Strange Horizons Reviews: Archives

Archived Reviews

Two Views: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes, by James Trimarco and Paul Raven (11/20/09): James Trimarco: Moxyland manages to breathe new life into this subgenre by capturing the peculiarly cynical voice of a generation that has absorbed so much branded messaging that it literally cannot imagine a gesture—not an utterance, not a political strategy, not even an act of violence—intended to do anything but stimulate the media for marketing-related purposes.

Paul Raven: It's a strong fast zap to the brain that eschews science fiction's lingering tendency to chase technological gosh-wow in favour of using its toolkit to vivisect the kids of tomorrow.
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, volume 3, edited by Jonathan Strahan, by Nader Elhefnawy (11/18/09): The volume offers few surprises (certainly for those who read much current science fiction and fantasy), but does succeed in offering that healthy (if conventional) sampling promised in the introduction.
Filaria by Brent Hayward, by Matt Denault (11/16/09): Filaria is not a work that dazzles with new ideas, rather it impresses by deploying a greater set of storytelling techniques than many better-known works, and in so doing renews the sense of wonder associated with familiar concepts of SF and horror.
Green by Jay Lake, by Kyra Smith (11/13/09): Lake attempts to wrestle with big themes—individual identity, gender and racial politics, gods and religion, and sexuality, to name but a few—but the overall impression is that he has bitten off more than he can chew.
Interfictions 2, edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, by T. S. Miller (11/11/09): What Interfictions 2 does offer is a set of stories that, if united by only the most tenuous thematic and generic threads, couldn't be more worth reading.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman, by John Clute (11/09/09): There was nothing exactly wrong at first, and hundreds of pages passed with nothing exactly going wrong; so why, at p.332, should the reader (this one, anyway) find himself baulking at the thought of reading even one more page, baulking for almost a month at clawing through the last few chapters of The Magicians?
Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, by Hallie O'Donovan (11/06/09): Shiver's flaws, weighed against one of the most engaging and emotionally involving reads I've had recently, are slight.
The Drowning City by Amanda Downum, by Kari Sperring (11/04/09): Downum takes us into that dark and dangerous territory pioneered by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber.
Ark by Stephen Baxter, by Jonathan McCalmont and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (11/02/09): Jonathan McCalmont: Is Baxter to be praised for his seemingly ever-increasing control over an array of themes and issues that few other authors bother to tackle? Or is he to be condemned for writing and re-writing the same kind of book over and over again?

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro: It travels much farther than its predecessor. It takes even bigger risks, and the emotional pay-off is consequently greater.
Orbus by Neal Asher, by Dan Hartland (10/30/09): In other words: I hate this book.
1942 by Robert Conroy, by Douglas W. Texter (10/28/09): Robert Conroy's alternate history of the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor serves as a morality play about good guys and bad guys.
The Black Mirror and Other Stories, edited by Franz Rottensteiner (trans. Mike Mitchell), by Adam Roberts (10/26/09): Overall: a very worthwhile collection of stories indeed.
Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, by Martin Lewis (10/23/09): A wonderfully versatile book.
Rampant by Diana Peterfreund, by Sara Polsky (10/21/09): Killer unicorns. I heard those words and Diana Peterfreund's fifth novel vaulted to the top of my to-be-read list.
House of Windows by John Langan and Slights by Kaaron Warren, by Richard Larson (10/19/09): The horror genre is lucky to have two new writers of such quality and ambition.
Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and China Mieville, by Michael Froggatt (10/16/09): It seems likely that this volume will remain more at home in the seminar rooms of cultural studies departments than on the bookshelves of interested lay-persons.
Tile by Maryanne Rose Papke, by Michael H. Payne (10/14/09): This one is just plain fun, the way it exemplifies abstract surrealism while still being a series of character-driven stories with odd little beginnings, middles, and ends.
The Stranger by Max Frei, by William Mingin (10/12/09): I want to give this book room to be its silly self. The Stranger's raison d'etre is pleasure.
Blood of the Mantis by Adrian Tchaikovsky, by Peter Whitfield (10/09/09): While the cast and overarching plot remain largely the same, the mood of the series changes enormously; turning gradually from optimistic light-heartedness and straightforward warfare towards political manipulation and the darker side of human nature.
Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, by Joel Zartman (10/07/09): The voyage to Arcturus on which David Lindsay takes his readers is a voyage worth taking.
Grazing the Long Acre by Gwyneth Jones, by Andy Sawyer (10/05/09): Grazing the Long Acre is a rich, rewarding collection by a writer at the height of her powers.
Darkborn by Alison Sinclair, by Hannah Strom-Martin (10/02/09): Sinclair spends most of her time in the drawing rooms and at the sickbeds of her characters, exploring their evolution as lovers, mothers and human beings.
The Resistance, by Muse, by Adam Roberts (09/30/09): Muse's new album is more than prog, and more than glancingly sciencefictional: it is intensely prog, and extremely sciencefictional.
Zadayi Red by Caleb Fox, by Karen Burnham (09/28/09): Zadayi Red begins with a woman, Sunoya, who's been having dreams.
The Fire in the Stone by Nicholas Ruddick, by Dan Hartland (09/25/09): Ruddick has provided an entertaining, rigorous, and most of all convincing study of prehistoric fiction.
The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw, by Kari Sperring (09/23/09): This is, have no doubt, a complex and accomplished first novel, and Shaw's voice is pure and true.
Two Views: Dollhouse, season one, by Bernadette Lynn Bosky and Gianduja Kiss (09/21/09): Bernadette Lynn Bosky: People have been made uncomfortable by Joss Whedon's series Dollhouse, as is only appropriate. We should be made nervous, even queasy, by both its premise and its execution, which demonstrate that Whedon has finally come of age as a science fiction writer.

Gianduja Kiss: The failure of Dollhouse to engage with the reality of what is happening to the dolls, and the responsibility of the Dollhouse's staff for it, presents a major stumbling block to thinking about the show on any other level.
The Lord of the Sands of Time by Issui Ogawa and All You Need is KILL by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, by Martin Lewis (09/18/09): Neither of these novels is going to set the world on fire, but their appearance in English is still an entirely welcome development.
District 9, by David J. Schwartz (09/16/09): District 9's metaphors are both its strength and its fatal flaw.
The New Uncanny edited by Sarah Eyre and Ra Page, by Paul Kincaid (09/14/09): This sense of alienation and menace generated by the familiar seems to me to be what is at the heart of the idea of the uncanny, and is what works most powerfully in the best stories in this collection.
One by Conrad Williams, by David McWilliam (09/11/09): This sombre, darkly majestic story of one man's journey into a post-apocalyptic Hell on Earth confirmed that my interest in the author's work was well placed.
The Gift of Joy, by Anil Menon (09/09/09): In the third-person stories, there is this sense that the grave events being recounted happened to a friend of a friend, in London, in Mozambique, in Brunei, in America, and that the next round of beer is perhaps—sure, why not?—definitely your turn, mate.
The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF edited by Mike Ashley, by Graham Sleight (09/07/09): The two questions that any reviewer has to ask are thrown into even sharper relief than usual. Does the book succeed on its own terms, those set out implicitly or explicitly by its author or editor? And what does the reviewer think of those goals?
Wireless by Charles Stross, by Nader Elhefnawy (09/04/09): Wireless gives a reader new to Stross a good sense of his major interests, themes and concerns.
Consorts of Heaven by Jaine Fenn, by Peter Whitfield (09/02/09): Marketed as a stand-alone novel in Jaine Fenn's Hidden Empire series, Consorts of Heaven finds it difficult to stand at all.
Amberlight and Riversend by Sylvia Kelso, by Abigail Nussbaum (08/31/09): If Amberlight and Riversend are feminist novels, they are no kind of feminism that I care for.
Nekropolis by Tim Waggoner, by Kyra Smith (08/28/09): You can almost picture the author hovering over his nouns like an over-protective mother: "Have you all got your adjective? Nobody leaves until everyone has an adjective."
Tides From the New Worlds by Tobias S. Buckell, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (08/26/09): He will likely continue to enjoy facing the rigors of the short form—and playing new arrangements of SF's power chords—for some time to come.
The New Space Opera 2, eds. Jonathan Strahan and Gardner Dozois, and Open Your Eyes by Paul Jessup, by Richard Larson (08/24/09): Perhaps the genre begs longevity, with characters participating in grand schemes in fully explored alternate worlds, the writers of such stories trying to balance the development of a rich setting with the creation of a fun and interesting narrative.
Zoo by Otsuichi, by Karen Burnham (08/21/09): In most of these stories, it is the psychological state of the narrator that is key.
Jasmyn by Alex Bell, by Angela Slatter (08/19/09): I felt myself torn between wanting to see what would happen next, and being so overwhelmed by problems with the writing that I just wanted to put the book down and walk away.
The Ask and The Answer by Patrick Ness, by Martin Lewis (08/17/09): The Ask And The Answer may be slower and less exhilarating to begin with than its predecessor but that is because it requires a fundamental change of mindset from the reader.
Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie, by Niall Harrison (08/14/09): I find myself having to ask: what kinds of truth does Best Served Cold steer close to?
The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, by Duncan Lawie (08/12/09): Above all, this is an accessible collection, an opportunity to experience the power of Michael Moorcock's prose without needing a training course in the Eternal Champion first. Be warned, however, that you'll be ready to dive deep into the Moorcock Multiverse afterwards, in search of another hit.
The Hungry Ghosts by Anne Berry and White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi, by Dan Hartland (08/10/09): A ghost is not some literary handwave, some cake the writer can have and then tuck into. Neither Berry or Oyeyemi make this mistake; but, whilst White is for Witching occasionally creaks under the strain of its own pretensions, it succeeds better than The Hungry Ghosts in, if you'll pardon the pun, giving life to its paranormal narrator.
The Laurentine Spy by Emily Gee, by Rosalind Casey (08/07/09): New Zealander Emily Gee's The Laurentine Spy is a book full of promise, or at least it makes a lot of them.
Torchwood: Children of Earth, by Roz Kaveney (08/05/09): How far do you go? and when do you say enough?
On Joanna Russ, edited by Farah Mendlesohn, by L. Timmel Duchamp (08/03/09): I hope this volume will pave the way for further study of Russ's work, for I enjoyed the time I spent with it immensely.
Blood of Ambrose by James Enge, by William Mingin (07/31/09): Given the loose and episodic nature of the Morlock stories, Enge hardly needs a set-up to tell more of them. He could conceivably keep on writing them for years. It's a happy thought.
Moon, by David J. Schwartz (07/29/09): In many respects Moon, Duncan Jones's first feature film, is the antithesis of the contemporary big-budget science fiction film.
Impossible Stories II by Zoran Živković, by Anil Menon (07/27/09): It takes a writer with considerable chutzpah, therefore, to offer us a collection of dreams that are also suicide notes.
Spook City: stories by Peter Atkins, Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell, edited by Angus Mackenzie, by Andy Sawyer (07/24/09): Is there something about Liverpool, which seems to call up more than its fair share of visionary writing?
Spiral Hunt by Margaret Ronald, by Hannah Strom-Martin (07/22/09): Next time Evie's on the prowl, you can count me in.
Traitor to the Crown by C. C. Finlay, by Paul Kincaid (07/20/09): I must stress that this is not a bad trilogy. It just feels slick and slight, as if the needs of the popular fantasy story have overwhelmed the dramas and challenges of the gripping historical story that forms its backdrop.
The Painting and the City by Robert Freeman Wexler, by Matt Denault (07/17/09): Wexler's new novel maintains a focus on character and on the surrealism of place, but breaks from the past in rejecting escape and in encompassing a scope greater than its individual protagonist.
The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, by Nick Hubble (07/15/09): This is a book which will last, informing and challenging scholars at all levels for many years to come.
The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham, by Gwyneth Jones (07/13/09): The Long Price is a lot more tightly packed than most moderately-conservative, stirring-yet-soothing fantasy trilogies. Is it too bleak and dense for the mass market audience? Too careless—on several levels—to gather a serious reputation? Time will tell.
Two Tastes of Paprika: Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel (trans. Andrew Driver), and Satoshi Kon's anime, by Martin Lewis (07/10/09): This review is backwards. Yasutaka Tsutsui's novel was published in Japan in 1993. Thirteen years later, it was filmed by Satoshi Kon. This year, it has finally been translated into English by Andrew Driver. (This is the third Tsutsui work to appear from Alma Books in recent years; Driver also translated his short story collection, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno, for them.) So I am not just reviewing a novel that is well into its second decade of life as if it is new; having already seen the adaptation, my original text is not the original text.
The Very Best of Gene Wolfe, by David McWilliam (07/08/09): Having not read the entirety of Gene Wolfe's body of short fiction, I cannot confirm whether the contents of this collection support the claim made by the title. However, the stories collected in The Very Best of Gene Wolfe—or, in the book's US edition, The Best of Gene Wolfe—would be considered to be very good by anyone's standards.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún by J. R. R. Tolkien, by Adam Roberts (07/06/09): Although Tolkien's meditations on Eddaic and heroic poetry are interesting, and although reading this book will certainly bring you closer to a number of interesting topics (the Volsung saga and the transmission of Old English and Old Norse poetry in particular)—it isn't in its own right a very effective piece of writing.
God of Clocks by Alan Campbell, by Martin Lewis (07/03/09): Before I get on to talking about what an exuberant, bloody and brilliant novel this is I need to first point out that God of Clocks is the final volume of the Deepgate Codex, concluding the trilogy that began with Scar Night and was continued by Iron Angel. And yet, I like it.
Legend of the Seeker, Season One, by Hannah Strom-Martin (07/01/09): Here's a frightening confession: I almost liked Legend of the Seeker.
Beyond Balram: Stories by Vandana Singh and Ian McDonald, by Dan Hartland (06/29/09): McDonald's concerns are avowedly science fictional, at first sight quite at odds with Singh's more mystical, at times barely more than metaphorical, approach. Yet each author in their own way allows science fiction to inform our imaginings of one of the planet's most important and exciting nations.
Ages of Wonder, edited by Julie E. Czerneda and Rob St. Martin, by Nader Elhefnawy (06/26/09): The old complaint goes that fantasy writing is rooted in a handful of concepts and milieus. Contemporary "urban fantasy" aside, Medieval Europe (and a simplistic, stereotyped version of it at that) is far and away the predominant one—as those hostile to the genre (prone to seeing it as all consisting of J.R.R. Tolkien knock-offs) often charge.
The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan, by Hallie O'Donovan (06/24/09): You know that painful feeling of being seriously out-of-step with the rest of the world? Not being satisfied with what makes almost everyone else content or even deeply happy? That's the experience Mary, the narrator of Carrie Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth, suffers through most of the book. It was also mine on reading some of the many glowing reviews the book has received since its US publication earlier this year.
Buyout by Alexander Irvine, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (06/22/09): I suspect most readers of this review are employed in ways enviably less difficult than one Martin Kindred, the protagonist of Alexander Irvine's highly enjoyable and gut-smart new novel.
Fast Ships, Black Sails, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, by Richard Larson (06/19/09): While there are plenty of risks taken and is plenty of originality to be found in the book, this is ultimately a no-frills collection of pirate stories.
Genesis by Bernard Beckett, by Jonathan McCalmont (06/17/09): This amalgamation of Platonic dialogue, Stapledonian fictional history and accessible SF prose yields rich rewards for Beckett right up until the book's climax where an undignified scramble for a conventionally satisfying ending comes dangerously close to undermining the entire work.
Up, by David J. Schwartz (06/15/09): It's not a new thing for Pixar to make stealth movies for adults in the guise of children's stories, but there is something particularly daring about Up's opening minutes
Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding, by Michael Levy (06/12/09): Retribution Falls doesn't do anything particularly groundbreaking or startlingly original, but it is great good fun.
Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress, by Niall Harrison (06/10/09): The mirror of the mind that produces life, indeed.
This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams, by Paul Raven (06/08/09): Long known as a genre-stretching writer, This Is Not a Game sees Walter Jon Williams stepping into the increasingly SF-adjacent demesne of the technothriller.
Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton, by Martin Lewis (06/04/09): Mark Charan Newton is clearly a writer who is still finding his voice. This is a fairly mealy-mouthed criticism but Nights Of Villjamur is a fairly mush-mouthed novel.
Blood and Ice by Robert Masello, by Duncan Lawie (06/03/09): When this book focuses on emotional truths, it is a good read; when it tries to convince the reader with facts, it is rather more frustrating.
Hoshruba, Book One: The Land and the Tilism, by Muhammad Husain Jah, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi, by Anil Menon (06/01/09): It has sorcerers, beautiful women, demons, kettle-drummers, paradisiacal gardens, beautiful women, lovers, wars, poem fights, beautiful women, magical devices, daring escapes, bazaar scenes, beautiful women, and of course, the promise of sequels with more of these very things. Twenty-three more volumes in fact, if the Urdu Project has its way.
Knife by R. J. Anderson, by Hallie O'Donovan (05/29/09): It may be apparent by now that in many ways this book could be called "old-fashioned," and it is, but not necessarily in the ways that might be expected.
Regenesis by C. J. Cherryh, by Nader Elhefnawy (05/27/09): Cyteen enjoyed widespread acclaim (as the endorsements on the back cover of my copy of Regenesis reminds me), and the awards it won include the Hugo for its year. Nonetheless, two decades is a long time, especially in science fiction.
Irons in the Fire by Juliet E. McKenna, by Nic Clarke (05/25/09): Irons in the Fire, the first in a new series from a new publisher for McKenna, is a typically rich, robust and unsentimental effort.
A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin, by Laura Blackwell (05/22/09): Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels takes many well-known ingredients—folklore, archetype-laden contemporary urban fantasy, role-playing games, comics, and action movies—and rolls them together into a clashing mess of flavors that never marry.
Star Trek, by Iain Clark (05/20/09): If I'm honest, the first time I heard they were recasting Kirk and Spock all I could think of was Steve Martin playing Sergeant Bilko. Or Steve Martin playing Inspector Clouseau. Neither of which are likely to go down in cinematic history as anything other than reasons to shake Steve Martin and shout "What were you thinking?"
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Season Two, by David Hines (05/18/09): The series found itself in the awkward position of figuring out what kind of show it was going to be while it was underway. This is always a bad position for a show to be in, but The Sarah Connor Chronicles was in a doubly bad spot: figuring out what kind of show it should be turned out to be really hard.
True Blood, season one, by Adam Roberts (05/15/09): It's worth watching, and it's easy to see why it has done as well Stateside as it has. Indeed, it rather feels as though the show has been assembled by a zeitgeist-mainlining committee, instead of adapted from Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire novels.
A Thread of Truth by Nina Allan, by Martin Lewis (05/13/09): It was with both anticipation and trepidation that I opened A Thread of Truth.
Battlestar Galactica: "Daybreak", by Roz Kaveney and Karen Meisner (05/11/09): Roz Kaveney: The eventual set of bad choices that produced Galactica's three-part finale "Daybreak" are both logical outcomes of things that were wrong with the show from the start and decisions that might not have been taken, had things gone otherwise.

