Locus Online

Black Static 5-6/19 Uncanny 5-6/19

The usual five original stories in Black Static #69 begin with “Where It Ends, Where It Begins” by Erinn L. Kemper. Old Mac salvages the sea on the west coast of Vancouver Island. For ten years, along with the usual fare, he’s also salvaged decaying body parts that he keeps in a freezer. Now he has collected an entire body’s worth of ...Read More

The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, Saad Z. Hossain (Tor.com 978-1-250-20911-5, $14.99, 176pp, tp) August 2019.

Saad Z. Hossein’s pissed-off djinn, awakened after thousands of years by melting ice in the Hima­layas (a nice, subtle reference to global warming), initially seems more concerned with his resumé than with vengeance: when he stumbles down the mountain and meets the crusty old Gurkha Bhan Gurung, he announces himself as “Melek ...Read More

Salvation Lost, Peter F. Hamilton (Del Rey 978-0399178856, 512pp, $32.00, hardcover) October 2019

I’m always chuffed when a review of mine provides a sentence that is deemed blurb-worthy by a publisher. This just happened with my review of Peter Hamilton’s novel Salvation from 2018. I appear on the back cover of the brand-new sequel, Salvation Lost, saying, “It’s a bravura performance from start to finish… Hamilton is juggling ...Read More

Fantastic Worlds: The Art of William Stout, Ed Leimbacher (Insight Editions 978-1-60887-865-9, $75.00, 333pp, hc) November 2018. Cover by William Stout.

From the small to the large: Fantastic Worlds: The Art of William Stout is a great big book offering great big fun in 331 pages filled with colorful and varied artwork. It’s the kind of retrospective that any artist would dream about. The artwork is well reproduced in ...Read More

Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone (Tor 978-0-7653-9581-8, 18.99, 480pp, hc) June 2019. Cover art by Tommy Arnold.

Max Gladstone is best known for the Craft Sequence, a fantasy series about demons, angels, and insurance adjust­ers. With Empress of Forever, he’s crossing the imaginary divide between fantasy and science fiction to spin a space opera that is as lyrical and surreal as his earlier work.

The story starts on ...Read More

Velocity Weapon, Megan O’Keefe (Orbit US 978-0-356-51222-8, $15.99, 544pp, tp) June 2019.

There’s really only one problem with Velocity Weapon, Megan E. O’Keefe’s first novel-length space opera, and that problem is something which ultimately isn’t a problem at all: the cover copy makes it sound like a vastly different novel than it really is, and kept me from enthusiastically devouring it for ages.

The last thing Sanda remembers is ...Read More

Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Dam­aged Glory: Stories, Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Knopf 978-1524732011, $25.95, 256pp, hc) June 2019.

Back in June IndieWire published an article list­ing the best TV shows of the last decade. BoJack Horseman was ranked number four behind three deserving and ground-breaking productions: Breaking Bad, Fleabag, and The Leftovers. BoJack Horseman, though, could easily have finished in the top spot. ...Read More

American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, Gary K. Wolfe, ed. (Library of America 978-1-59853-635-5, $75.00, 1,500pp, hc, boxed set) November 2019. Also available as American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (Library of America 978-1-59853-501-3, $37.50, 738pp, hc) November 2019 and American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969, (Library of America 978-1-59853-502-0, $37.50, 762 pp, hc) November 2019. Covers by Paul Lehr.

Reviewing is generally ...Read More

Winners for the 2019 Geffen Awards for best science fiction and fantasy published in Hebrew have been announced by the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Stephen & Tabitha King have received city council approval to rezone their Bangor ME home as a non-profit, with plans to turn it into a museum. Stephen King’s personal archives, previously housed at the University of Maine, will be moved to the home and made available to scholars and other visitors by appointment. A house next door, also owned by the Kings, will accommodate up to five writers-in-residence at a ...Read More

The Dark 5/19, 6/19 Nightmare 6/19, 7/19 Apex 5/19

The Dark #48 offers two new stories. In Angela Slatter‘s “The Wilderling“, isolated, bored, childless LP is fascinated with a feral child who visits her yard. One might expect LP to do something other than what she does for or with the savage kid. Mystery grows as LP’s actions defy expectation. Slatter, with perfect pacing and accomplished writing, ...Read More

My Beautiful Life, K.J. Parker (Subterranean 978-1-59606-930-5, $40.00, 112pp, hc) November 2019.

Unlike the long tradition of disruptive but fundamentally decent rogues, K.J. Parker’s invidious protagonists, who are often his narrators, can almost seem ingratiating in their forthrightness and cynicism – until we catch on to what sort of ruthlessness they are really capable of. It’s not giving anything away to point out that Parker’s new novella My Beautiful ...Read More

Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, Aliette de Bodard (Subterranean 978-1-59606-952-7, $40.00, 384pp, hc) September 2019. Cover by Maurizio Manzieri.

