Finalists for the 2020 Minnesota Book Awards, given by The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, have been announced, including several titles and authors of genre interest.
Novel & Short Story
Genre Fiction
Young Adult Literature
Middle Grade Literature
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood (Doubleday 978-0-385-54378-1, $28.95, 422pp, hc) September 2019.
When Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985, the year after the real-life 1984 and at the height of the Thatcher/Reagan era, figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell were still ascendant, and the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in the US was still a raw memory. It made sense to ask, as Atwood did, just ...Read More
Ghosts of the Shadow Market, Cassandra Clare, ed. (McElderry Books 978-1-5344-3362-5, $24.99, 607pp, hc) June 2019.
Ghosts of the Shadow Market is a mammoth anthology of stories written to accompany Cassandra Clare’s immersive Shadow Market world. Clare has brought an impressive group of co-writers along with her – Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Kelly Link, and Robin Wasserman – and indulges all manner of fan obsessions and questions in ...Read More
Black Static 9-10/19 The Dark 9/19, 10/19 Nightmare 10/19 Uncanny 9-10/19 Three-lobed Burning Eye 8/19
Black Static #71 is a stellar issue. If you’ve never sampled the UK periodical, this is the place to start. Felix, in Stephen Hargadon‘s novelette “Dixon Parade“, is a lonely, melancholy middle-aged man who never really moved on after his divorce. He purchases an early-’80s painting of a suburban street scene and ...Read More
A Chain Across the Dawn, Drew Williams (Tor 978-1-250-18614-0, $27.99, 320pp, hc) May 2019.
Drew Williams’s A Chain Across the Dawn delivers all of the sensawunda space opera that his first book (The Stars Now Unclaimed) did, which isn’t a huge surprise since it picks up a couple of years after his debut novel left off. Jane, an explorer/badass who is looking for kids with gifts, is ...Read More
John Scalzi, A Very Scalzi Christmas (Subterranean 978-1-59606-932-9, $40.00, 142pp, hc) November 2019. Cover by Natalie Metzger.
For a fancy stocking stuffer, this collection of holiday items, most originally published on Scalzi’s Whatever blog, presents a mix of hilarious Santa snark and heartwarming sentiment, with a mix of lists, poems, interviews with some of Santa’s helpers, stories, and more. Three items are brand new, but many of the older items ...Read More
Sabbath, Nick Mamatas (Tor 978-1250170118, $27.99, 304pp, hc) November 2019.
Sabbath is a book I would generally avoid. One: it’s an adaptation, a literary sub-genre I understand is very popular (see all the books based on console games) but which I find to be surplus to requirement given the thousands of original works I’ve yet to read. Two: the source material, Matthew Tomao & Josh Medor’s Sabbath: All Your ...Read More
Several authors and works of genre interest made the MWA (Mystery Writers of America) 2020 Edgar Awards list of nominees.
Best Paperback Original
Best Critical/Biographical
Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All, Laura Ruby (Balzer & Bray 978-0-06-231764-3, $17.99, 384pp, hc) October 2019.
Stop whatever you are reading right now and get your hands on a copy of Laura Ruby’s Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All. If literature exists to make us think, to broaden our minds, to make a difference, then there can be no better a book to read right now. That ...Read More
Mingus Fingers, David Sandner & Jacob Weisman (Fairwood 978-1933846873, $8, 68pp, trade paperback) November 2019
The boom in novellas shows no signs of petering out, as their bite-sized yet sufficiently mouth-filling substantiality continues to appeal to readers who want more than a short story but less than a novel. Here we have a go at three recent fine examples of the form.
If I had a time machine, one ...Read More
Dead Astronauts, Jeff VanderMeer (MCD 978-0374-27680-5, $27.00, 352pp, hc) December 2019.
Whatever success the British and American New Wave had in broadening our definition of science fiction and fantasy, the Modernist techniques the movement embodied never caught on. There are strong, market-driven reasons why this is the case, why, if you want to a read a genre novel that deliberately eschews a linear, conventional structure you need to look ...Read More
Candidates for the 2020 Going Under Fan Fund (GUFF) have been announced:
The 2020 fund will send fans from Europe to Australasia to attend the 78th World Science Fiction Convention, CoNZealand, to be held July 29 – August 2, 2020 in Wellington, New Zealand. Voting is
The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced the preliminary ballot for the 2019 Bram Stoker Awards:
Superior Achievement in a Novel
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters, Amy Binns (Grace Judson Press 978-0992756710, $14.95, 304pp, pb) October 2019.