Karen Meisner: There is heroism to be found in its characters, in their continual choice to keep dreaming of and trying for a better way of life. "Daybreak," the series finale, encapsulates both the futility and the greatness of that attempt.
The Accord by Keith Brooke, by Duncan Lawie (05/08/09): Brooke could easily have spent the whole book on this struggle, the decaying state of the Earth, and the consequences of the technology already on display. Instead, the second half of the book is v2.0.
Living with Ghosts by Kari Sperring, by Hannah Strom-Martin (05/06/09): Living with Ghosts, a dark fantasy of eldritch magic and political intrigue inspired by Alexander Dumas, has a murky premise and some even murkier prose, but the characters are so appealing that you hang on every twist of their carmined lips
Two Views: UFO in Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo, by Richard Larson and Karen Burnham (05/04/09): Richard Larson: UFO In Her Eyes paints a picture at once obvious and subtle, flatly on-the-nose about luminously complex ideas.

Karen Burnham: While it offers an interesting perspective on the way things work in China, it describes a place not as alien or different as perhaps one might think.
Far North by Marcel Theroux, by Dan Hartland (05/01/09): What all this amounts to is a novel which doesn't practice ambivalence without aiming for safety; a book with a number of cross-currents, which refuses to settle one way or the other, and one which derives its richness from these internal struggles: a weak dystopia, but an informed contribution; a gender puzzle but one uninterested in pushing the study further than the bounds of the character allows.
Patient Zero by Jonathan Maberry, by Colin Harvey (04/29/09): Patient Zero is a fast-paced thriller that's amongst the best of its genre.
The 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist, by Edward James (04/27/09): The judges, whose decision this year is announced on April 29, will be certain only that many people will regard their decision as wrong-headed, and that the more critical will note that the shortlist from which they made their final choice was selected in some strangely arcane manner.
Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Strahan, by James Trimarco (04/24/09): Although Eclipse Two contains three or four first-class pieces, the book as a whole is uneven in quality and sometimes oddly old-fashioned.
Fathom by Cherie Priest, by Sara Polsky (04/22/09): Cherie Priest's writing is the kind that pulls the reader under until she surfaces, many hours and missed train stops later, at the end of the book.
Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente, by Matt Denault (04/20/09): Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales was a tour de force of postmodern folktale, showing how a culture, and indeed a world, is constructed by an accumulation of stories that become history that become myth. Palimpsest, her newest novel, brings the same insight to the myths of the contemporary world.
Dragonfly Falling by Adrian Tchaikovsky, by Peter Whitfield (04/17/09): Gradually it becomes clear that the world Tchaikovsky has created is caught between two possible futures: continuous racial divide or all-inclusive cultural harmony.
Subterfuge, edited by Ian Whates, by Tanya Brown (04/15/09): Subterfuge got me thinking about what it takes to make a good contemporary genre story.
Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters by John Langan, by Abigail Nussbaum (04/13/09): Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters gives every indication that Langan is becoming an intriguing and accomplished writer, but as a work in its own right it isn't worth a reader's time and money.
The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros, by Paul Kincaid (04/10/09): There is simply too much going on in this novel for it to be entirely successful.
Marcher by Chris Beckett, by Niall Harrison (04/08/09): Marcher is a significant contribution to its subgenre.
Powers: Secret Histories, compiled and edited by John Berlyne, by Graham Sleight (04/06/09): This book is a labour of love, and nearly perfect in what it chooses to do. The only real questions are about those choices, about the boundaries they draw.
In Great Waters by Kit Whitfield, by Kari Sperring (04/03/09): There is an elephant in the room—in the pages: the world-building just does not work. Not for me, anyway.
The Good Humor Man by Andrew Fox, by Jonathan McCalmont (04/01/09): Fox's new novel, The Good Humor Man Or, Calorie 3501 marks something of a departure for him as it is a work of dystopian near-future SF. Well ... that is what it says on the tin.
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr, by Adam Roberts (03/30/09): In a year well supplied with detailed and long-considered critical accounts of SF, Csicsery-Ronay's The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction is by far the most substantial, most important and most thought-provoking.
Gullstruck Island by Frances Hardinge, by Farah Mendlesohn (03/27/09): What begins as one of the simpler of Hardinge's books grows in subtlety and complexity.
Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi, by Richard Larson (03/25/09): All of this is really fun to read about, because John Scalzi is at heart an entertainer, and he is at his best when he maps out big plots and sends his characters careening through them.
Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S Wilce, by William Mingin (03/23/09): Flora's Dare, the sequel to Wilce's first novel, Flora Segunda, represents a great stride forward in her ability to involve readers and keep the pages turning.
The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker, by Peter Whitfield (03/20/09): The question, though, is does The Judging Eye live up to the massive expectations forged by its predecessors? The short answer is, not really.
Rosa and the Veil of Gold by Kim Wilkins, by Hannah Strom-Martin (03/18/09): The strangest thing about Rosa and the Veil of Gold is Wilkins's choice of characters.
Mind Over Ship by David Marusek, by Paul Raven (03/16/09): I didn't notice a kitchen sink, but I'd not be surprised to find I had nearly stubbed my toe on it while busily gawking at something else.
The Adamantine Palace by Stephen Deas, by Nic Clarke (03/13/09): Dragons enslaved by humans by means of mind-controlling potions is an idea with explosive potential. And so, towards the end of the novel, it begins to prove; if there are future volumes, a dragonocalypse must surely be in the offing.
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry, by Karen Meisner (03/11/09): The fact is that The Manual of Detection is a singular creation.
Two Views: Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts, by Michael Froggatt and Abigail Nussbaum (03/09/09): Michael Froggatt: Blending madcap farce with dark satire, Yellow Blue Tibia immerses the reader in the labyrinthine bureaucratic nightmare that was the "developed socialism" of the early 1980s.

Abigail Nussbaum: It's traditional for reviews to make at least some vague gesture at an evaluation of their subject—is this book good, and what readers are likely to find it enjoyable? Yellow Blue Tibia has proven somewhat problematic on that front.
Journey into Space by Toby Litt, by Martin Lewis (03/06/09): Toby Litt is a smartarse (in the best possible way).
Iain M. Banks's The State of the Art, adapted for Radio 4 by Paul Cornell, by Farah Mendlesohn (03/04/09): One of the well trailered highlights of the season, airing on Thursday 5th May, is Paul Cornell's adaptation of Iain M. Banks's "The State of the Art," a novella from 1991.
The Company by K. J. Parker, by Niall Harrison (03/02/09): The Company is not a story about escaping to a new society; it is a story about how impossible such escape is.
Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox, by Kari Sperring (02/27/09): Densely plotted and lushly written, Dragon in Chains draws the reader into a world that is at once magical and real, familiar and strange, engaging and terrifying.
Poe, edited by Ellen Datlow, by Jonathan McCalmont (02/25/09): With the exception of pastiches—which were mercifully excluded—Datlow allowed her authors to take inspiration from anything surrounding Poe.
Gears of War: Aspho Fields by Karen Traviss, by Nader Elhefnawy (02/23/09): Traviss offers a surprisingly lightweight drama against a thinly sketched backdrop.
The Dragon's Nine Sons and Three Unbroken by Chris Roberson, by Duncan Lawie (02/20/09): Three quarters of the way through the second of these novels, I thought I'd left the book on the train. My concern at losing a review copy was mingled with my relief that I might not have to finish reading the thing.
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle, by Sara Polsky (02/18/09): What made the book most memorable for me, however, was not the storyline but the small moments of humor sprinkled throughout.
The Walls of the Universe by Paul Melko, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (02/16/09): The good news is that Paul Melko's second novel, The Walls of the Universe, is not a sequel to his first, Singularity's Ring. The bad news is that one almost wishes that it were.
Night Work by Thomas Glavinic, by Alan DeNiro (02/13/09): Night Work is the ultimate "what if" novel. One day, Jonas wakes up in Vienna to discover that everyone is missing.
Subtle Edens, edited by Allen Ashley, by Martin Lewis (02/11/09): Slipstream stories are easy to get wrong and perhaps, counterintuitively, deliberately setting out to write one is the worst thing you can do.
Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow, by Michael Froggatt (02/09/09): It has the feel of a shaggy-dog story, related at a breathless pace, which pauses only occasionally for moments of introspection or description, while relying on quick-fire dialogue to keep its audacious, high-concept narrative in motion.
The Night Children by Kit Reed, by Michael Levy (02/06/09): In The Night Children Reed is working interesting variations on a number of standard fantasy motifs and previously published works of fiction.
City at the End of Time by Greg Bear, by Tony Keen (02/04/09): Its reception, at least in America, has often been favourable. It has appeared on a number of "best of 2008" lists, and I am resigned to it being on the next Hugo ballot.
The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, by Richard Larson (02/02/09): Andrew Davidson's The Gargoyle, a debut novel that explores concepts like the timelessness of love and "the redemptive power of suffering" (straight from the press notes), is annoyingly self-conscious from the start.
Long Walks, Last Flights and other Strange Journeys by Ken Scholes, by Niall Harrison (01/30/09): In general Scholes is an unfussy writer in the manner of a Stephen King or a Neil Gaiman—although not, yet, as consistent as either—focused above all on getting a story told.
Just After Sunset by Stephen King, by Colin Harvey (01/28/09): It's fascinating that the best stories in Just After Sunset are of intermediate length, as if King needs space to develop his ideas, but needs confinement to prevent them losing their impact or over-spilling into grotesquerie.
Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones, by Paul Kincaid (01/26/09): Spirit is, I think, possibly the best thing Gwyneth Jones has written since the original Aleutian trilogy. But it is a novel whose strength wanes the longer it goes on.
The Bell at Sealey Head by Patricia A. McKillip, by Hannah Strom-Martin (01/23/09): McKillip's knack for finding magic in intimate settings is prominently on display in her latest novel, The Bell at Sealey Head, a story in which the simple act of opening the door to the linen closet is fraught with enchanting potential.
Going Under by Justina Robson, by Kari Sperring (01/21/09): Robson is neither sentimental nor self-indulgent and her depiction of her heroine is clear-eyed. She doesn't require us to like Lila or admire her. But—to this female reviewer at least—this series is the best feminist SF in years.
Watermind by M. M. Buckner, by L. Timmel Duchamp (01/19/09): In short, M.M. Buckner's Watermind is fun, if utterly frivolous and a bit wearing in the way prolonged amphetamine use is.
The Chronicles of the Black Company by Glen Cook, by Martin Lewis (01/16/09): It is perhaps the biggest backhanded compliment imaginable to say something is only of historical interest. The Chronicles of the Black Company is of greater interest than that, but it is certainly no masterpiece.
The Spirit, by William Mingin (01/14/09): Frank Miller has played fair with his source material in making The Spirit; it's a pity the film doesn't succeed.
The Best of Lucius Shepard, by Victoria Hoyle (01/12/09): There is an instructive story behind this review; a parable of sorts, about the dangers of making snap critical judgements in the light of very little evidence.
METAtropolis edited by John Scalzi, by Farah Mendlesohn (01/09/09): Much of METAtropolis works very well; there is a sense of a world beyond the tale. However, the stories feel designed to show off the world, rather than to be consequences of the world: for too much of the time we are being given a tour of Utopia.
Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin, by Adam Roberts (01/07/09): I enjoyed this novel more than any Le Guin since the 1970s; and that (it's almost tautological to add this) means that I enjoyed it more than pretty much any novel since the 1970s. It possesses a depth, clarity and wonder greater than most of the fiction being published nowadays.
2008 In Review, by Our Reviewers (01/05/09): We asked our reviewers to pick their SF-related highs and lows of 2008—books, films, tv, anything. This is what they said.
Queen of K'n-Yan by Asamatsu Ken, translated by Kathleen Taji, by Kari Sperring (12/24/08): Did I like it? I'm not sure. I admired it, and am glad that I read it. Should more works by Asamatsu be translated into English, I'd be interested to read them.
Voices From Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited and wth poems by Theodora Goss, by Karen J. Weyant (12/23/08): What is most intriguing and impressive about this anthology is the sense of range and breadth it conveys.
Other Worlds, Better Lives: A Howard Waldrop Reader—Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003, by Graham Sleight (12/22/08): Sometimes, what everyone knows is true. Howard Waldrop's body of fantastic fiction is uniquely fascinating and rewarding, and he deserves all the plaudits he's received for it.
The Last Book by Zoran Živković, by Matt Denault (12/19/08): This is a novel that requires detective work, and ultimately its strength lies in its very un-genre acknowledgement that there is a world beyond its covers.
Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery, by Abigail Nussbaum (12/17/08): The publicity material for Liberation quite understandably makes much of the prescience and topicality of its premise, but in doing so seems to misrepresent the novel's goals and strengths.
Half a Crown by Jo Walton, by John Clute (12/15/08): The truth of the matter is that the ending of Half a Crown must be an insult to any reader who thought Small Change was going to have something adult to submit about the matters it purports to address.
Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet by Gregory Frost, by Michael Levy (12/12/08): Telling tales is what Shadowbridge the novel and its sequel, Lord Tophet, are all about.
Winterstrike by Liz Williams, by David McWilliam (12/10/08): Winterstrike offers up a mixture of gothic fantasy and space opera that succeeds and fails to engage in roughly equal measures.
The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum, by Dan Hartland (12/08/08): So Rosenbaum is a writer not without promise, who from time to time manages to spin all his plates simultaneously. More often, one or other flings itself to the ground, and the audience might understandably drift away. But at least he is trying to perform the trick, which is in no small part the quality which makes a writer worth watching.
The Engine's Child by Holly Phillips, by Hannah Strom-Martin (12/03/08): Canadian author Holly Phillips has already been nominated for a World Fantasy Award, for her debut short story collection In the Palace of Repose (2005). With the publication of her second full-length novel, The Engine's Child, expect to see Ms. Phillips's name on the shortlist once more.
Dead Set, by Martin Lewis (12/01/08): The fact that Dead Set, shown on five consecutive nights and released in an approximation of a feature-length DVD, is a zombie drama set in the Big Brother house is not as surprising as it might at first appear.
Song of Time by Ian R. MacLeod, by Adam Roberts (12/01/08): It doesn't quite work, either as a novel or as a meditation, but it's an ambitious piece of writing for all that.
Fast Foward 2, edited by Lou Anders, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (11/28/08): This collection may be all about fast forwarding, but with material this strong, it's worth hitting slow mo and zoom.
Twelve Collections and The Teashop by Zoran Živković, by Lara Buckerton (11/26/08): Živković is pretty smart, though comparisons with Kafka or even Borges or Bernhard are premature at least. The fasttracked absurdity of Paul di Filippo meets the accessible intricacy of Haruki Murakami? Comparisons are tough. Check him out.
Very Bad Deaths and Very Hard Choices by Spider Robinson, by Greg Beatty (11/24/08): Taken together, both the successes and failures of these books point to some of Robinson's defining characteristics.
The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson, by Sara Polsky (11/21/08): Like much of the best SF, The Adoration of Jenna Fox posits a different world and then explores many of its facets. As in the best young adult fiction, that exploration is twined with Jenna's struggles to fit into a body and a world that feel inexplicably different.
The Angel Maker by Stefan Brijs, by Paul Kincaid (11/19/08): The Angel Maker, first published in Dutch in 2005 and now available in a superb translation by Hester Velmans, is one of the most complex novels I have read in a long time, and also, not coincidentally, one of the most satisfying.
Button, Button by Richard Matheson, by William Mingin (11/17/08): The stories in Button, Button give a fairly good sample of Matheson's short story work and are generally representative of a particular strain of genre fiction of the period.
The Temporal Void by Peter F. Hamilton, by Karen Burnham (11/14/08): Hamilton gives us unadulterated adventure sf—with some fantasy tropes mixed in—and although it has some of the problems associated with that forlorn not-the-fun-introduction-but-not-the-climax-either status of second books, it's good stuff.
The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl, by Nader Elhefnawy (11/12/08): While this is not the book I would present to readers looking for their first contact with Clarke's work, longtime fans looking just to spend a few more hours in the master's company will not regret the read.
A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, eds. Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg, by Richard Larson (11/10/08): If surrealism was a revolutionary movement representative of the liberation of a previously dormant collective imagination, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany, edited by Jason Erik Lundberg and Janet Chui (who also contributed striking illustrations), a lovely little book encompassing a vast collaborative collage of imagined plant specimens, is a quiet inversion, a patient investigation of the fantastic in literature.
The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, by Martin Lewis (11/07/08): This is the best effing science fiction novel I've read all year.
Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key by Kage Baker, by Donna Royston (11/05/08): All in all, Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key has much to recommend it: a sprightly adventure, deft touches of humor, and involving characters.
The Middleman, by Roz Kaveney (11/03/08): Pleasure is common in this world, but delight is rare. The particular excellence of the ABC Family network show The MiddleMan is that it provides both—pleasures that one can describe and quantify, and moments of utter delight that it is hard to provide an entirely rational account of, moments that cause one to sit blowing little bubbles of glee, too happy to be thinking.
The Last Reef and other stories by Gareth L. Powell, by Gene Melzack (10/31/08): This collection may not have been the best showcase for Powell's writing, but his is a name that will pique my interest, should I see it on a magazine cover in future.
The Wiscon Chronicles, volume 2, edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Eileen Gunn, by Hannah Strom-Martin (10/29/08): I've never attended a WisCon, but having read the essays, presentation transcripts, and Guest of Honor speeches compiled in The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 2: Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution and the future, I think a trip to Madison will soon be in order.
Blonde Roots by Bernadine Evaristo, by Gwyneth Jones (10/27/08): Bernadine Evaristo uses a sharp edge, not a bludgeon. Her vivid, deceptively casual style has the precision of her poetry. I've no doubt that she could have made a simple skin-tone reversal of the slave trade story, set in a straightforward alternate 18th century, gripping. Blonde Roots, however, is something else.
Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, and Extraordinary Engines, edited by Nick Gevers, by Duncan Lawie (10/24/08): Steampunk: what is it? Perhaps for many people today it is most easily recognised by (pseudo-)Victorian dress or a laptop encased in brass. The New York Times recently discussed the subject in its Fashion section with barely a reference to fiction. So it's interesting to see the arrival of two anthologies that aim to shine the spotlight on steampunk as literature.
Filter House by Nisi Shawl, by Matthew Cheney (10/22/08): Filter House collects fourteen stories that are generally thoughtful, often skillfully written, and yet, with only occasional and fleeting exception, lifeless.
Dangerous Laughter: 13 Stories by Steven Millhauser, by Paul Kincaid (10/20/08): No understanding of the possibilities and opportunities presented by the fantastic can be complete without knowing the work of Steven Millhauser.
Realms: the first year of Clarkesworld Magazine, edited by Nick Mamatas and Sean Wallace, by William Mingin (10/17/08): I read the first twelve issues of Clarkesworld Magazine more or less as they came out, October 2006 to September 2007. Each issue featured two short stories (literally—there was only one piece over 7500 words the entire year), with no frills except a "cover" illustration (recent issues include more stories and articles, essays, and interviews). This focus on stories alone worked because they are what so many genre magazine stories are not: memorable.
Two Views: Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory, by Amy O'Loughlin and Dan Hartland (10/15/08): Amy O'Loughlin: Pandemonium is intriguing, challenging, and stirring. If there are too many instances of Del running his hand through his hair (p.128, 196, 208, 232, 272), a few go-nowhere passages, and a few extraneous characters, they are forgivable. Gregory has produced a debut novel that combines suspense, philosophical conundrums, Jungian psychological theory, aspects of American pop culture, and a touch of neuroscience with skillful and ambitious storytelling.