Aliette de Bodard’s Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is a collection from an author whose work possesses both breadth and depth. Published by Subterranean Press, this volume largely collects works from her Hugo Award-nominated Xuya continuity – including award-winning stories “The Shipmaker” (BSFA Award), “Immersion” (Nebula and Locus ...Read More

The Horror Writers As­sociation (HWA) has announced Mick Garris as media guest of honor for StokerCon UK, to be held April 16-19, 2020 at the Royal and Grand Hotels in Scarborough, UK. He joins previously announced guests Kim Newman, Grady Hendrix, and Gillian Redfearn, with A.K. Benedict as mistress of cer­emonies and Robert Lloyd-Parry as special guest.

For more <stokercon-uk.com/guests.htm>.

While you are here, please take a moment to ...Read More

Patricia Briggs, Storm Cursed (Ace 978-0-425-28129-1, $27.00, 358pp, hc) May 2019. Cover by Daniel Dos Santos.

The 11th novel in the Mercy Thompson series finds Mercy back home in Washington’s Tri-Cities area, and a little more in the public eye than she cares for, thanks to having publically declared the area under the Columbia Basin pack’s pro­tection a couple of books back, so now she gets called to deal with ...Read More

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus) and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton) were announced as joint winners of the 2019 Booker Prize during a ceremony held October 14, 2019 at the Guildhall in London, UK.

The Booker rules forbid splitting the prize, but chair of judges Peter Florence said, “We were told quite firmly that the rules state we can only have one winner. ...Read More

The winners for the 2018 Sidewise Awards for Alternate History have been announced.

Trace, Pat Cummings (HarperCollins 978-0-06-269884-1, $16.99, 320pp, hc) April 2019.

Sometimes, readers want a gentle story with big-hearted characters that manages to convey powerful drama in a subtle plot. Trace by Pat Cummings is exactly that, a ghost story that combines an unfolding historical mystery with a heartfelt coming-of-age tale. It is a muted novel, as much about the struggle of adapting to a new family situation as it ...Read More

Literary critic Harold Bloom, 89, died October 14, 2019 in a New Haven CT hospital. Bloom was one of the most famous and controversial critics in America, writing and editing bestselling, influential volumes like The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), and How to Read and Why (2000). In all he wrote more than ...Read More

Winners for the 2019 Imadjinn Awards were announced during Imaginarium 2019, held October 11-13, 2019 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel and Conference Center in Louisville KY. Categories of genre interest include:

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award has been renamed the Otherwise Award, announced by members of the Tiptree Motherboard on October 13, 2019. In a statement, they said:

The Tiptree Award was named as a joyful joke, 28 years ago.

James Tiptree, Jr/Alice Sheldon is a complicated figure who has grown more so as participants in the sff world have gained more diverse perspectives and more acute critical analyses. In ...Read More

Analog 7-8/19 Asimov’s 7-8/19 F&SF 5-6/19

I’ve always thought that if Analog was truly the central bastion of hard SF among our magazines it ought to be publishing Greg Egan but, with the exception of “Beyond the Whistle Test” 30 years ago, his work has not appeared in the magazine. Until now! And “The Slipway” qualifies as pure a hard SF story as you might want – so ...Read More

The Thousand Demon Tree, Jeffrey Alan Love (Flesk 978-1-64041-010-7, $29.95, 93pp, hc) Au­gust 2019. Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love.

In The Thousand Demon Tree, Jeffrey Alan Love follows up his popular Notes from the Shadowed City (Flesk, 2017) with a powerful 96-page wordless graphic novel.

Love has painted an eloquent tale whose haunt­ing silhouettes and strange atmospheric effects create a timeless eerie story in which the reader is ...Read More

Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was under a worldwide embargo until Sep­tember 10, 2019. Amazon shipped “a small number” of copies a week early to customers who’d pre-ordered. A Penguin Random House spokesperson said the books “were distributed early due to a retailer error which has not been rectified. We appreciate that readers and booksellers have been waiting patiently… in order to ...Read More

Necropolis PD, Nathan Sumsion (Parvus Press 978-0-99978-423-5, $15.99, 412pp, tp) April 2019.

“Why am I always a few steps behind every conversation I get into?” asks Jake Green, the protagonist of Nathan Sumsion’s Necropolis PD, about halfway through this overlong, rudimentary novel. The potential answers to this question: Jake is an idiot, or Sumsion relies on thin narrative strategies to maintain tension. Or both. Although the novel moves ...Read More