborhood is quiet enough so that she can continue teaching her ...Read More

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Liz Bourke Reviews Lady Eve’s Last Con by Rebecca Fraimow

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Lady Eve’s Last Con, Rebecca Fraimow (Solaris 978-1-83786-159-0, $16.99, 368pp, tp.) June 2024.

Lady Eve’s Last Con is Rebecca Fraimow’s debut novel, and what an interesting debut it is. Set in a far-future solar system in the glittering, elite high society of New Monte, it stars a small-time grifter who’s decided to run a long con for revenge, only to find herself falling for her mark’s half-sister.

Ruthi Johnson ...Read More

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Colleen Mondor Reviews The Frame-Up by Gwenda Bond

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The Frame-Up, Gwenda Bond (Del Rey 978-0-593-59773-6, $10.00, tp, 325pp) February 2024.

Author Gwenda Bond hit the NY Times best­seller list for the Stranger Things tie-in Suspicious Minds and prior to that authored several YA titles (including a trio about young Lois Lane). In recent years she has quietly been carving out a niche in magical romance and her latest, the art heist adventure The Frame-Up, fits nicely ...Read More

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Adrienne Martini Reviews The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands by Sarah Brooks

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The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Waste­lands, Sarah Brooks (Flatiron Books 978-1-250-87861-8, $28.99, 336pp, hc) July 2024.

Trains make great narrative devices. You can get all of your characters in the same place and keep them there while they move through space and time. Pick up the well-known Agatha Christie train mystery, if you like a good murder on the rails. Or, if you bend more toward science fiction, ...Read More

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Reviews Short Fiction 

Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Subterranean, Worlds of Possibility, Flash Fiction Online, and Zooscape

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Subterranean 8/27/23, 4/21/24 Worlds of Possibility 4/24 Flash Fiction Online 4/24 Zooscape 4/15/24

Subterranean has been releasing individual short stories for a while now, and I recently had the chance to catch up, including with Josiah Bancroft’s rather charming 2023 story “The Small Hands of Chokedamp”, which focuses on Captain Isolde Wilby, the inaugural head of the Office of Ensorcelled Investiga­tions. Though Wilby had hoped the platform ...Read More

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