Dan Hartland: to be entirely successful, a plot's journey forward cannot be divorced from its theme, and by leaving his concepts ossified Gregory robs them of some of their potency. He falls too readily for the novelty of the mash-up, forgetting that the most successful aren't just diverting, arch or amusing, but are also transformative.
An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe, by Adam Roberts (10/13/08): I've now read this novel twice and I'm still not entirely sure what exactly is going on, or whether it's any good or not. Since reviews are largely in the business of giving readers a sense of what a novel is about and whether it is any good, this may prove problematic.
The Turing Test by Chris Beckett, by Colin Harvey (10/10/08): Like a British Philip K. Dick, with whom Beckett has been compared, the protagonists of these stories, whether they inhabit bucolic colonies, dark Edens, or world-spanning metropolises, must cut through the (often) literally shifting nature of reality to strive to understand their place in the universe.
Paper Cities: an anthology of urban fantasy, edited by Ekaterina Sedia, by Maureen Kincaid Speller (10/08/08): Every anthology has some sort of purpose, be it a survey of the year's best fiction, a collection of stories the editor particularly liked, or, as in this case, an exploration of a specific theme. Here the assumption is, presumably, that by the end of the anthology, the reader will have some idea about what urban fantasy actually is.
Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia, by L. Timmel Duchamp (10/06/08): The publisher reproduces Jess Nevins's signature at the end of his introduction, as though to impress upon the reader the credibility and authenticity of his final claim that "If Paper Cities is any indication of second-generation Urban Fantasy—and I believe it is—both the mode of storytelling and the subgenre have a bright future" (p. 5). I sincerely hope that, Nevins's signed attestation to the contrary, the anthology isn't an indication of what "second-generation Urban Fantasy" is or might be, for it's hard to believe anyone would rate it an improvement over, say, Emma Bull's War of the Oaks (1987), the quintessential work of Urban Fantasy.
The Quiet War by Paul McAuley, by Abigail Nussbaum (10/03/08): After spending the early and mid-oughts writing near-future technothrillers, Paul McAuley returns to his roots with The Quiet War, the first volume in a new space opera series.
Unwelcome Bodies by Jennifer Pelland, by Tanya Brown (10/01/08): Jennifer Pelland is a relatively new writer—the first of these stories was published in 2003—but has already made a mark on the genre short story scene.
The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan, by Graham Sleight (09/29/08): The Steel Remains, Richard Morgan's sixth novel and his first to be marketed as fantasy, is a very odd book.
The Luminous Depths by David Herter, by Finn Dempster (09/26/08): Baxter calls it "a page-turning cracker of a horror story" and, whilst it certainly is that, the description really only goes part-way toward classifying a stubbornly unclassifiable story which contains elements of fantasy and magic realism.
Superpowers by David J Schwartz, by Karen Burnham (09/24/08): I did not like Superpowers as much as I'd hoped. I found it easy to put down and harder than average to pick back up. I've been a bit hard-pressed to express just why this is; it's not a bad book by any means, but it lacks something, or perhaps lacks a little in several areas.
The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, by Nic Clarke (09/22/08): In Hollywood terms, it's high concept: in a world where religion is banned, what happens when robots find God?
Year Million, edited by Damien Broderick, by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (09/19/08): These wondrous vistas challenge us to stretch our understanding of the real—and, beyond that, the possible, blurring all distinctions between the two. As it should be, in the Year Million.
Midnight Never Come by Marie Brennan, by R. J. Burgess (09/17/08): Reading like a weird mix between Neil Gaiman and Philippa Gregory, the novel carves itself a niche somewhere between historical court intrigue and magical otherworldliness. And it's a niche that's exploited well.
Sideways in Crime edited by Lou Anders, by William Mingin (09/15/08): There is, simply, a (similar) intellectual enjoyment to be found in mystery, alternate history, and science fiction proper that some readers find compellingly pleasant, and certainly some of the stories in Sideways in Crime are pleasing. Several are fun to read; the best are intriguing, amusing, even charming in the conceits they put forward, the speculations they arouse. But the devil is in the details, and none of these stories is flawless, a few of them fail, and a couple of them are shoddy.
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, by Jonathan McCalmont (09/12/08): The universality of The Gone Away World's media coverage would not bother me, however, except for the fact that it has been universally positive. Mercifully (for the sake of my misanthropy), while The Gone Away World is a book that has a lot going for it, it is by no means flawless.
Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams, by Dustin Kurtz (09/10/08): Walter Jon Williams's latest novel is a strange beast. Stitched together with coarse thread are the twitching limbs of high fantasy, hard-edged military sci-fi, political intrigue, and Benford or Clarke-esque glimpses of something beyond. The beast functions well enough—running jumping, eating your children—but some reeking wounds where thigh was grafted to torso, antenna to eye socket, are more fully healed than others.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson, by Martin Lewis (09/08/08): Anathem is a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness.
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, by David McWilliam (09/05/08): Atmospheric Disturbances certainly lends itself to many alternative readings, but for me the novel's main success is in depicting the inexorable dissipation of a relationship between two people.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz, by Dan Hartland (09/03/08): Imagine, if you will, the Salman Rushdie of geek culture. Done that? Good. You probably now know whether you're going to like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
Wit's End/The Case of the Imaginary Detective by Karen Joy Fowler, by Abigail Nussbaum (09/01/08): The real life of this novel is lived in the meta-level, in its observations about mystery writing, writing in general, and, as I've already noted, the relationship between an author and her characters, an author and her readers, and readers with their beloved characters. Viewed in this light, Wit's End is an interesting novel, and a cleverly constructed one. It is not, however, particularly intelligent.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Ellen Datlow, by Richard Larson (08/29/08): The anthology as a whole deserves acclaim for its willingness to take chances by presenting ambitious and complex work that could have failed in the hands of weaker writers.
The Roswell Poems by Rane Arroyo, by Karen J. Weyant (08/27/08): Rane Arroyo, in his first book of speculative poetry book, asks, "Something happened in that obscure town, something happened that is still with us in the 21st century—but what?"
Neuropath by Scott Bakker and Blindsight by Peter Watts, by Nader Elhefnawy (08/25/08): Whereas Bakker's novel derives much of its impact from its narrow scope and no-frills future, Watts's bigger canvas proves essential to telling his "macro" tale about what such a diminished premium on sentience might mean from the standpoint of the history of life in this universe.
Year's Bests edited by Jonathan Strahan, and David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer, by Karen Burnham (08/22/08): The books I have before me are Jonathan Strahan's The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Two, David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's Year's Best Fantasy 8, and the Year's Best Science Fiction 13 from the same duo. The differences between the volumes are interesting for what they imply about the current trends in the field.
Everything is Sinister by David Llewellyn and The Heritage by Will Ashon, by Martin Lewis (08/20/08): There is a strong seam of disgust running through contemporary British fiction. Predominately masculine in nature, it is a disgust directed primarily at the vapidity of the world that surrounds it. At the same time a fair portion is directed inwards: we are all fiddling whilst Rome burns.
Speculative Japan, edited by Gene van Troyer and Grania Davis, by Niall Harrison (08/18/08): This anthology—published last year to mark the first Japanese Worldcon—is intimidatingly generous.
Sputnik Caledonia by Andrew Crumey, by Michael Froggatt (08/15/08): Sputnik Caledonia's greatest strength lies in the rich and contrasting portraits of the two universes it envisions, and once it gets properly underway it provides a thought-provoking twist on its familiar theme.
Iron Angel by Alan Campbell, by Finn Dempster (08/13/08): When I reviewed Scar Night a while back I gave it a glowing review, so I approached its sequel Iron Angel with fairly high expectations. Happily, these were pretty much met.
The X-Files: I Want to Believe, by Abigail Nussbaum (08/11/08): I Want to Believe is an odd artifact—on the one hand, clearly aiming for and relying on viewers' nostalgia and lingering love for Mulder and Scully, and on the other leaving out much of what made The X-Files and its characters appealing to just those people it is trying to draw back in.
Escapement by Jay Lake, by Paul Kincaid (08/08/08): What we have read so far barely skims the surface of the moral and religious issues thrown up by the setting, and if future novels are going to improve at the rate we have witnessed in these first two, then they are going to be rewarding in the extreme.
The Affinity Bridge by George Mann, by Hannah Strom-Martin (08/06/08): Ultimately, the questions Mann leaves his readers to ponder (why are there so many zombies in London? And why is Queen Victoria so interested in robots?), as well as a subtle-but-impressive twist ending, will certainly entice them back for the sequel.
Collected Poems by Mervyn Peake, by Adam Roberts (08/04/08): The poetry provides, as the book's own blurb puts it, "a dazzling link between the fantasy world of Gormenghast and the narrative of Peake's own life and the turbulent times he lived in." Anybody with the remotest interest in Peake should buy this book.
The Ninth Circle by Alex Bell, by Tanya Brown (08/01/08): As The Ninth Circle progresses, the layers of reality begin to bleed into one another to such an extent that it's hard to tell whether the focus of the novel is some Miltonian epic of good and evil, or one man's quest to discover the truth about his past.
The Sharing Knife: Passage by Lois McMaster Bujold, by Greg Beatty (07/30/08): I love Lois McMaster Bujold, but The Sharing Knife: Passage suffers from an absence of malice.
Hello Summer, Goodbye and I Remember Pallahaxi by Michael G. Coney, by Colin Harvey (07/28/08): For those readers who are prepared to look for the clues buried in the text, who prefer their novels to defy the default commercial narrative structure, both books have much to commend them, not least classic love stories and some outstanding world-building.
Martin Martin's on the Other Side by Mark Wernham, by Jonathan McCalmont (07/25/08): Martin Martin's on the Other Side is the debut novel by Mark Wernham, a former music and lifestyle journalist. It has appeared from a mainstream publisher and it has received warmly if not volcanically glowing newspaper responses, including the claim that it is "a dark, brilliantly funny satire from a maverick new talent who clearly has a lot to say about these interesting times we live in." However, this undeniably makes the book sound more substantial than it is. I'll agree to "funny," but I think some of the rest may be a touch charitable.
Lost Boys by James Miller, by Martin Lewis (07/23/08): Although Lost Boys talks the talk of a "day after tomorrow" political thriller, it walks a rather different walk, one signalled by a couple of other words on the jacket: "apocalyptic fable."
Two Views: The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper, by Nic Clarke and Sherryl Vint (07/21/08): Nic Clarke: The Tepperverse remains gratifying as liberal wish-fulfilment, but The Margarets is also its most satisfying embodiment as a novel in ten years

Sherryl Vint: Ultimately, Tepper does enough to make us consider how different the people we see around us every day are to the humans in her novel, which leaves us with the question that matters: what can we do?
Elric: The Stealer of Souls (Chronicles of the Last Emperor of Melniboné: Volume 1) by Michael Moorcock, by Nader Elhefnawy (07/18/08): As Michael Moorcock has related, he developed a knack early on for the 15,000-word novella, which he was able to knock off in a day and thereby pay a month's rent. The Elric stories began as such novellas for Science Fantasy magazine and were only later assembled into books, a course of development reflected in this latest reissue.
The Princes of the Golden Cage by Nathalie Mallet, by Hannah Strom-Martin (07/16/08): The phrase "Golden Cage" refers to a well-documented feature of a Sultan's palace: namely, a section of living quarters, removed from the rest of the court, where all legitimate male heirs were sequestered during their father's rule. Think of it as Solitary Confinement for the Rich and Famous.
Flood by Stephen Baxter, by Adam Roberts (07/14/08): It turns out this is the way the world ends: neither with a bang nor a whimper, but a splosh. Baxter's new novel is, in several senses, a storming disaster tale—his best book for a long time, actually. It's a splendid and engrossing read and a thought-provoking whole to boot.
Omega by Christopher Evans, by Paul Kincaid (07/11/08): We can only hope that Evans's triumphant return to science fiction is a harbinger of yet another revival in his writing.
Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell, by Niall Harrison (07/09/08): The remarkable thing about Mary Doria Russell's beginnings is their clarity.
Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction by Lisa Yaszek, by Maureen Kincaid Speller (07/07/08): Yaszek's intention is to recover the work of the post-war generation of female writers and reaffirm its historical significance.
Shadow Gate by Kate Elliott, by Juliet E. McKenna (07/04/08): Crucially, as the story unfolds, we begin to hope ordinary individuals might achieve things through intelligent co-operation that a more noticeable mighty hero could not.
On Spoiling the Fourth Season of Battlestar Galactica, by Roz Kaveney (07/02/08): We watch Battlestar Galactica for the space battles and the sudden revelations and reversals, of course, but the question has to be asked: why do we end up caring so much?
An Experimental Life: books by and about Naomi Mitchison, by Nic Clarke (06/30/08): There are so many points of fascination in the long life of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999) that one could probably write any number of biographical volumes concentrating on different aspects of her experiences without much danger of overlap.
Celebration, edited by Ian Whates, by Graham Sleight (06/27/08): In fact, that's the main charge to be made against the stories in this anthology. Very few are actively bad, and plenty of them are perfectly competent, but only some are distinctive enough to really stay in the memory.
The Philosopher's Apprentice by James Morrow, by Abigail Nussbaum (06/25/08): With The Philosopher's Apprentice Morrow appears to be aiming less for laughs than for a sense of otherworldliness, or unreality, that goes beyond fantasy
Singularity's Ring by Paul Melko, by Gwyneth Jones (06/23/08): Singularity's Ring is not about neurology, but it's as well to keep the science in mind, if you want to grasp both the strangeness and the validity of Paul Melko's concept.
Drinking the Blood of the Dead: The Nines, Southland Tales and Doomsday, by Martin Lewis (06/20/08): In the mid-Eighties, music critic Dave Quantick wrote in the NME that "pop will eat itself." And then, to hammer home his point, along came a band and named themselves after this quote. It is hard not to think of this sort of rabid self-cannibalisation when watching any of these three science fiction films
The Ex Files: The Lost Tales and the return of Babylon 5, by Iain Clark (06/18/08): Babylon 5 is one of my old TV flames, and now, after all this time, here it is again. It's tempting to wonder why, of all the gin joints in all the world, it had to walk into mine.
Torchwood, season two, by Tim Phipps (06/16/08): Imagine for a second, if you will, that you're a TV show yourself. Let's narrow the field a bit—picture yourself as a programme from the same fictional universe as Doctor Who. You're having a nice evening with your other half, you've enjoyed a good meal and some fine wine, and now things are getting a little more... intimate. When the phone rings at some crucial moment, what do you do?
Principles of Angels by Jaine Fenn, by Dan Hartland (06/13/08): My favourite misjudgement has to be one of the marketing bullets on the back cover: "Female SF writers are a rarity; good ones even scarcer!" Sadly, Principles of Angels is so far from the company of the myriad novels which could be used to rebut this hopelessly bonkers bit of puff that I was left wondering if the sub-editor wasn't having a knowing giggle at Gollancz's expense.
Darkmans by Nicola Barker, by Alan DeNiro (06/11/08): Darkmans is full of paradoxes. It sprawls with little in the way of plot, and yet offers tons of narrative satisfaction.
Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn, by John Clute (06/09/08): May I say how much I like this book before I make it clear that I cannot say how much I like this book? Rhetorics of Fantasy, most of which is superbly thought through, is perhaps the first full-length study of the vast fuzzy genre of fantasy to have been written as though the genre exists.
Incandescence by Greg Egan, by Adam Roberts (06/06/08): Feature Week: Greg Egan

Adam Roberts: Egan’s new book is about finding stuff out, and that is both its appeal and the ground of its weakness.
Quarantine and Teranesia by Greg Egan, by Colin Harvey (06/04/08): Feature Week: Greg Egan

Colin Harvey: Egan may or may not have become a better SF writer as his career progressed, but he certainly became a more impressive novelist.
Axiomatic and Dark Integers by Greg Egan, by Karen Burnham (06/02/08): Feature Week: Greg Egan