In the Preface to his biography of Somerset Maugham, who was notoriously uncooperative with biographers, Ted Morgan recounts how Maugham directed his executors to prevent the publication of his letters. “Maugham,” writes Morgan, “who had spent most of his long life prying into the affairs of humankind, did not want his own affairs ...Read More
A Choir of Lies, Alexandra Rowland (Saga 978-1-53441-283-5, $26.99, 464pp, hc) September 2019.
“Stories are powerful. Stories are arrows and swords. Written down, they become a copy of a mind. These words right now, on the pages under my hands – what am I doing with them? What power have I put into this? Is it safe? Is it right?” So asks Ylfing, one of the dual narrators of ...Read More
The Forbidden Stars, Tim Pratt (Angry Robot 978-0-85766-769-4, $8.99, 400pp, pb) October 2019. Cover by Paul Scott Canavan.
Tim Pratt’s Axiom novels (The Wrong Stars, The Dreaming Stars, and now The Forbidden Stars) have delighted me since almost the first chapter of the first book, back in 2017. They’re a very modern iteration of action-heavy pulp, with appealing characters and worldbuilding that hints at more ...Read More
Ted Chiang will be artist in residence at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for the 2020-21 academic year. He will take part in a two-day workshop, engage with Notre Dame faculty, and participate in weekly seminars. His Exhalation (Knopf) appears on the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2019 list.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. ...Read More
Quillifer the Knight, Walter Jon Williams (Saga 978-1-4814-9001-6, $16.99, 544pp, tp) November 2019.
When Walter Jon Williams introduced us to his amorous and sometimes hapless hero Quillifer a couple of years ago, he was clearly and joyously celebrating the kind of essentially comic, faux-historical swashbucklers that date back as far as Rafael Sabatini and Anthony Hope and as recently as K.J. Parker. Like Hope and Parker, he sets his ...Read More
Benedict Jacka, Fallen (Ace 978-0-440-00058-7, $7.99, 296pp, pb) September 2018.
Alex Verus’s life takes a big turn for the worse in this tenth installment in the urban fantasy series. That’s not a huge surprise – this series has had a lot of ups and downs. This time, though, things get pretty desperate. Alex gets caught covering up for his girlfriend Anne, who let her dark self out and some really ...Read More
Author and editor Christopher Tolkien, 95, son and literary executor of J.R.R. Tolkien, died January 15, 2020 in Provence, France. Tolkien dedicated his life to his father’s work, editing and shepherding into print more than a score of the elder Tolkien’s books. He organized and edited the The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales (1980), and the 12 volumes of The History of Middle-earth (1983), along with The Children of Húrin (2007), ...Read More
The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez ((Del Rey 978-0-593-12898-5, $27, 400pp, hardcover) January 2020
Simon Jimenez’s touching, bold, surprising, gorgeous debut novel—a certain manner of postmodern space opera, despite the fantasy-resonant title—is not only the best debut novel I’ve read in ages, but simply one of the best SF novels in recent memory. I am reminded of the excitement I felt when encountering A.A. Attanasio’s Radix (1981). If The Vanished ...Read More
The Pursuit of William Abbey, Claire North (Orbit 978-0316316842, $16.99, 464pp, tp) November 2019.
The Pursuit of William Abbey is Claire North’s sixth novel in six years, a period during which she also published three novellas (The Gamehouse trilogy). It’s a remarkable feat when you consider that (a) these are stand-alone books in an age of multi-volume series and (b) they’ve consistently received critical praise and won awards, including ...Read More
The longlist for the €100,000 2020 International Dublin Literary award has been announced, and includes numerous titles and authors of genre interest:
The Tenth Girl, Sara Faring (Imprint 978-1-250-30450-6, $18.99, 464pp, hc) September 2019.
Sara Faring’s The Tenth Girl is a 1970s Gothic thriller filled with horrifying ghosts in an isolated Argentinian boarding school during the “Dirty War” when 30,000 civilians were disappeared at the hands of the US-backed military government. Eighteen-year old Mavi never knew her father, her rebel mother was recently arrested and hauled away with no hope of ...Read More
New titles this week are by Mike Chen, Rod Duncan, Sara Hanover, Charlaine Harris, S.A. Hunt, Simon Jimenez, Joanna Kavenna, Parker Peevyhouse, Ransom Riggs, and Rebecca Roanhorse. ...Read More