Karen Burnham: It feels as if there are two Greg Egans. One is so excited about whatever amazing piece of esoteric science he's imagined that he just can't resist writing a story about it. Then there's the lesser known Egan who uses straightforward extrapolation, usually of biology and computer modeling, to examine "what if" questions of identity and ethics.
Dark Blood by John Meaney, by Duncan Lawie (05/30/08): The flesh of Dark Blood is that of a detective novel. This can be difficult to manage convincingly in science fiction, but the hard work of building the universe in the first book is repaid here: we now have a conception of normality within the setting so we can seek clues ourselves and attempt to get ahead of Riordan.
The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert VS Redick, by Colin Harvey (05/28/08): The originality of creatures such as the Flikkermen—people with electric eel-like qualities glimpsed for barely a dozen pages—will doubtless win Redick many readers; yet ultimately the very quality of his work was why I felt so ambivalent when I finished the book.
Superheroes! by Roz Kaveney, by Tony Keen (05/26/08): Any future scholarly article on superheroes that does not reference Kaveney just won’t have been done properly.
Blood in the Fruit by L. Timmel Duchamp, by Lesley A. Hall (05/23/08): Blood in the Fruit is not a comfortable read: it goes to some very dark places indeed, although never pruriently lingers on pain and suffering in a gratuitous fashion. But it is a very rewarding one.
Iron Man, by Iain Clark (05/21/08): Kids will think the effects are cool (they are), and comic book fans will get a buzz from the in-jokes (there are many), but this is a mainstream film aimed squarely at an adult audience who wouldn't be seen dead holding a comic. It's a fun, violent, sexy, entirely lightweight piece of entertainment.
The Baum Plan for Financial Independence by John Kessel, by Dustin Kurtz (05/19/08): Kessel's protagonists are all malcontents, victims. They are out of place. At odds with those around them. They feel misunderstood and helpless. Their thoughts are full of angst and resentment. They do not understand themselves. The trick, of course, is that they are understood perfectly—written to be so—by us, even in their moments of confusion and mania.
Juan Antonio Bayona's El Orfanato: a Psychiatric Review, by McCalmont J and Harrison N (05/16/08): Though not as obviously fraudulent as some, the subject nonetheless shows little signs of real distress. Her symptoms are limited to attempts at mimicking other more notably disturbed individuals and the value of further treatment is questionable.
Suspects by David Thomson, by Graham Sleight (05/14/08): Suspects is the sort of book whose nature and generic location are especially difficult to fix.
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds, by Dan Hartland (05/12/08): Reynolds manages space opera that does not read like farce.
The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford, by Michael Levy (05/09/08): We're not dealing with some damn metaphor or allegory. The things that happened, really happened. But what they mean, well, that's anyone's guess, and therein, I think, lies the novel's wonder.
Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie, by Larry Nolen (05/07/08): Concluding volumes of epic fantasy trilogies are expected to contain an action-filled payoff and, for the most part, Last Argument of Kings fulfills this expectation.
What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid, by Martin Lewis (05/05/08): Kincaid displays a flexible, proportionate style and—like David Langford, who provides the introduction to this volume—he is erudite, demotic, and not afraid to put the boot in when necessary.
The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes, by Lisa Goldstein (05/02/08): At this point the story starts to read like a collaboration between Terry Pratchett and Vlad the Impaler, with additional dialog by H. P. Lovecraft, as the two men head out into the streets of London and proceed to kill everyone in sight.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist -- Part Two, by Abigail Nussbaum (04/30/08): What should win?
The 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist -- Part One, by Abigail Nussbaum (04/28/08): No matter what your definition of science fiction, there is almost certainly at least one book on the 2008 Clarke shortlist that won't meet it.
Dark Space by Marianne de Pierres, by R. J. Burgess (04/25/08): Occasionally, the net is cast slightly too narrow, by which I mean that the gap between the galaxy-spanning presence of God and this tiny desert world seems simply too vast to match the two together; but in the novel's second half it's very easy not to care about such things as you sit back and simply allow yourself to be carried along for the ride.
Wildwood Dancing and Cybele's Secret by Juliet Marillier, by Hannah Strom-Martin (04/23/08): Delightful is the word for Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing and Cybele's Secret, the first two books in what promises to be a compelling historical fantasy series for young adults.
The Starry Rift edited by Jonathan Strahan, by Karen Burnham (04/21/08): Any imaginative child (between the ages of say, 10 and 14, depending on the kid) should find stories here to enjoy. There is a wide variety of styles and sub-genres on display, and also plenty of recommendations for what to read next.
Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett, by Jason Erik Lundberg (04/18/08): Bangkok Haunts is a fast read, but one that stays in the mind long afterward, plaguing the senses with the smell of curries, or the flashing lights of Soi Cowboy, or the startling sadness of silent Khmer guards.
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf by Victor Pelevin, by Michael Froggatt (04/16/08): More obviously than his earlier works, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf demonstrates Pelevin's unease with Russia's increasingly authoritarian political system.
Matter by Iain M. Banks, by Gwyneth Jones (04/14/08): It’s been a long time in real-world politics since the last Culture novel. As I followed the adventures of the princess, and her brothers, I wondered what new corrective the story would deliver, so as not to give comfort to the war-mongers of the twenty-first century.
Worshipping Small Gods by Richard Parks, by Richard Larson (04/11/08): The contents of Worshipping Small Gods are drawn from a relatively short period (2002—2005, plus one story from 1996), and while some of the stories are quite strong, others feel like the same story, or at least a very similar story, recycled and repackaged. Fortunately, however, the gems are worth rooting around for.
Last Dragon by J.M. McDermott, by Michael Levy (04/09/08): First the basics—we're dealing with a very grim secondary universe here. Magic is present, but relatively low key and rarely fun. There were literal dragons once, but they're all dead. In general most people have it bloody awful.
The Bone Key by Sarah Monette, by L. Timmel Duchamp (04/07/08): What reader hasn’t been bedeviled by the experience of finding the verisimilitude of a book’s characters and world trickling away the farther one gets into the book? For the reader who’s also a writer, it’s a frightening experience. That, one inevitably thinks in horror, could be my book!
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, by Iain Clark (04/04/08): Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is none of the series you feared you might get when someone had the misconceived notion to remake Terminator 2 for TV. It's actually good.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, by Farah Mendlesohn (04/02/08): Doctorow revels in what he has set out to do, which is simply to place in the hands of every school child a manual which could be subtitled "how to bring down your government and enjoy doing it."
The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick, by John Clute (03/31/08): This book packs more ethnics than Ellis Island. They have emigrated from all the melting pots of story, and here they are in Babel, which is very much like the Manhattan of 1910 (and other years) transfigured into an enormity of Edifice: diced, braided, mirrored, eschered, bigger inside than out: pure urban fantasy.
Ascendancies by Bruce Sterling, by Nader Elhefnawy (03/28/08): Three decades after Sterling first appeared on the scene Ascendancies brings together twenty-three of his best-known and most highly praised short stories and novelettes, spanning the entirety of his career.
Rewired, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, by Roz Kaveney (03/26/08): Rewired is a chastened collection of stories that inhabit a science fiction that is penitential in tone; guessing the worst that might happen is no longer a game when all too often you kind of got it right.
The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton, by Bruce Sterling (03/24/08): The Shock of the Old has one big, strong argument, and a host of smaller contrarian ones. These are all raids on the twentieth century's ideas of technological common sense, which Dr. Edgerton terms "passé futurism."
Black Sheep by Ben Peek, by Martin Lewis (03/21/08): If you've seen a copy of the book you might be surprised it's taken me so long to get around to talking about race, because one of the first things you are likely to think when you read the back cover is that this is a book inextricably linked to the subject. Actually though, it turns out to be little more than window dressing.
The William L. Crawford Award Shortlist: Part Two, by Victoria Hoyle (03/19/08): Reading the Crawford Award nominees has proved more interesting than I imagined. Certainly the breadth has been greater than I ever expected it to be, and that must be a strength. But it has left me asking questions about the validity of the prize’s broad criteria.
The 2008 William L. Crawford Award Shortlist: Part One, by Victoria Hoyle (03/17/08): The William L. Crawford Award for First Fantasy Book has selection criteria almost as sprawling as the Tiptree. Any debut fiction, published in the last 12 months and designated as "fantasy" by the selection panel, is eligible for consideration, no matter its form or intended audience. A brief glance at this year’s shortlist, announced in January, will demonstrate the difficulties inherent in such all-embracing vagueness. It includes: two short story collections, one short story sequence-cum-novel, one children’s book and one (arguably young adult) novel.
Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick, by Adam Roberts (03/14/08): A sense of something hidden, something underground and flourishing in the interstices, like bluebells growing in the cracks of the pavement (or blooms of mors ontologica in amongst the corn) energises his fiction. It's this something that has kept his books alive when better written, better structured and better plotted novels have fallen into obscurity around them.
Halting State by Charles Stross, by David V. Barrett (03/12/08): Many years ago you read an interesting short story, in an SF anthology edited by George Hay, that was written in the second person (Perry A. Chapdelaine's "Someday You'll Be Rich!" in The Disappearing Future). It was an unusual conceit, and it worked—just—at short length. Now you're sent a novel for review, and you open it and find that the entire thing is written in the second person—in fact, in three separate voices of the second person. And you wonder: Why?
A Sword From Red Ice by J.V. Jones, by Nic Clarke (03/10/08): Red Ice is not an inevitable damp squib, precisely, but it is certainly a book with hurdles to overcome, some of which are extrinsic to the words on the page. That it fails at certain points is hardly surprising, but even if it is more uneven than its predecessors—and in terms of pacing a clear victim of middle volume syndrome—there is plenty here to enjoy.
Weaver by Stephen Baxter, by Jonathan McCalmont (03/07/08): Weaver is a book of considerable intelligence and subtlety that uses an alternative Second World War as a backdrop against which to explore the role, both in the macrocosm and the microcosm of history, of the conflict between ideology and expediency. Weaver is a book devoted to the concept of moral compromise.
Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh, by Richard Larson (03/05/08): Of Love and Other Monsters is primarily a story of immigration, of being foreign and displaced in a strange environment. Arun experiences a great deal of anxiety and loneliness when he realizes that no one in the world, save one, could ever really understand him.
Pump Six and Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi, by Abigail Nussbaum (03/03/08): The horror that runs through Pump Six is the kind that is at the very core, or perhaps origins, of science fiction. It's the horror Victor Frankenstein feels when he gazes at his creation and knows it for a monster. It's the horror the monster feels when it realizes that it is just human enough to know how inhuman it truly is.
The Fade by Chris Wooding, by Colin Harvey (02/29/08): Whether The Fade is fantasy or science fiction, it's quite simply the best speculative fiction novel of 2007 that I've read.
Rome Burning by Sophia McDougall, by Tony Keen (02/27/08): But plainly SF is not where the particular branch of Orion that McDougall is signed up to wishes to place the Romanitas series. From the packaging and advertising, it would appear that the lengthy works are aimed at the airport novel market, and the sort of people who buy Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler novels.
Swiftly by Adam Roberts, by Dan Hartland (02/25/08): If Roberts has explicated Swift's surreal world with wit and not a little learning, he has also in no small part written a book equal parts adventure story and social commentary. Its philosophy is Swift's, but its success is all Roberts's own.
Ragamuffin by Tobias Buckell, by Paul Kincaid (02/22/08): If you wouldn't choose to recommend this book as a representative of the intellectual or literary heights that science fiction might achieve, it is at least a damned good example of something at the very core of the genre. This is where we grew up from, and if science fiction has gone off in many different directions since then it is still good to know that something so basic to the genre still has this much life in it.
Precious Dragon and Bloodmind by Liz Williams, by Donna Royston (02/20/08): You can anticipate certain strengths from a novel by Liz Williams. An inventive plot—that's a given. A vivid and detailed imagining of setting—that can be expected, also. Wide-ranging action, usually brisk and well paced, is also assured. These qualities are shared by two very different novels: Precious Dragon, a light fantasy with comedic touches, and Bloodmind, a dark SF narrative. In one case, the result is satisfying; in the other, this reader was left feeling that something was wanting.
Duma Key by Stephen King, by Adam Roberts (02/18/08): This novel reads like classic King; and his one-armed naïf-painter protagonist Freemantle whose phantom limb is more phantom than most, is a compelling and memorable creation.
The SFWA European Hall of Fame, edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow, by Martin Lewis (02/15/08): The anthology's aim—to publish in translation non-English language European SF stories from the last twenty years or so—is laudable. (Europe is, of course, an imaginary place that means different things to different people but here it is given the standard "Continental" gloss and is assumed to spread from Portugal to Russia. Poor old Iceland.)
Kéthani by Eric Brown, by Michael Levy (02/13/08): Kéthani is a decent book. It's worth reading, especially if you like Brown's fiction, or if you're particularly interested in the theme of immortality or the venerable trope of aliens coming to Earth bearing gifts. It is not, however, anything particularly groundbreaking.
Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, by Paul Raven (02/11/08): I had high hopes for Philip Palmer's Debatable Space. A new science fiction novel from Orbit? A novel from a new author represented by none other than John Jarrold, an agent who knows his genre onions? A novel billed by the press release as "ideal for readers of high concept space opera," no less? And it arrived just before the holidays—perfect timing. This would be a fine book to savour in front of an open fire for a day or two, I thought.

Hence I was rather disappointed that I had to force myself to read beyond the novel’s first third.
disLOCATIONS edited by Ian Whates, by Duncan Lawie (02/08/08): DisLOCATIONS is firmly in the middle ground of current British SF. It could be accused of being a little unadventurous, but that's is almost a way of saying that none of the stories are failures.
The Long Price, Book One: Shadow and Betrayal by Daniel Abraham, by Siobhan Carroll (02/06/08): To be a Poet is to have freedom, power, and terrible responsibility, for as the few men able to capture a concept in words and make it do their bidding, they are the most powerful magicians in the world. The price of their power is a lifetime dedicated to serving their city and a relationship to a concept, or “andat,” that resembles that of a master to his slave.
Cloverfield, by Roz Kaveney (02/04/08): There are movies, to enjoy which, you have to turn off your brain; Cloverfield is a movie that turns your brain off for you.
Dangerous Offspring by Steph Swainston, by David Soyka (02/01/08): In an interview at UKSF Booknews, Steph Swainston describes Dangerous Offspring, the latest installment in her Castle series as "still a complete novel in its own right and is intended to be read on its own—so new readers shouldn't be afraid of starting here." Well, I'm not so sure.
Mindscape by Andrea Hairston, by Nader Elhefnawy (01/30/08): Hairston's premise, consequently, combines two long-standing science fiction traditions—the plumbing of the human reaction to the unknown and inscrutable, and the cultural clash between radically different, isolated cultures.
Bad Blood by Rhiannon Lassiter, by Nic Clarke (01/28/08): Lassiter writes well, generating the brooding, unsettling atmosphere with considerable skill. The cobwebbed recesses of the house and the overgrown paths of the neighbouring woodland are continually disorientating; the skies over both are invariably overcast, and night draws in all too quickly.
Blood Engines by T. A. Pratt, by Hannah Strom-Martin (01/25/08): Blood Engines is an urban fantasy starring kick-ass “crime lord” sorceress Marla Mason. She is paired with Rondeau, a friendly and often horny spirit who has adopted human form, and a washed-out TV actor nicknamed B, who has the ability to speak to spirits. Over the course of the tale, the three must grapple with body-switching Chinese sorcerers in Chinatown, a Pornomancer in the Castro, and assorted witches, gods, and cannibals, who pop up in unlikely places.
One for Sorrow by Christopher Barzak, by Richard Larson (01/23/08): In his debut novel, One For Sorrow, Barzak has written a love story about death, and life; a story about being dead and then being alive again—a story, indeed, about ghosts. And the writing is best when he describes his ghostly Youngstown itself.
Ink by Hal Duncan and In The Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne M. Valente, by Dan Hartland (01/21/08): Hal Duncan, his style reminding me more of John Brunner's hectoring polemicist Chad Mulligan than a Virgil for our age, cannot marry in his heady, ultimately painful, duology the twin demands of multi-part narrative and compelling storytelling. He writes like a hippo. Catherynne M. Valente, on the other, enchants and enlightens in equal measure.
The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller, by R. J. Burgess (01/18/08): In many ways, then, The Awakened Mage can be seen as a copy of much that has gone before. However, it's what Miller does with these traditional tropes that makes this series more than just a re-hash.
Stealing Light by Gary Gibson, by Colin Harvey (01/16/08): Gary Gibson is the latest entrant in the British New Space Opera revival; Stealing Light is his third novel, following the release of Angel Stations and Against Gravity, and is expected to be his "breakout book." As such there are pressures on Gibson to deliver a commercial hit, and he has probably done so—although whether there is a cost to commercial success is debatable.
Gateways to Forever: the story of the science-fiction magazines from 1970 to 1980 by Mike Ashley, by William Mingin (01/14/08): Mike Ashley tells us in the preface to Gateways to Forever that he intended his history of the science-fiction magazines to be a trilogy complete in this volume. But he found the '70s to be too rich and complex a time to fit into one book with everything that came afterward. And so we have a volume of nearly 400 pages with another hundred pages of apparatus, including many appendices, for this decade alone. The more the merrier! My enjoyment and interest in the book did not flag.
Till Human Voices Wake Us by Mark Budz, by Abigail Nussbaum (01/11/08): The back-cover blurb for Till Human Voices Wake Us inexplicably calls the novel a thriller. This blatant piece of misinformation only serves to draw attention to the fact that it is almost completely lacking in tension. As the characters are so forgettable and Budz's prose so indifferent, there's nothing left for us but to mentally hurry him on.
The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua, by Martin Lewis (01/09/08): This isn't a novel you can get an easy grip on; like the famous elephant surrounded by blind men, its shape and texture suggest differing beasts depending on where you grab it. Literary thriller and domestic drama, thought experiment and drug trip, cyberpunk and technopagan, satire and prophecy. It is almost as if de Abaitua is worried that he will only get one chance and has consequently crammed all his ideas into one novel.
2007 In Review, by Our Reviewers (01/07/08): We asked our reviewers to pick their SF-related highs and lows of 2007—books, films, tv, anything. This is what they said.
Dark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany, by Paul Kincaid (12/20/07): Feature Week: Samuel R Delany

Paul Kincaid: And so we come to the perennial problem of criticism and biography. How much is it legitimate to read knowledge (possibly privileged knowledge) of a person's life into their fiction? How much is it legitimate for a critic to allow their own biography to colour their readings of a particular text, a particular author?
About Writing: 7 essays, 4 letters, & 5 interviews by Samuel R. Delany, by L. Timmel Duchamp (12/19/07): Feature Week: Samuel R Delany

L. Timmel Duchamp: Like all of Delany's work, About Writing is vivid, passionate, and provocative. After first reading its 419 pages in December 2005, I've returned to the book again and again. Delany warns in his preface that "this is a book for serious creative writers." And so it is. But I recommend it also to all people who want more from their reading than simply entertainment; i.e., all serious readers.
Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories by Samuel R. Delany, by Graham Sleight (12/18/07): Feature Week: Samuel R Delany

Graham Sleight: Delany's work, here and elsewhere (most obviously in Dhalgren) is about the limits of the old positivistic SF urge to "make sense" of the world. There's a long passage explaining another art-form in this world, that of the Singers; it begins, "Singers are people who look at things, then go and tell people what they've seen." What they've seen: not tell people "about the world" or "the truth," but what has registered with their subjectivity. That begs a question: if, for Delany, subjective knowledge is the only kind of knowledge, to what extent are these stories transfigured autobiography?
Night and Day: The Place of Equinox in Samuel R. Delany's Oeuvre, by Matthew Cheney (12/17/07): Feature Week: Samuel R Delany

Matthew Cheney: That Equinox has not had the same sort of attention as its predecessors is hardly surprising, and not just because the original edition and the 1994 reissue (under Delany's preferred title) can be difficult to find. The book is pornography, and tells the tale of various cartoonish characters in search of endless orgasms and orgies, who encounter all manner of sex and sexuality, some of it violent.
The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman, by Karen Burnham (12/14/07): "Low-key" describes most of this book. It is very short and easy to read and completely lacks the emotional intensity and drive of The Forever War. Where that book describes a soldier caught up by circumstance and flung into the future despite himself, Matt, while not exactly a boldly going explorer, at least has basic control of his destiny. He chooses which path he will take, even if he makes stupid choices.
Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff, by Michael Levy (12/12/07): Is a story realistic or fantastic? The answer may vary from person to person and depend more on the life experiences and specific reading protocols that each reader brings to the text than on anything in the story itself. Matt Ruff is a writer who loves to skate that boundary.
The Pesthouse by Jim Crace and The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall, by Victoria Hoyle (12/10/07): Listening to the attendant hype, or reading the innumerable interviews with the authors in the mainstream press, you would be forgiven for thinking that the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it was more topical in 2007 than it has ever been before. Which isn't true, of course. These stories of the end and what comes afterwards are heirs to some of the founding narratives of Western culture. The anticipation of humanity's impending doom is deeply ingrained in our psyches: it is the front-page story that will not die. Terrorism, climate change, nuclear war—these are just the latest in a long line of potential catalysts to the end times. Once we feared God's almighty capacity to destroy us; now we fear our own. But the stories we tell about it have hardly changed at all. Open any of the above novels and what you will find is basically a variation, for better or for worse, on Noah's Ark.
Not Flesh Nor Feathers by Cherie Priest, by J.C. Runolfson (12/07/07): The ending of Not Flesh Nor Feathers shows Eden preparing to take a new direction in life, very different from the plans she made before the flood and its consequences. It's a good point at which to draw the trilogy to a close, and Priest leaves her conclusion bittersweet and untidy, in keeping with the atmosphere of the series.
The Terror by Dan Simmons, by Adam Roberts (12/05/07): Were I tasked to movie-pitch Dan Simmons's new novel (and what a splendid blockbuster it would make) I might try Jaws on Ice—except that makes it sound like a crew of professional skaters in spangly costumes tangling with a rubber-costumed monster, which it assuredly isn't.
The Engineer Trilogy by KJ Parker, by Farah Mendlesohn (12/03/07): The trilogy format of Parker's work is deceptive: it both does, and doesn't conform to recognisable fantasy trajectories. Yes, in almost all of the books there is at least one person who rises to power or moves towards the centre of the action; there is always big landscape; there are wars and many nameless people die. But the stories which form the plot are interlocked through future, present and past. Parker writes stories in which individuals become enmeshed in the machine, and in which economics is the god on which all the principals are sacrificed.
Thirteen/Black Man by Richard K. Morgan, by Sherryl Vint (11/30/07): This is a novel that wants to make us think about violence, about the hard masculinity we admire so much, and about the prejudice which is so often a justification for violence and a way of performing masculinity.
The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia, by Nic Clarke (11/28/07): Two currents shape the novel. The first is that the reader is presented with a classic fantasy protagonist in this modern-day urban setting: the outsider, the Cassandra, always correct but never believed, who resents her powers for the way they have marginalised her, even if she never doubts their reality. The second is a broader motif—of disappearance, of forgetting, of denial, all enforced or encouraged or allowed under silence—and it flows through both story and setting.
Battlestar Galactica: Razor, by Abigail Nussbaum (11/26/07): Far more egregious are the blows that "Razor" strikes against "Pegasus," and the flawed, complicated woman at its core. Written when Galactica was still at the height of its complexity, "Pegasus" worked hard to avoid easy indictment or approval of Cain's actions. She came off as a person who had gone astray, who had spent so long struggling to survive that she forgot to wonder what she was surviving for, and whose self-identity as a soldier had taken precedence over the soldier's purpose—to protect the state and its citizens. This is not the character as "Razor" presents her.
Divergence by Tony Ballantyne, by Duncan Lawie (11/23/07): There is a cool distance in the writing, as though the narrator is drawing the plot neatly to avoid confusing the audience with all the things they don't need to know. This engenders a rather passive voice, which results in emotions being described rather than experienced. Indeed, a significant part of the the thesis of Divergence can only be presented once the fog of emotions has been blown clear.
Of Tales and Enigmas by Minsoo Kang, by Justin Howe (11/21/07): Minsoo Kang is Korean by birth but has spent much of his life traveling the globe. He's a historian by training and belongs to that circle of Asian authors who have consciously adopted the styles of Western genre fiction. He ends stories with quotes from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges, and he's written stories that draw attention to the fact that they are stories.
Beowulf, by Roz Kaveney (11/19/07): For the director, then, this is in part a film not just about story, but about the techniques through which story is told; given that epic as we know it is always a bastardized form in which mechanisms derived from oral culture are transferred across into literary culture, this is fair enough.
9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, by Alex Saltman (11/16/07): Since the mood of cyberpunk itself evolved from hardboiled detective fiction, it's unsurprising that Grimwood has written an entertaining noir. 9Tail Fox has all the lean prose, sex, and violence that implies, with one real innovation—the hero is dead.
The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, edited by Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link, by Michael Levy (11/14/07): There are odd comments from the editors that seem to have been included just for the hell of it, including an apology for any chocolate stains that may appear on the book; a short contributor's note for the long-dead British writer Hilaire Belloc (whose work does not appear anywhere within these covers); and a note on selling out. And there are lists, a wide variety of them, including someone's favorite music, and a selection of teas from the LCRW kitchen. This is all inspired silliness but hardly reason enough to shell out $14.95 plus tax to buy the book. Reason to do that, however, is provided by the fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron, by William Mingin (11/12/07): This nutshell summary doesn't convey the fairly complex narrative stratagems Barron employs, the levels of layered detail, and the real sense of dread he evokes. His manner is aimed at a more literate, sophisticated audience than this pulpy plot would seem to indicate; at his best, he gives the best of both worlds.
Navigator by Stephen Baxter, by Jonathan McCalmont (11/09/07): With each new book in this series, Baxter has become better and better at engaging with historical ideas and theories. While Emperor spent too much time dealing with Roman technology and Conqueror struggled to rise above historical and archaeological data, Navigator is a mature work from a writer completely at ease with not only historical fact but historical analysis too.
Shelter by Susan Palwick, by Richard Larson (11/07/07): Although it takes place decades in the future, Shelter is surprisingly old-fashioned, almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail while chronicling what is essentially a family history—a domestic drama, a story about connectedness and the building of a family through the action of simply participating in the same narrative, playing a part in the same story.
Getting to Know You by David Marusek, by Adam Roberts (11/05/07): Getting to Know You's pleasures certainly outweigh its occasional drags. The buzz is that David Marusek is an author to watch, and given SF's propensity for troping the past as the future, it may well be that the solidly Campbellian mode of his storytelling will come into its own in the years to come.
Soldier of Sidon by Gene Wolfe, by Tony Keen (11/02/07): Feature Week: The 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

Tony Keen: For me, what Gene Wolfe does is capture the ordinariness of the encounters with deities. The gods want various things done for them, but there are no great epic narratives, no wars of gods and men—just immortals going about their business in much the same way as mortals.
In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, by Dan Hartland (11/01/07): Feature Week: The 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

Dan Hartland: In the Night Garden is the first volume in a duology, concluded later this year with In the Cities of Coin and Spice. It has already won the 2006 Tiptree Award (together with Shelley Jackson's Half Life), and its nomination for the World Fantasy Award is richly deserved.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, by Victoria Hoyle (10/31/07): Feature Week: The 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

Victoria Hoyle: One hundred and fifty pages into The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch's World Fantasy Award-nominated debut, I remembered why I love fantasy novels. Not because they're strongholds of comfort, or repositories of nostalgia (although they are); or because they allow us to "escape" the real world, or even because they give the reader permission to confront the essential clichés of theme—love, grief, evil, goodness—without flinching (although they do). But because when they're well done, really well done, they're vivid and glittering works of the imagination's art: they blow the walls off buildings, take the lid off the sky and remake the world. Believe me when I say that The Lies of Locke Lamora is very well done indeed.
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner, by Nic Clarke (10/30/07): Feature Week: The 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

Nic Clarke: It's a man's world. Yes, still. How else could Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword—a vastly entertaining bildungsroman, told as a novel of manners with a judicious amount of swashbuckling—be so easily dismissed by one blogger as "fantasy chick lit"? The main character is a young woman, and there are a couple of references to shoes, it is true. The setting is also largely urban, a generous amount of tears are shed (a girl is raped; this upsets her), and certain characters do indeed fall in love or at any rate have sex (both pastimes being, as I understand it, quite common among human beings). The fact that it is also pacy, witty, filled with politicking and swordfights, and essentially a coming-of-age story, is apparently irrelevant. Men's stories are universal, after all; women's are niche (and fluffy).
Lisey's Story by Stephen King, by Farah Mendlesohn (10/29/07): Feature Week: The 2007 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel

Farah Mendlesohn: My choice for "worst book I have ever read from beginning to end" has stood for a very long time, but this week it has surely been displaced. Stephen King, a writer I admire hugely, whose work I teach and recommend, has produced perhaps the most embarrassing load of twaddle I have ever been forced to complete.
Legends of the Fall: Television's newest SF shows, by K. Tempest Bradford (10/25/07): The American fall TV season has brought us seven new SF shows to vie for our attention. As often with television, the majority of these shows aren't particularly good. It's not too harsh to say that a few of them are utter crap. That said, at least two of them are really good, and one has problems but may end up better than it started.
The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton, by Karen Burnham (10/24/07): There may not be much poetry in The Dreaming Void—mostly the sentences exist to convey information, to fill the spaces between dialogue, and to move the plot from A to B—but one doesn't read Hamilton for the language.
The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, by Hannah Strom-Martin (10/23/07): Fifteen minutes into the film, it is apparent that Cunningham, the shameless raconteur behind The Path to 9/11, has no interest in staying true to Cooper’s work, if, in fact he has even read it. This is especially apparent in his treatment of Cooper’s characters.
The Country You Have Never Seen by Joanna Russ, by Sarah Monette (10/22/07): I have a weakness for good literary criticism—the kind that is trenchant and witty and intellectually rigorous, but also passionately and personally felt—and Joanna Russ hits all my buttons, lighting me up like a pinball machine.
Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin, by Lisa Goldstein (10/19/07): Even with only three volumes, though, it's possible to trace some of the themes running through the Western Shore series, and to see the ways in which the stories mirror each other.
The Ultimates and The Ultimates 2, by Tony Keen (10/17/07): It's entirely appropriate that this review is a few months late, because if Ultimates was famous for anything, it was missing planned publication dates. In 2002, Ultimates #1 appeared. Five years, but only twenty-six issues (and one annual), later, Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch finished their story. In between came one of the most talked-about superhero comics for several years.
Two Views: Spaceman Blues: A Love Song by Brian Francis Slattery, by Martin Lewis and Rose Fox (10/15/07): Martin Lewis: As always, you can judge a book by its cover. The back of the pretty little proof copy of Spaceman Blues carries a selection of helpful information for your faithful reviewer. This includes the fact that Spaceman Blues will have "national print advertising in The New Yorker." Not your average Tor novel then.

Rose Fox: Much as wild animals are best appreciated in their natural habitat, Slattery's version of New York and its inhabitants is at its best when encountered on the 1 train heading south from the Bronx, while it's still aboveground and rocketing past rag-curtained tenement windows and the occasional marble edifice left over from Inwood's glory days as a suburb for the wealthy Dutch
Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley, by Hannah Strom-Martin (10/12/07): In Dragonhaven, Robin McKinley departs from the fairy-tale mode which made her earlier novels so notable and tries something new: entering the heart, mind, and world of a modern fifteen-year-old boy. It's an interesting choice, and much like riding on the back of a giant dragon, it can leave you feeling out of sorts.
The Revenge of the Elves by Gary Alan Wassner, by Brian Malone (10/10/07): Let us be honest: odds are good that you may not have heard of Gary Wassner or the Gemquest series of books. Understandably. The freshman effort of a previously unknown author, issued by a small press without the marketing juice of a major publisher, Gemquest is tailor-made for obscurity.
Land of the Headless and Splinter by Adam Roberts, by Victoria Hoyle (10/08/07): Earlier this year Adam Roberts was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award with his survivalist space saga, Gradisil. He has followed up that success with not one but two novels in the last ten months, Land of the Headless and Splinter. And he has written both while also holding down a full time academic post, blogging (at the inestimably literary Valve, as well as elsewhere), and reviewing in his spare time. If he was churning out the SF equivalent of a James Patterson thriller I would still be impressed; but as it is—Splinter being one of the most beautifully written and sensitively themed novels I've read all year—I'm somewhat boggled. I begin to suspect he has some kind of literary superpower.
Settling Accounts: In at the Death by Harry Turtledove, by Nader Elhefnawy (10/05/07): After ten years and as many volumes, readers of what some fans have taken to calling the Timeline 191 series will no doubt be anxious to lay hands on what the blurb trumpets as "the thunderous conclusion" to "the most ambitious saga of [Turtledove's] long and storied career" and indeed, "one of the greatest sagas ever to portray an America that almost was"—Harry Turtledove's Settling Accounts: In at the Death.
Two Views: No Humans Involved by Kelley Armstrong, by Genevieve Williams and Colin Harvey (10/03/07): Genevieve Williams: A newcomer to Kelley Armstrong's Otherworld, so thickly populated with ghosts, demons, werewolves, necromancers, and other supernatural beasties, might be forgiven for wondering where ordinary people fit in. The title of Armstrong's latest supernatural thriller/romance, however, puts the answer to that question beyond all doubt.

Colin Harvey: From the point of view of a new reader, while the main protagonists and the television characters are well drawn, the supporting cast felt sketchy. Of course, Armstrong faces a dilemma here: spend too much time telling new readers about Hope and the other protagonists of earlier books, and she not only slows down the story but also risks her regular readers switching off.
Trust Me, I'm a Fabulator: Three Books, by Dan Hartland (10/01/07): Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth by Ben Peek, The Fate of Mice by Susan Palwick, and The Modern World/Dangerous Offspring by Steph Swainston

Under the entry for "Truthiness" in Twenty-Six Lies and One Truth, Ben Peek asks, "What is it that I have the authority to write about?" In the age of the Internet, authority is a topic much discussed, but ultimately it seems a question incorrectly framed. The question should be: what is it that a writer has the passion to write about?
The Innocent Mage (Kingmaker Kingbreaker Book One) by Karen Miller, by R. J. Burgess (09/28/07): This two-part fantasy series should keep fans of Trudi Canavan and Robin Hobb more than happy. Karen Miller’s world of Lur is an expansive, well-drawn, and believable place made all the more accessible by an easygoing prose style that you can’t help but get drawn into. There’s nothing particularly new about her depiction of a prosperous land shielded from evil by magic, but a strong cast of identifiable characters breathes new life into the clichés.
Cowboy Angels by Paul McAuley, by Michael Levy (09/26/07): I’m not criticizing the move towards thrillers in and of itself. Unfortunately, however, in McAuley’s case, as in the case of Greg Bear, the result has been less interesting books. Not bad books, you must understand. Simply less interesting ones.
Ice and Guilty by Anna Kavan, by Abigail Nussbaum (09/24/07): Coming away from Guilty and Ice, one has the impression of an author whose fiction should be read not for its fine details—for well-drawn characters, believable settings, or clever dialogue—but for its emotional effect. In this respect, Kavan is nothing less than a revelation.
The Sharing Knife: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold, by Donna Royston (09/21/07): The first book, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, concluded with the forbidden marriage of Dag Redwing and Fawn Bluefield, the two main characters, and now, in Book Two, we see the consequences.
Stardust, by David J. Schwartz (09/19/07): Perhaps it is axiomatic, but it may as well be said up front: the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess's Stardust: Being A Romance Within The Realm of Faerie is not as good as the illustrated novel. It's not a fair comparison, obviously; a book is not a film, and vice versa. That seems to be the clear attitude of the filmmakers, who've taken nearly every opportunity to turn up the story's volume with big effects and big fights. The result is a film that is perfectly entertaining and, for the most part, perfectly forgettable.
It Happened Otherwise? Three Alternate Histories, by Paul Kincaid (09/17/07): In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan, The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter, and Resistance by Owen Sheers.

Why do we write—and read—alternate histories? What draws us to stories of our past turned around, re-set in strange ways that never were?
The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker, by Lisa Goldstein (09/14/07): Plotlines are tied up, lost characters are found, puzzles are solved. Even that much, these days, is grounds for rejoicing. But there is a good deal more to this book; it has twists and turns aplenty, surprises going off bangbangbang like fireworks.
Selling Out by Justina Robson, by David Soyka (09/12/07): Selling Out seems to suggest that what keeps us human is not so much the stuff of which we are made, but the stuff of our relationships.
Titan by Ben Bova, by Adam Roberts (09/10/07): Titan is one of the blandest pieces of fiction I have come across in three decades of reading novels. If the Campbell shortlist is a high-class curry restaurant of delicious, spicy, and stimulating food, then Titan is a single slice of white bread and margarine on a white plate under the neon light of a truck drivers' café.
Mike Carey's The Devil You Know and Vicious Circle, by Laura Blackwell (09/07/07): Anyone who enjoyed Mike Carey's writing in his Lucifer and Hellblazer graphic novels will not be disappointed by his first two prose novels. His plotting is tight, and his dialogue crackles. Both books are hard to put down. Carey's matter-of-fact approach to imaginative horrors makes them powerful without seeming lurid or voyeuristic.
Polyphony 6, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, by Paul Kincaid (09/05/07): We grow tired. The world and its doings now excite not engagement, not rage, not even despair, but rather a weary resignation. Even the pulse of creativity seems to have slowed. Or such is what we take from the latest iteration of Polyphony.
Best American Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, by Gwyneth Jones (09/03/07): What is "best," what is "American," what is "fantasy"? As Matthew Cheney points out (getting the disclaimers in swiftly!), in his preface to the first volume of a new series, none of these terms has a stable definition.
Steven Moffat's Jekyll, by Colin Harvey (08/31/07): Jekyll has caused genuine consternation among viewers; one said to me, "I don't know whether to dismiss it as utter crap or to call it a masterpiece. Which is it?"
The Man With the Golden Torc by Simon R. Green, by William Mingin (08/29/07): Green is a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction, generally in series, who has published over 30 books in the last 20 years or so. His writing is workmanlike (he's improved over the years), but has a certain snap and verve to it, helped along by his hero being a wise-ass, as he is here and in much of Green's work.
Spook Country by William Gibson, by Graham Sleight (08/27/07): Plato’s argument is that we humans, chained in the cave, cannot perceive the Real directly, only its shadows on the wall. I know of no SF author who (consciously or unconsciously) adheres more closely to this aesthetic, that what can be described is only what can be perceived, than William Gibson.
Bone Song by John Meaney, by Duncan Lawie (08/24/07): Meaney sets the tone of Bone Song very effectively. Tristopolis is a city powered by bones, and many of its citizens will go to the reactors after they die. But not all of them.
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, by Martin Lewis (08/22/07): Red Seas Under Red Skies shows every sign of being the work of an author who has rolled up his sleeves, put his feet up, and settled in for the long haul. When you turn the final page of the book there is nothing approaching closure; instead you get the impression you have just finished the opening gambit. Much as with the first book in the sequence, in fact, but without the same excuse.
Fantasy, edited by Paul G. Tremblay and Sean Wallace, by Nic Clarke (08/20/07): This new anthology is not a "best of" the magazine, but rather sets out to showcase "short fiction of the type that can be found" in it. In other words, the stories have not previously been published in the magazine, although some of the authors have. We are promised "sophisticated, literate tales" that push imaginative boundaries using original styles. Inevitably, this is truer of some contributions than others.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by Catie Ash (08/17/07): Not that any of the past Potters has been particularly atrocious, but all of the things that routinely tainted them (scanty plot development, awkward child actors, and heavy, corresponding doses of syrupy-sweetness and cheese) are adamantly absent from Order of the Phoenix. The other four Potter movies are varying degrees of okay; this is the first to feel like a real film instead of a brand name.
Logorrhea, edited by John Klima, by L. Timmel Duchamp (08/15/07): As a child, I spent hours with my nose buried in the biggest, heaviest tome in the house—the dictionary—and because I loved words, I was a champion speller (though never in an official contest). And so I felt an immediate keen interest when I came across Logorrhea, the stories in which were inspired by some of the Scripps National Spelling Bee championship words.
Two Views: Transformers, by Tim Phipps and Tim Phipps (08/13/07): 1: Initial Reaction

ROBOTS SMASH! RARR! Bloody marvellous, and a fanboy's wet dream. Quite simply the most fun you'll have in the cinema this year. Who cares about politics or heart when you've got SMASHY ROBOTIC GOODNESS?

2: On Reflection

Last week I went to see Transformers and, well, I don't know what I expected to gain from the experience. But I went.
Breakfast with the Ones You Love by Eliot Fintushel, by Paul Kincaid (08/10/07): Jack Dann describes Breakfast with the Ones You Love as a collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harlan Ellison, and Woody Allen. Frankly, anyone who knows the work of those writers would realise that such an unholy collaboration would result in an almighty mess. And this novel is not an almighty mess . . . well, not quite.
The Man Who Melted by Jack Dann, by Nader Elhefnawy (08/08/07): Dann wrote The Man Who Melted as a poet, not an engineer, "concerned primarily with the future as a visionary construct, almost as a dream, rather than as a tangible reality." There is everywhere an obsession with death, manifested in ways that can only be depicted surreally, from casinos where players hooked into one another gamble for organs to elaborate suicides based on the re-creation of historic disasters.
Doctor Who: Series Three, by Adam Roberts (08/06/07): There is, I'd say, a pretty widespread consensus about the new Who, viz.: that the retooling of the series has been a notable success; that Eccleston was a good Doctor but Tennant is even better (perhaps, some people whisper, the best yet) and that Russell T Davies is to be greatly lauded for his part in the whole Whonaissance. By the same token the consensus seems to have arrived at a less dithyrambic assessment of Series 3.
Acacia by David Anthony Durham, by Hannah Strom-Martin (08/02/07): Why dole out your money for tales of fictional worlds when things there are just as bad? One reason, I suppose, is that you would then miss out on novels like David Anthony Durham's tour de force, Acacia, a deeply political vision of the fantastic that exposes the humanity at the heart of every ruthless machination.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 1, edited by Jonathan Strahan, by Colin Harvey (08/01/07): It's interesting that although it's billed as "SF and Fantasy"—presumably so that readers don't mistake this for a book/collection of reprints from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—fantasy dominates; the first half of the book is two-thirds fantasy to one-third SF, and although the story count almost evens up by the end (or does even up, depending on whether the reader classifies Paul di Fillipo's "Femaville 29" and Neil Gaiman's anthology-opening "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" as SF or fantasy), in terms of number and memorability of stories, it's still a somewhat fantasy-dominated anthology.
The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi, by Niall Harrison (07/31/07): Aya is an Orisha—"deadly friends from stories" is how one of the characters describes Orishas—a manifestation of the Santerian patron of women. She overflows, we are told, with "the kind of need that takes you across water on nothing but bare feet." She is "powerful, half mad, but quiet about it." And either The Opposite House isn't about her, or it's about only her. It's hard to say.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, by Abigail Nussbaum (07/30/07): The basic structure is that of a thousand hard-boiled mysteries, but The Yiddish Policemen's Union is spared from utter predictability by Chabon's beautiful, energetic, humorous prose, as well as by the fact that there is virtually no limit to the amount of humor that can be wrung out of combining the noir detective style with Yiddish colloquialisms.
Portable Childhoods by Ellen Klages, by Richard Larson (07/26/07): Klages's protagonists experience a world which never quite makes sense, and in which they are never quite welcome. For Klages, childhood is a distinctly antagonistic realm, a physical place or thing from which we must escape at all costs. Unfortunately, this is told more than felt: her characters never experience anything more than they can stand, and their ultimate escapes are often unsatisfying.
Interfictions, edited by Theodora Goss and Delia Sherman, by David Soyka (07/25/07): If you want to know the definition of "interstitial writing," skip the introduction by Heinz Insu Fenkl. Instead, go straight to the afterword in which the editors of Interfictions, Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, explain how they know what it is when they see it.
Trial of Flowers and Mainspring by Jay Lake, by Nic Clarke (07/24/07): Two novels, two publishers, two worlds: a little over six months in the life of one ambitious author, in a market that apparently equates writer versatility with audience confusion, as if a reader's world might collapse when faced with different types of books from the same author.
Swans Over the Moon by Forrest Aguirre, by Colin Greenland (07/23/07): In this first novel—novella, really, lavishly spaced, leaded and interleaved—by anthologist and short-story-writer Forrest Aguirre, there are indeed swans on the moon: actual feathered and beaked ones, not to mention copious representations of them in painting and architecture and even as ornaments on the armour of Judicar Parmour Pelevin, monarch of Procellarium.
HARM by Brian Aldiss, by Nader Elhefnawy (07/19/07): HARM is unambiguously (and for a publisher, intimidatingly) about the present War on Terror, and Paul's torturers, at the titular Hostile Activities Research Ministry, are unambiguously American and British officials.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang, by William Mingin (07/18/07): This is the third time Chiang has dealt with the essential problems of fate, determinism, and free will. His darkest view of the subject comes in a short-short published in Nature, "What's Expected of Us" positing a device that, by undeniably demonstrating our lack of free will, leaves a third of its users in a waking coma. In The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate, as in "Story of Your Life," he presents us with a more gentle, nuanced fatalism—fatalism from the inside, fatalism understood.
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver, by Victoria Hoyle (07/17/07): In 2005 Lionel Shriver won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). The judges' decision caused a minor furore within the literary establishment, not least because Shriver was a virtual unknown, published by a small press, and had a man's name. The book itself, however, was almost universally recognized for what it was—a disturbing and vigorous meditation on motherhood and modern America, a compelling virtuoso performance by a mature author. The Post-Birthday World—a long, meandering, and, it has to be said, somewhat arduous take on parallel worlds—hardly bears favorable comparison.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien, by Adam Roberts (07/16/07): Here are two titles for booksellers to shelve under Fantasy. Both follow the adventures of an essentially good though morally (slightly) complicated hero around a medievalised imaginary world. Both embody a sort of under-narrative about revenge, upon which are constructed varied and peripatetic adventures. There is, in both books, Evil to be combated, magic to be performed, and artefacts that have special powers. One (the Rothfuss) is an example of a genre pretty much wholly invented and defined by the other (Tolkien). Nevertheless they are absolutely as different from one another as could be imagined. One of these is, in its way, a great book. The other is a competently constructed time-wileawayer. See if you can guess which description fits which novel.
The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas, by Dan Hartland (07/12/07): One afternoon a few months ago, I was sitting alone in a pub. (News of my incipient alcoholism has been greatly exaggerated.) I was reading a book. After I'd been sitting there for about half an hour, a woman the worse for wear arrived at my table and, as her opening gambit, demanded, "What's so clever?" She was pointing at the book. Did she not like books? "I don't mind the books," she replied, swaying into the seat opposite me. "I just think—don't—what's so clever? What's the point?"
Verdigris Deep by Frances Hardinge, by Farah Mendlesohn (07/11/07): Verdigris Deep confirms what I already suspected: Frances Hardinge is the best new fantasy writer for children since Diana Wynne Jones.
Flora Segunda by Ysabeau S. Wilce, by David V. Barrett (07/10/07): The award for the longest SF/fantasy title is probably still held by DG Compton's 1971 time travel novel Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes, and Something That Might Have Been Castor Oil, later reissued under the more manageable but far less inspiring title Chronicules. However, Ysabeau S Wilce's juvenile fantasy Flora Segunda must be in the running for the longest subtitle: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog. And yes, it lives up to it.
Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand, by Matthew Cheney (07/09/07): Cass is a refugee from a lost generation, the generation of the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols, of Television and Blondie, of Performance Studio and CBGBs. Her passions were born in the latter days of Arbus and the early days of Mapplethorpe, but she never quite became who she should have been, because death was her best muse, and she couldn't whistle a happy tune and wander away from all the pills and potions that crossed her lips.
The fourth book of Ægypt: Endless Things by John Crowley, by John Clute (07/05/07): Feature Week: John Crowley's Ægypt

John Clute: Endless Things comprises, in part, a release into stillness, an ontological black hole from which other stories of the world cannot escape, or are disinclined to; a spiral which becomes a circle in the end; a holy emptiness vaster than pleroma, where the utter still centre of the world utters all.
The third book of Ægypt: Dæmonomania by John Crowley, by Paul Kincaid (07/04/07): Feature Week: John Crowley's Ægypt

Paul Kincaid: Dæmonomania should represent the point in the sequence where the creation has become too big, so that it starts to slip out of the author's sure grasp. In fact I think it is where Crowley reasserts his grip on the story after the (relative) slippage of Love & Sleep. But it is also where he breaks the pattern of Ægypt.
The second book of Ægypt: Love & Sleep by John Crowley, by Graham Sleight (07/03/07): Feature Week: John Crowley's Ægypt

Graham Sleight: The story of the first three volumes of John Crowley's Ægypt sequence is, broadly, the story of his protagonists getting what they want and finding they can't stand it. The first volume, Ægypt, is the story of the main characters wishing; Love & Sleep is the story of them getting.
The first book of Ægypt: The Solitudes by John Crowley, by Abigail Nussbaum (07/02/07): Feature Week: John Crowley's Ægypt

Abigail Nussbaum: The Solitudes presents the reviewer with an unusual challenge. How to review the novel as an independent entity—and thus avoid stepping on my fellow reviewers' toes—when it is so clearly and overwhelmingly part of a whole? More importantly, how to review Ægypt the novel when the experience of reading Ægypt the series so completely and irrevocably colors and alters one's reactions to it?
Alien Crimes, edited by Mike Resnick, by Karen Burnham (06/28/07): Thus we have a new anthology, Alien Crimes, that contains six detective stories, each different to the others in everything from style to theme. In the end, the only points of commonality are crimes or misbehaviors of some nature, and the fact that a detective has to investigate them.
The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson, by J.C. Runolfson (06/27/07): While she interacts with two potential love interests and her estranged childhood best friend, and these relationships are also important, it's family, particularly the fear of losing it, that drives most of Calamity's choices.
The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds, by Martin Lewis (06/26/07): With his latest novel Alastair Reynolds has, not for the first time, produced a curate's egg. However, since this is his seventh novel and he is now deep into his career this particular egg must surely mark the point where we have to finally accept that he is probably never going to write the great novel that a lot of people (myself included) thought he had in him.
The Future Is Queer, edited by Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel, by Rose Fox (06/25/07): There's something here for everyone, more or less. Sometimes it seems as though the editors went out of their ways to make sure that any possible reader could find a character or two to identify with, perhaps passing over better stories in the process.
Dzur by Steven Brust, by Genevieve Williams (06/21/07): Brust has chosen to pattern the novel's plot after one of the most sumptuous multicourse offerings one could imagine. Each dish, course, and wine is expressly (if not always explicitly) related to the action of the chapter that follows it, and the results can be both affecting and surprisingly dramatic.
Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie, by Siobhan Carroll (06/20/07): The Blade Itself mixed the pared-down prose of hard-boiled detective fiction with the epic scope of a George R. R. Martin fantasy. Now, however, the familiar beats of an epic fantasy series are beginning to emerge. Characters who previously displayed intriguing degrees of moral ambiguity are beginning to learn Valuable Lessons, while some stock fantasy types seem poised in the wings, waiting to take over the story.
Three Dreams on Mount Meru by François Devenne, by Finn Dempster (06/19/07): As an exploration of the natural history and anthropology of its setting and an amalgamation of fables and moments, Three Dreams on Mount Meru is often a delight, routinely evoking a sense of wonder, magic, and mystery. As the story of a boy's journey into manhood, it is functional but less successful.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, by Hannah Strom-Martin (06/18/07): The Name of the Wind is a book that, while posing no serious threat to George R.R. Martin's reign, still carries a certain weight. I defy anyone who has read it to contradict me when I state that it is the David Copperfield of fantasy.
Dangerous Space by Kelley Eskridge, by Ilana Teitelbaum (06/14/07): With its kaleidoscopic variety of settings and prose styles, this short story collection by Kelly Eskridge is comprised of many spaces rather than just one.
Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks, by Duncan Lawie (06/13/07): Cadel Piggott's whole life has been designed to make him the perfect inheritor of a criminal empire; when he learns that even his adoption was carefully arranged, he realises that his upbringing has totally twisted him. Yet Catherine Jinks does a remarkable job of indicating right and wrong without Cadel having to be a clear avatar of morality himself.
Helix by Eric Brown, by R. J. Burgess (06/12/07): The Helix—a vast collection of thousands of Earth-like worlds linked together like beads on a necklace and wrapped around a star. It's clearly an artificial construct, thousands of years old and self-sustaining, but who would build such a thing? And why?
28 Weeks Later, by Martin Lewis (06/11/07): It goes without saying that the virus was not successfully eradicated. I will allow you the pleasure of picking apart the plot holes in its re-introduction for yourself but suffice to say it wouldn't have been any less plausible if the Americans had just installed a big, unguarded button labelled "PRESS HERE FOR ZOMBIES."
The Time of the Reaper by Andrew Butcher, by Siobhan Carroll (06/07/07): Apocalyptic and postapocalyptic settings have long held particular appeal for YA authors. There's nothing like a good plague or nuclear holocaust to set teenage characters adrift in a world without rules. For younger audiences, apocalyptic fiction provides a short and dramatic version of the journey into adulthood: one minute a protagonist is safe within the confines of a stable home, and the next he or she is thrust into a world in which one must learn the skills of a self-sufficient adult in order to survive.
The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, by J.C. Runolfson (06/06/07): The Coyote Road is named for one of the more famous tricksters of North America. But the anthology features tricksters of many cultures from all over the world. There are stories here of Loki, Legba, Hermes, Raven, the Monkey King of China, and the fox spirits of Japan.
Softspoken by Lucius Shepard, by Richard Larson (06/05/07): Engaged with a mystery that grows more complex as the novel progresses, Sanie is the ultimate outsider, a guest at her husband's family's house and a foreigner to their small southern town. But even with this familiar situation—young woman stranded in creepy old mansion—the novel avoids being just a stock ghost story, becoming instead a thoughtful investigation of genre expectations.
The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod, by Paul Kincaid (06/04/07): It is in the nature of critics to quibble. Not because we like doing so, but because we are in the business of weighing a work, and in a good book problems can stand out more starkly than they do in mediocre novels. The Execution Channel is a good book. In fact it is a very good book, perhaps the best Ken MacLeod has written to date. Which makes the couple of places where it goes wrong all the more infuriating.
Extended Play: The Elastic Book of Music, edited by Gary Couzens, by Paul Raven (05/31/07): As the back-cover blurb would have it, in this anthology "writers use music as a springboard for their fiction," and indeed they do. But your mileage may vary, as the saying goes—because music, like all art, is a very personal and subjective experience. If you don't believe me, sit down with three heavy metal fans and try to get them to agree on a definition of what "heavy metal" is—Damon Knight's adage can be applied there just as well as it can to science fiction.
Players by Paul McAuley, by Karen Burnham (05/30/07): It remains to be seen if Paul McAuley can insert a well-reasoned action-adventure into the territory so thoroughly colonized by Michael Crichton. We don't need to implausibly genetically engineer dinosaurs when we've got seriously insane people around who are willing to turn themselves into literal as well as metaphorical monsters.
Hunter's Moon by David Devereux, by Richard Larson (05/29/07): Usually, the hero in this sort of genre fiction has a deep understanding of good and evil and works to make things right in the world; they serve as our moral compass. Jack, however, is more or less along for the ride, defeating people he is told to defeat, and killing, torturing, or otherwise manipulating most of the other characters in the book. While he is obviously very good at his job, he's missing any sense of social responsibility; he just wants a drink and a pretty lady at the end of the day, like any self-respecting wage slave, and doesn't care who he has to hurt to reach this objective.
Red Spikes by Margo Lanagan, by Colin Greenland (05/28/07): She’s bloody good, Margo Lanagan. She really is. Readers of White Time or Black Juice, her two previous collections, will recognise her custom, her knack, of getting us to lay all this conceptual brickwork, erect all these airy constructions, by familiarising us each time with the ground floor of the imaginary world: the level of the commonplace.
Barking by Tom Holt, by Lisa Goldstein (05/24/07): But Holt has a lightness of touch, an eye for the comic scene, that sets him apart: the Rhinemaidens at a horse show, for example, or Wotan forced more or less into retirement with his daughters the Valkyries.
The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt, by Colin Harvey (05/23/07): In its early pages the book reads as if it is set in a parallel Dickensian London, but as the novel progresses the full strangeness of the world beneath (literally in some cases) emerges.
Ascent by Jed Mercurio, by Michael Froggatt (05/22/07): The Soviet space programme has always provided fertile ground for urban myths, conspiracy theories, and tall tales. The secrecy which surrounded it, in comparison to the blaze of publicity which accompanied the Mercury and Apollo projects, does much to encourage such speculation. Soviet cosmonauts remained anonymous until they returned safely to Earth and any accidents along the way (even if they resulted in several hundred deaths) could be discreetly erased from history.
Two Views: Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay, by Graham Sleight and Victoria Hoyle (05/21/07): Graham Sleight: The first thing that struck me—a reader who'd not encountered Kay's work before—is the shocking directness of its telling. Every sentence moves the action forward, every action moves the plot forward.

Victoria Hoyle: In the interests of full disclosure, and before I begin to wax thoughtful, I should admit that I have a long history with Guy Gavriel Kay. You might go so far as to say that he has been with me since the beginning.
Horizons by Mary Rosenblum, by Duncan Lawie (05/17/07): Ahni Huang is an incredibly rich and talented young woman. Her brain has been infiltrated by nanotech, giving her an on-board AI and communications device, and she is a capable empath. She also has combat training—as Horizons opens she is on her way to Earth's orbital platforms to avenge the murder of her brother.
Spider-Man 3, by Iain Clark (05/16/07): Who'd have thought a radioactive spider-bite could prove so versatile? In Spider-Man (2001) nerdy Peter Parker's super-powers were treated as a metaphor for puberty in a quirky tale of boy-meets-girl. In Spider-Man 2 (2004), his powers suffered an embarrassing bout of impotence in the face of crippling self-doubt, although he did win the girl. Now in Spider-Man 3 his powers become as self-destructive as his testosterone-fuelled behaviour, and boy loses girl once more.
Un Lun Dun by China Miéville, by Dan Hartland (05/15/07): Un Lun Dun reminds the adult reader of New Crobuzon, not least because ultimately Miéville shows himself to be refashioning the staples of kiddy portal fantasy, in the way his earlier novels refashioned the staples of the steampunk dystopia.
Mistakes and All: Defending Battlestar Galactica, by Jeremy Adam Smith (05/14/07): Hell hath no fury like a raving army of disappointed fans. Mistakes have been made on Battlestar Galactica—but I would like to take this moment to come out swinging in defense of the show, mistakes and all.
Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, by Sherryl Vint (05/10/07): Rude Mechanicals is set in Hollywood in 1934 and concerns two cyborg characters familiar to Baker's readers: the facilitator Joseph and the literary preservation specialist Lewis.
Deadstock by Jeffrey Thomas, by Finn Dempster (05/09/07): Begging publisher Solaris's pardon, but Jeffery Thomas's novel deserves a better introduction than the blurb on the back cover provides. Informed that "Punktown, crime-ridden metropolis on the colony world, Oasis, is home to the scum of countless alien races," and that "Stalking its mean streets is Jeremy Stake, the private detective," I began to suspect I was dealing with the literary equivalent of a straight-to-video release. But whilst Jeffery Thomas's novel is not without its tackier elements, the overall package is unpretentious and enjoyable.
So Far, So Near by Mat Coward, by Jonathan McCalmont (05/08/07): Most SF authors pick a genre, or even a sub-genre, and stick with it until the muse stops calling. Mat Coward is not that kind of writer. While his short story collection So Far, So Near might well be his first book of SF, it is not his first book.
Double Vision and Sound Mind by Tricia Sullivan, by L. Timmel Duchamp (05/07/07): The antagonist of Tricia Sullivan's duology Double Vision (2005) and Sound Mind (2007), who is not completely unmasked until well into the second novel, would like to pull off an ambitious scheme that bears more than a passing resemblance to Baudrillard's "perfect crime."
From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain by Minister Faust, by Karen Burnham (05/02/07): In the terms we use to talk about the fantastic, comic books, especially superhero comics, have long been a genre unto themselves. They combine elements of fantasy (magical and mythic powers) and science fiction (mutants and alien invasions) with archetypal characters and violent conflict. While comic books and graphic novels in general have expanded far beyond these genre boundaries (see "Sandman", "Maus," et al) recently this sort of story has been moving into the world of the conventional novel. Minister Faust subtly used some of these conventions in his amazing debut, Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and now approaches the heroic comic book genre head-on in the hilarious and pointed From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain.
One of these books is not like the others: three tomes about SF TV, by Tim Phipps (05/01/07): I am a man forever tainted by fandom, of course, so simple things like Jim Robinson being head of the Newport Group or that kiddy-fiddling vampire who tortured Angel being a history teacher at Harbour bring me a geekish joy beyond words. And let's not even start on how Ryan's mom loved to listen to Puccini and killed the seventh Doctor.

I am tainted. And it's the fault, frankly, of the internet and of books like these.
Brasyl by Ian McDonald, by Adam Roberts (04/30/07): This year's award season is still in full cry: the Arthur C. Clarke Award reaches its climax on May 2nd, the Nebula winner will be announced May 11th, and the Hugo at the beginning of September. But that shouldn't stop the ever-future-oriented SF community speculating about next year's prizes. So, and by way of handing Strange Horizons readers a reviewerish hostage-to-fortune: I predict Brasyl will be on multiple shortlists in 2008. It's easily the best SF novel I've read this year.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, by Lisa Goldstein (04/26/07): Michael Chabon, though, has already shown a certain savvy about genre conventions. His YA novel Summerland was fantasy; the protagonists of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay write and illustrate comic books; Wonder Boys begins with a tribute to a fictional pulp writer, August Van Zorn. In retrospect it seems obvious that Chabon was moving in the direction of science fiction all along.
Black Man/Thirteen by Richard Morgan, by Martin Lewis (04/25/07): This is a book that wears its heart on its sleeve. Or, at least, it does in the U.K. In America—the country that occupies the heart of the novel—Richard Morgan's Black Man has become Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen. It is an act of cowardice on the part of the publishers that is so minor as to be baffling. Both titles relate to the central character, but only the original gets straight to Morgan's concerns, lets us know up front that this is a novel about identity politics.
Sunshine, by Adam Roberts (04/24/07): The story, in other words, is a will-they-won't-they mission to save the world; and scriptwriter Alex Garland clearly believes the way to make this interesting is to throw lots of obstacles in the way of the mission, one after the other, any of which could result in the world's doom. But there's an inevitable sense of diminishing returns to this narrative strategy.
The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales by Rudyard Kipling, by William Mingin (04/23/07): Rudyard Kipling was for several decades one of the most popular writers in the English-speaking world, and at a young age became the first Englishman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. It's remarkable that, setting aside collections of connected stories, he wrote only four novels: Kim (1901), Captains Courageous (1897), The Light that Failed (1890), and The Naulahka (1892). While these are not negligible, it's his short stories (including his children's books) that constitute his most important work, and among their large number (he was prolific) was a good helping of speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales gives us 48 stories, in order of publication, a generous sampling of Kipling's output, no matter the genre.
Flavors of My Genius by Robert Reed, by Colin Harvey (04/19/07): In Reed's future world, everyone has access to an internal universe at least as interesting as the external; it's a place where someone's genius can render him catatonic with overstimulation at the sight of the commonplace and where work has become meaningless.
Deliverer by C. J. Cherryh, by Siobhan Carroll (04/18/07): C. J. Cherryh has always excelled at describing the alien. Whether her novels feature actual alien creatures (as in The Chanur Saga) or merely human beings so clinically detached from their peers that they might as well be from a different species (as in Cyteen), Cherryh's stories center on the experience of encounter—the moment an individual or a society collides with a culture strikingly different from their own.
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, edited by George Mann, and Fast Forward 1, edited by Lou Anders, by David Soyka (04/17/07): What with the various yearly "best of" collections, on top of those calling themselves paraspheres, new wave fabulists, new weird, post-cyberpunk, slipstream, and even, god help us, interstitial fictions, what's an editor to do to distinguish his or her particular anthology on the crowded shelves of what we used to just call science fiction and fantasy? You can't just put together a bunch of stories you think are really cool. There's got to be either a theme (e.g., alien sex, feminism, award winners) or a declaration of some movement (see above) in which the editor's selections herald some brave new genre.
The 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist, by Farah Mendlesohn (04/16/07): The Arthur C. Clarke award comes around but once a year, and as ever the judges have done sterling duty working their way through the best and worst of the British publishing scene. Their trawl is not limited to the SF publishing houses and their definition of SF is wide. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes, as this year, it seems to have offered little Added Value. There are three clear genre science fiction novels, all from Gollancz (as Gollancz is the premier UK SF publishing house this should be understood as a bias in the field, not in the jurors), all of which are excellent in their own way. Then there is a weak piece of nuclear rapture fiction, a pale allegory, and, from one of our best SF small presses and one of our best SF writers, we have a 1970s Playboy cod-psychological battle of the sexes.
Primeval: The First Season, by Iain Clark (04/11/07): We've already witnessed Robin Hood, the BBC's own attempt to reinvent another old show in the same contemporary vein as Doctor Who, mixing brisk historical action with modern characters and concerns and a healthy dollop of romance. ITV's Primeval is, if anything, an even more transparent attempt to reach the same audience; a series so carefully crafted around its different demographics that it feels as if it was designed by focus group.
The Last Mimzy, by William Mingin (04/10/07): If you’re not in nursery school yourself, you may already have questions about this scenario. Why didn’t the scientist send a jar and a note (“Please spit in this and take the following steps to return it to the future, thank you”) and aim it at grown-ups?
Glorifying Terrorism, edited by Farah Mendlesohn, by Dan Hartland (04/09/07): In short, the stories in Glorifying Terrorism exist to extrapolate situations and futures in which their authors may justify and understand terrorist action. This is a laudable goal—all the singing very loudly and sticking one's fingers in one's ears in the world won't make terrorism or terrorists go away, and to pretend "terrorism," or even particular groups of terrorists, can be defeated or silenced is of course to fundamentally misunderstand the phenomenon.
The 2007 Philip K. Dick Award Shortlist, by Nicholas Whyte (04/05/07): I think Dick would have been pleased by the candidates arrayed to honour his memory. Almost all of them deal with his favourite themes of politics, the nature of reality, or both. Of course, science fiction has moved on since Dick's death in 1982, and the authors also deal with the legacy of cyberpunk and the latest thinking on AI, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.
Majestrum by Matthew Hughes, by Siobhan Carroll (04/04/07): Reality, it seems, operates in a cyclical pattern, alternating ages of science and reason with ages of "sympathetic association," or magic. Hapthorn's age is on the brink of such a turn, and as a result, pockets of magical reality are suddenly appearing in Hapthorn's logically ordered universe.
Mythic 2, edited by Mike Allen, by Donna Royston (04/03/07): Mythic 2 can be viewed as its own fantasy universe, with a heavenly realm of gods, a middle realm of lesser magic and human enchantment, and a lower realm where all the magic has drained away, leaving imperfect memories and forlorn longing or opportunities for erudite display.
Grey by Jon Armstrong, by Richard Larson (04/02/07): In Armstrong's world, the media is the primary factor in the development of our identities. Choosing to be grey in a world dominated by a whirlwind of images is a bold statement, an act of defiance: it represents the choice to be turned off to the onslaught of media manipulation.
The Blood Confession by Alisa Libby, by Hannah Strom-Martin (03/29/07): This is an age, after all, that embraces the sensationalism of Paris Hilton's DUI convictions, Ms. Spears's lack of panties and Lindsay Lohan's drug abuse, the very sort of hysterical, hyper-sexual antics the Gothic celebrates. And so, without further ado, I give you the next representative of girlhood in our modern age: The Countess Elizabeth Bathory.
Galactic North and Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds, by Duncan Lawie (03/28/07): Reynolds tends to focus on the darker corners of his characters and their environments, building a grandiose, gothic flavour over a hard science fiction base. Many of Reynolds's stories also possess a sense of scale. They tend to be long, but more than this, they do not flinch from gazing on the immensity of the universe.
Hart & Boot & Other Stories by Tim Pratt, by Karen Burnham (03/27/07): Tim Pratt's new collection will be a revelation to those who are only familiar with him from his first novel The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. Indeed, the cover of Hart & Boot & Other Stories promises more of the same Western-flavored contemporary fantasy, but this is something of a bait-and-switch. The title story shows similar influences to Rangergirl, but all the other stories draw from different styles and mythologies: Greek, Southern, and Irish among others, showing off the breadth of Pratt's knowledge and craft.
Two Views: The Road by Cormac McCarthy, by Victoria Hoyle and Paul Kincaid (03/26/07): Victoria Hoyle: From the very first page there can be no doubt at all that McCarthy is situating The Road in a tradition of great narratives of death, despair and hope, and of sheer human doggedness. It contrives to be two novels at once. On the one hand it is a thoroughly contemporary post-apocalyptic novel: an elegy for our world, in both its modernity and its natural beauty, and a clarion warning of what we stand to loose through expedient stupidity. On the other, it is a parable, stripped bare—a mythic representation of humanity's struggles to reconcile suffering with divinity, and despair with the instinct to love.

Paul Kincaid: Cormac McCarthy's extraordinary novel, The Road, is at first sight a clear example of a familiar science fictional trope, the post-apocalyptic story. This is a tradition within science fiction that reaches back to Carolyn See's Golden Days (1987), to George R. Stewart's Earth Abides (1950), to Richard Jefferies's After London (1885), and The Road seems to fit right in, telling the familiar story of the struggle of civilised people to survive when there is no more civilization. On closer examination, however, this line of descent is not so plain.
Sean Wright’s Jaarfindor Remade and Love under Jaarfindor Spires, by Colin Harvey (03/21/07): But just when it looks as if Jaarfindor Remade is simply a caper with gaudy dressings, the novel's second part abruptly takes off in a completely unexpected direction. Such bravura is at once endearing and deeply, deeply annoying, and all of Wright’s strengths and weaknesses are similarly shown in Love under Jaarfindor Spires, his first collection of short stories.
Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky, by Jonathan McCalmont (03/20/07): In 1977, when George Lucas was taking the pulpy spectacular roots of US SF and making Star Wars, Andrei Tarkovsky was taking one of the landmarks of Soviet-era science fiction and producing a characteristically cerebral and symbolic art-house film. The year that Stalker was released marked the first appearance of the original book, Piknik na obochine, in English. Reading it now, Boris and Arkady Strugatsky's novel (translated by Antonina W. Bouis, who is not credited in this Gollancz Masterwork edition) is just as cerebral and symbolic as its cinematic counterpart, and as powerful and fresh as the day it was first published.
Map of Dreams by M. Rickert, by Niall Harrison (03/19/07): It hurts. That has to be said. M. Rickert's brilliant debut collection hurts from the first sentence of the first (and title) story, a bald statement of loss that sets the tone for much of what follows. "My six-year-old daughter," Annie Merchant tells us, "was shot and killed by a sniper while we were visiting New York City in the summer of 1992."
Fat by Rob Grant, by Siobhan Carroll (03/15/07): The first few pages of the novel describe a world in which the British health service has decided to deny service to overweight citizens, but the vaguely science-fictional premise doesn't last. Instead, the book steers quickly into straightforward contemporary comedy, following the adventures of three characters whose radically different BMIs influence the course of their lives.
The Eagle's Throne by Carlos Fuentes, by R. J. Burgess (03/14/07): I'll confess it up front—I don't know much about Mexican politics. You'd think this would be a problem, what with The Eagle's Throne being a political satire, in translation, by one of Mexico's most famous writers, Carlos Fuentes. But you'd be wrong.
Dreadful Skin, by Cherie Priest, by J.C. Runolfson (03/13/07): Despite the English origins of the main antagonist, the Irish origins of the protagonist, and the Southwestern United States setting of the second and third parts of the book, there is a dark, rich, and fevered atmosphere to Dreadful Skin that feels quintessentially Southern Gothic. But while the prose rushes forward with a kind of breathlessness, there's restraint in the levels beneath the plot.
Hav by Jan Morris, by Matthew Cheney (03/12/07): History's shortcomings are the impetus, material, and theme of Hav, a remarkably subtle book, a novel of indirections that presents an imaginary (and richly imagined) geography and history for a Mediterranean nation called Hav, a country that incorporates the potentials and mysteries of various real societies and cultures.
Contact, for Nintendo DS, by Erin Hoffman (03/07/07): And while this particular game is not out to push the boundaries of interactive media or expand the conveyance of philosophical realization through agency in gameplay, it is undoubtedly a must-play for anyone who enjoys RPGs. If you're down with the nostalgia, Grasshopper Manufacture is the studio for you.
Ilario: The Lion's Eye by Mary Gentle, by Nic Clarke (03/06/07): With Ilario: The Lion's Eye, Mary Gentle returns to, and broadens our picture of, the skewed fifteenth-century Mediterranean world she explored to such acclaim in her gritty, witty, absorbing Ash: A Secret History (2000): a world in which Carthage is a Visigothic stronghold locked in perpetual darkness; in which proud Pharaonic Egypt (and its library) lives on—just—in Constantinople; in which Christianity is divided between the followers of Christus Imperator and those of the Green Christ, and the papacy is a magically cursed and powerless shell; in which the Arabs apparently never made it out of the Hijaz, and the Etruscans live on the margins, worshipping their old gods in precarious secret.
Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill, by Abigail Nussbaum (03/05/07): Joe Hill's debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, opens with the description of a collection, belonging to the novel's protagonist, Judas "Jude" Coyne, of objects macabre, grotesque, and just plain creepy: drawings by John Wayne Gacy, the trepanned skull of a sixteenth century peasant, a witch's confession, a hangman's noose, a snuff film. In a few paragraphs, Hill establishes the first of three storyforms with which he shapes the novel's plot—the collector of ersatz objects of wonder who comes across something truly wondrous, or in this case, truly horrific. When Jude's assistant comes across an online auction offering the titular box, said to contain the ghost of the seller's stepfather, Jude cavalierly puts in a bid and thinks nothing more of it. The readers, meanwhile, are fastening their seat-belts and getting ready for a bumpy ride.
The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes, by David Soyka (03/01/07): Our apparent protagonist is Edward Moon, a stage magician on the declining side of fame, as well as freelance detective whose once faultless powers of deduction are in question due to some hinted-at debacle.
Icarus by Roger Levy, by Pete Young (02/28/07): Few books can have been written around such extraordinary circumstances as a near-fatal knife assault on its author. But Levy's experience no doubt informed his third novel in a way that few people could, or would ever wish, to emulate.
Conqueror by Stephen Baxter, by Jonathan McCalmont (02/27/07): Emperor spanned the four hundred years of Roman rule by focusing on a series of historical vignettes bound together by a prophecy and populated with characters who represent, in stereotypical terms, the social changes that occur during the period (a formula similar to that used in Baxter's Evolution (2003), albeit on a much longer timescale in that instance). Conqueroruses the same formula to cover the Dark Ages.
The Keyhole Opera by Bruce Holland Rogers, by Graham Sleight (02/26/07): Rogers's chosen form is the very short story. The works in The Keyhole Opera mostly range from one page to ten. As I suggested above, everything about a work represents a choice by the writer, and so should make a case for why there's a word on the page instead of nothing. The choice to restrict oneself to this narrowest of compasses, therefore, clearly reflects a kind of modesty about what can and can't be said. In purely economic terms, it's a brave choice in a world where you get paid by the word.
Shades Fantastic and Masque of Dreams by Bruce Boston, by JoSelle Vanderhooft (02/22/07): What are The Odyssey, Gilgamesh and The Faerie Queene if not journeys into the impossible, and therefore journeys that employ some amount of speculation about what might happen if the mythic, the unusual, and the impossible suddenly became real? To understand speculative poetry, one should first pick up one of these epic poems, or any epic poem. And then, one should pick up a collection by Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master Poet Bruce Boston, one of the finest and most original voices working in speculative poetry today.
Time Pieces edited by Ian Whates, by Colin Harvey (02/21/07): But Ian Whates's anthology Time Pieces, which was assembled to celebrate NewCon 3 in 2005, is a deeply traditional British SF anthology. The convention's theme was "Time," which explains the anthology's subject matter, but it's also appropriate given that it's less a throwback to a vanished era of printing presses and mimeographs than a (perhaps) conscious pastiche.
The Fountain, by Martin Lewis (02/20/07): When Pitt walked from the film in 2002 it effectively ended production. In the light of this Aronofsky decided to realise the project in a different medium: the graphic novel. He started work on this new version with artist Kent Williams but, as he did so, came to understand that he was at heart a low-budget film maker and could make his film, in slightly different form, without the sort of budget he need a marque-name A-lister to secure.
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, by Adam Roberts (02/19/07): And now we have Against the Day, a book as difficult to assess by the criteria of contemporary fiction as it would be to judge Cerberus with the rest of the Crufts usuals. Sui generis doesn't even begin to describe it.
The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross, by Mark Teppo (02/13/07): Calling this book a thriller would be as egregious a whitewash as filing it in the “technical adventures for boys who fear sunlight as much as an expected core dump” section. The Jennifer Morgue is a delirious collision of the archetypal hero adventure, our modern obsession with flashy technology, and our perpetual fear of the unspeakable unknown.
The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3: Subversive Stories about Sex and Gender, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, by Victoria Hoyle (02/12/07): Certainly there is much to like, and even to love, in this third anthology of short-listed fiction. The lineup is startlingly impressive: stories from Margo Lanagan, Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Eleanor Arnason, Ted Chiang, and Geoff Ryman; nonfiction from Pam Noles, Dorothy Allison, and L. Timmel Duchamp; and, finally, a welcome and extremely challenging story by James Tiptree herself, a glaring omission in previous volumes.
Mathematicians in Love by Rudy Rucker, by Yoon Ha Lee (02/08/07): This book will not be to all tastes. If you are allergic to surfspeak, you should run away at high speed. On the other hand, Bela, the protagonist, is a lively narrator, whose descriptions, whether of parties or music jamming sessions or synesthetically conceived mathematical systems, are vivid (and don't require a math degree for enjoyment).
The End of Harry Potter? by David Langford, by Karen Burnham (02/07/07): And even those more sober folks, ready to wait for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to come out in its own good time, will appreciate Langford's thorough and often hilarious summaries of what has come before.
Settling Accounts: The Grapple by Harry Turtledove, by Nader Elhefnawy (02/06/07): In the end, what appeals most about Turtledove's writing is the strength of his concepts, which more than survive his inconsistent handling of them—and which, no doubt, will make fans disappointed by this entry come back for the next one.
The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology edited by Paul Kincaid with Andrew M. Butler, by Claire Brialey (02/05/07): It's something of a truism that there is no such thing as a "typical" winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Since 1987, the award has been presented annually to the best SF novel published in Britain for the first time in the previous calendar year. It is judged by a panel drawn from the British Science Fiction Association, the Science Fiction Foundation and, usually, a partner organisation—originally the International Science Policy Foundation, and most recently the Science Museum. The results have sometimes been surprising. They have sometimes been controversial. But they have always been interesting. Or, as Neil Gaiman contends in his preface to this volume, the Clarke Award has always been weird.
Variable Star by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson, by Nicholas Whyte (02/01/07): This is, frankly, not a great book. The warning signals are all there in the hype on the dust jacket (and more of the same was helpfully supplied by the publishers to this reviewer), which encourages us to admire the fact that this book has been written at all rather than to consider whether it has been written well.
The Serrano Legacy by Elizabeth Moon, by Duncan Lawie (01/31/07): The Serrano Legacy (published as Heris Serrano in the USA) collects Hunting Party (1993), Sporting Chance (1994) and Winning Colours (1995) by Elizabeth Moon, which first appeared in the UK as individual novels in 1999. The omnibus relates the civilian life of Heris Serrano, formerly a Captain in the Regular Space Service.
The Line Between by Peter S. Beagle, by Justin Howe (01/30/07): Beagle sums up the collection: "There it is: that invisible boundary between conscious and not, between reality and fantasy . . . between the seen and the seen's true nature. . . ." These stories recount those instances when individuals approach that borderland, which at times exists purely as edge, and dance back and forth across the line.
Children of Men, by William Mingin (01/29/07): Readers of P.D. James's Children of Men will recognize some of the scenario, but it's best to put the book out of mind when watching this exciting and thoughtful film by Alfonso Cuarón, director of Y tu mamá también and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
El Laberinto del Fauno (a.k.a. Pan's Labyrinth), by David J. Schwartz (01/25/07): Guillermo del Toro's El Laberinto del Fauno (AKA Pan's Labyrinth) is a bleak and beautiful nightmare of a film. It is a story about a child that is decidedly not for children.
Odyssey by Jack McDevitt, by Karen Burnham (01/24/07): In many ways Odyssey describes the most optimistic future a science fiction fan could reasonably hope for. So why are the folks in it still arguing over space-flight funding?
On the Overgrown Path by David Herter, by Finn Dempster (01/23/07): This compelling little curio of a story stubbornly refuses to fit neatly into any category, but its pervading sense of other-worldliness will most likely land it in the fantasy section of your local book emporium from which, with a couple of caveats, I am going to recommend you pluck a copy.
A Thousand Words About Heroes, by Roz Kaveney (01/22/07): One of the crucial things is how slowly it moves. We are used to stories of superheroes moving fast enough that five significant things can happen in the twenty-something pages of the average comic. The first eleven episodes of the new US TV show Heroes, though, are gently paced even by the standards of episodic television; by the half-way mark of the first season, we are little closer to understanding what is going on and a very long way from forming a superhero team or dealing with the atomic explosion that will soon destroy New York.
Sound and Fury: the Sputtering Candle of Battlestar Galactica, by Dan Hartland (01/18/07): In John Webster's revenge tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, the bullied and bullying assassin Bosola famously remarks, "We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded / Which way please them" (V.iv.55-55). Bosola would have recognised what it now means to be a character on Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica.
Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, by Maureen Kincaid Speller (01/17/07): In fictional terms the power of a letter lies as much in its potential to initiate as in anything actually realised; the letter written but not read, read but not answered, or read by another person, the wrong person even.
Dreamsongs: A GRRM Rretrospective by George R. R. Martin, by Colin Harvey (01/16/07): When the review copy of Dreamsongs landed on my doormat, my first thought was that it was way too soon in Martin's career for a publisher to be offering a retrospective. Then I read the notes.
Two Views: Doctor Who, "The Runaway Bride", by Nicholas Whyte and Tony Keen (01/15/07): Nicholas Whyte: Rose's departure gave the writers a chance to portray his Doctor meeting a potential replacement, but also meant that viewers would see the Doctor from a different perspective, Rose having been effectively the viewpoint character for the first two seasons.

Tony Keen: I am a dyed-in-the-wool Doctor Who traditionalist. I have definite ideas of what the programme and character should be, built up over nearly forty years of viewing. Bear that in mind. It may colour my perspective.
Torchwood: "Captain Jack Harkness" and "End of Days", by Iain Clark (01/11/07): British SF drama for adults is all but extinct: with the exception of a few aborted X-Files clones and Sixties remakes, UK television has entirely failed to serve a grown-up audience starved of intelligent tales of the fantastic. Into this barren wilderness Torchwood emerged, bawling, an only child with no siblings for competition and every reason to win unconditional devotion. Instead, it turned out to be a monstrous brat that only its mother could love.
Rainbow Bridge by Gwyneth Jones, by Sherryl Vint (01/10/07): Rainbow Bridge is the fifth and final book in Gwyneth Jones's Bold as Love series, the continuing adventures of rock-stars-turned politicians Ax Preston, Sage Pender, and Fiorinda Slater.
Star Begotten: A Biological Fantasia by H.G. Wells, by Paul Kincaid (01/09/07): Star Begotten, a short novel first published in 1937, can be read as a comment on all of this, a knowing novel about science fiction, and also as a satire on the state of the world in those dark days when everyone knew they were drifting towards war but nobody seemed able to do anything about it. It is also a science fiction novel in which nothing science fictional actually happens.
John Clute's The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, by Sarah Monette (01/08/07): John Clute, in The Darkening Garden: A Short Lexicon of Horror, as in his earlier works The Encyclopedia of Fantasy and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, has chosen Door #3. He has in fact wrenched it open and gone striding through with guns blazing.
Urban Fantastic by Allen Ashley, by Jeremy Adam Smith (01/04/07): We might (or in many cases, might not) go looking for something in a book that helps us understand the world and ourselves, but in the vast majority of stories we are only drawn off the path into wish-fulfillment fantasies or violent catharsis or fleeting amusement. Urban Fantastic, which contains 21 stories published between 1982 (Margaret Thatcher! The Clash!) and 2006 (Tony Blair! Al-Qaeda!), is not one of those books, though fortunately it does contain elements of fantasy, catharsis, and amusement.
Julian: A Christmas Story by Robert Charles Wilson, by Niall Harrison (01/03/07): Julian has the deftly-tucked hospital corners characteristic of so many good novellas—in the end, nothing is superfluous—but its pace, even at its most dramatic moments, never risks becoming urgent.
Resplendent by Stephen Baxter, by Adam Roberts (01/02/07): The third volume of Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children sequence, 2005's Transcendent, seemed so effective a copestone we might wonder what a fourth book could add. The answer is: a fix-up of eighteen previously-published short stories (and one new one) arranged in the chronological order dictated by Baxter's Xeelee future-history.
2006 In Review, by Our Reviewers (01/01/07): We asked our reviewers to pick their SF-related highs and lows of 2006—books, films, tv, anything. This is what they said.
Don't Stop: A West Wing retrospective, by Graham Sleight (12/21/06): It's absolutely clear to me that the true predecessor of The West Wing, the great science fiction show that ended its seven-season run this spring, is the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Pictures From an Expedition by Alexander C. Irvine, by Dan Hartland (12/20/06): It isn't until the 169th page of Alexander Irvine's second collection of short fiction that he comes out and says it. Preceding this moment have been tales of varying setting and success but uniform purpose. However far each story has deviated from another in terms of plot or conceit, ultimately an over-arching preoccupation has emerged. And part way through "Volunteers" (2004), Irvine's story of space colonisation and mass delusion, the narrator expresses it for us: "I know you know most of this already. All I have to offer that's new is me. My feelings, my perspectives." It may as well be Irvine talking.
Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster, by Paul Kincaid (12/19/06): There comes a point when many writers seem to retreat inside themselves and produce a novel purely concerned with the workings of the inside of their own head. Such novels are easily recognisable: the setting tends to be a bare room, the cast is limited to one (with any other figures acting out roles rather than being developed characters), and the resolution, if not death, is stasis.
Salon Fantastique, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, by Nic Clarke (12/18/06): If it were left to the rather cutesy cover art to sell the book, Salon Fantastique would not be an immediately appealing prospect (have we not yet grown tired of soft-focus Ren Faire ladies and ... butterflies?). However, the casually-browsing would-be reader is also gifted with certain names that inspire more confidence—co-editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, of course, together with a roster of fifteen contributors to make any lover of literary fantasy go weak at the knees.
To Hold Infinity by John Meaney, by Colin Harvey (12/14/06): John Meaney's first short story appeared in Interzone in 1992. Meaney was then at the tail end of a squad of new or revitalised writers entering SF, including amongst others Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, Greg Egan, Nicola Griffiths, Kim Newman, and Brian Stableford. There were so many that some could appear and go relatively unnoticed, like Keith Brookes, Eugene Byrne, Charles Stross, and ... John Meaney.
Joon-ho Bong's The Host, by Jonathan McCalmont (12/13/06): When the film shifts into higher gear or decides to pile on the tension, director Joon-ho Bong's shot selection and Hyung-ku Kim's beautiful cinematography combine with high-end special effects and great action directing to produce scenes that are not only exciting and visually impressive but also emotionally resonant.
Farewell Summer by Ray Bradbury, by David Soyka (12/12/06): If the Bradbury oeuvre is distinguished by its author's ability to "never grow up," as the song goes, it is perhaps fitting that, this late in his long career, his most recent novel, Farewell Summer, is a mediation on the bittersweet passages of the polar ends of life, adolescence and old age.
Forbidden Planets, edited by Peter Crowther, by Mark Rich (12/11/06): Peter Crowther apparently had a canny way of getting the stories he wanted, a few of which pay quite direct homage. He wanted stories that would go to "places where humans should not venture but do." There is something about the expansive strength and simplicity of the film Forbidden Planet that would be hard to convey in your average written-to-order short story, but the theme of unwisely venturing into new places seems to have taken these writers to nearly the same place: the level of their writing is fairly high.
Doorways for the Dispossessed by Paul Haines, by R. J. Burgess (12/06/06): Take a slab of Hunter S. Thompson, add some Philip K. Dick, and throw them into a blender for a while. Add a little dash of Brother's Grimm and a spoonful of American Psycho and what do you end up with? In all honesty, probably a great galumphing mess, but if anyone could come close to making such a bizarre union of styles and genres work then it's this man—Paul Haines—a young, up-and-coming author from down under.
Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, by Siobhan Carroll (12/05/06): The promotional material for Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn: The Final Empire represents the novel as a fantasy that "dares to turn a genre on its head" by asking the question "What if Frodo failed?" Set in a dark fantasy landscape where the prophesized hero failed to save the world, Sanderson's novel ultimately does defeat expectations, just not in the manner advertised.
Nova Swing by M. John Harrison, by Abigail Nussbaum (12/04/06): It starts with a dame. She's out of place: too classy for this dim and shabby bar off an unimpressive street in a run-down part of town. She's looking for a man. God knows how a woman like her tracks down a man like him, but people do strange things when they need something badly enough. She has a job for him. She's looking for something, and he's the one who can lead her to it.

Thus begins Nova Swing, not so much a direct sequel as a companion piece to M. John Harrison's much-lauded 2002 space opera, Light.
Valley of the Soul by Tamara Siler Jones, by Jonathan McCalmont (11/30/06): Based on a high-concept blending of the fantasy and police procedural genres, Valley of the Soul is the second sequel to Ghosts in the Snow, a book that made its way onto Locus magazine's 2004 recommended first novel list and earned its author a Compton Crook award for best first SF or fantasy novel. Unfortunately, despite showing an exemplary grasp of the mechanics of genre, Valley of the Soul displays a lack of focus that Jones will have to remedy if she harbors any hopes of transforming that early critical good will into any kind of lasting impact upon the infamously competitive fantasy genre.
Mad Dog Summer by Joe R. Lansdale, by Duncan Lawie (11/29/06): The problem with this collection is that Joe R. Lansdale is a great writer. He has such mastery of tone and style that I was convinced by almost every word he wrote in Mad Dog Summer. Convinced, but upset and irritated as well. In part, the problem is the distance between Lansdale's world view and my own; but what I really don't like about much of the work on show here is the vulgar approach Lansdale takes to his subjects.
The Grass-Cutting Sword and In The Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente, by Donna Royston (11/28/06): Two new books from Catherynne M. Valente, The Grass-Cutting Sword and The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden, both spin stories from the affairs of celestial beings, the first children of the Creators—gods. But these are not happy gods, ruling in bliss in the heavens; nor are they benevolent or righteous, giving laws and enforcing justice. Some are jealous, cruel, or self-destructive; others are frail victims.
The Prestige: the film and the screenplay, by Paul Kincaid (11/27/06): The Prestige is a film in close-up, a confined and confining film set in narrow streets, in small, dark rooms, in prison cells, a film that directs where we look and so guides what we do not see. We watch a drama—at times violent, always compelling—but the real story is something we construct only later, when the mysteries of the plot slot neatly and satisfyingly into place.
The Impelled by Gary Fry, by Colin Harvey (11/23/06): Fry made his first sale in 2003—and while the eighteen stories in The Impelled cover the last three years, most of them are even more recent than that range suggests; six of the stories were published last year and two more this year, while six of the stories appear for the first time in these pages. Add to that his two British Fantasy Award nominations (albeit as Best Editor), and his rise has been rapid.
Unexplained: An Encyclopedia of Curious Phenomena, Strange Superstitions, and Ancient Mysteries by Judy Allen, by Matt Cardin (11/22/06): It’s probably the tack Allen takes as much as anything having to do with the book’s rich content and design that leads me to give it high marks. I find her tone and approach endearing. Yes, it’s equally possible to scoff at this tone, to cop an attitude drawn from CSICOP and deem the entire book a mass of rubbish. But I choose to be charmed instead of offended. I think it can be a positive boon for young people to be entertained by this type of stuff, which helps keep the doors and windows of their imaginations wide open.
Clinically Dead and Other Tales of the Supernatural by David A. Sutton, by Kelly Christopher Shaw (11/21/06): When writing horror fiction, Stephen King admits in his 1981 paean to the horror genre, Danse Macabre, "if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out." What to make, then, of David A. Sutton's collection of 10 horror stories, Clinically Dead and Other Tales of the Supernatural, which fails to affect the reader on all three levels?
The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke, by Victoria Hoyle (11/20/06): The stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu are consistently subtle and enchanting, and as charismatic as any reader could wish, but, while the collection has the panache of the novel, it lacks its glorious self possession. The stories feel a little adrift, a little raw, occasionally too neat; they're not the natural heirs to the magnum opus. But then, how could they be, and why should they be? A short fiction collection is a different beast to a novel, and is bound to work on its readers in entirely different ways.
The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue, by R. J. Burgess (11/16/06): The Stolen Child is a beautiful book. In the blurb on the back cover, there is a quote from Audrey Niffenegger (author of The Time Traveller's Wife) praising it for its depth of language and style. It's an appropriate choice of reviewer, since The Stolen Child shows strong similarities to Niffenegger's work. They share the same dual-threaded narrative style, the same achingly sentimental tone, the same emphasis on characterisation and meticulous attention to detail.
Pearls from Peoria by Philip José Farmer, by Danny Adams (11/15/06): Fans will rejoice that Pearls contains not just stories but also poems and essays—many of which were either previously unpublished or published decades ago in venues so obscure it would be nigh impossible to find them today.
High John the Conqueror by Jim Younger, by Jonathan McCalmont (11/14/06): The characterisation and setting of Younger's book show a love of purple prose and a taste for sensationalism, blasphemy, and decadence that will inspire snorts of recognition as well as laughs of disgust and delight.
Matriarch by Karen Traviss, by Sherryl Vint (11/13/06): The Wess'har War Series centers on Shan Frankland, an Environmental Hazard Enforcement Officer, who ends up exiled far from Earth on the planet Cavanagh's Star (called Bezer'ej by the local inhabitants) investigating what happened to a long lost colony whose database of earth life DNA has become an important resource in a time of environmental crisis and mass species extinctions.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr, by Adam Roberts (11/09/06): Feature Week: The Life and Legacy of James Tiptree, Jr.

Adam Roberts: You need to read James Tiptree Jr. If you've never read her, and you've any interest in SF, you need to rectify that anomaly. But even if, like me, you have read her, perhaps a while ago, you need to re-read her. Tachyon's handsomely-produced catch-all collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the perfect place to begin: a lovely piece of book-production, from its attractive John Picacio cover-art through each of its eighteen indispensable stories printed across well-laid-out pages. It's a beaut, and you need to read it. Or to re-read it.
Render Unto Chaos: The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, by Victoria Hoyle (11/08/06): Feature Week: The Life and Legacy of James Tiptree, Jr.

Victoria Hoyle: The second James Tiptree Award Anthology (sadly bereft of a teasing subtitle this time) takes the same anarchic structure as its predecessor, being an admixture of fiction and non-fiction, short stories and novel excerpts.
Sex, The Future, and Chocolate Chip Cookies: The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, by Victoria Hoyle (11/07/06): Feature Week: The Life and Legacy of James Tiptree, Jr.

Victoria Hoyle: The result in Volume 1, the aforementioned and playfully titled Sex, the Future and Chocolate Chip Cookies, is truly cacophonous: three fairytales (one written in the mid-nineteenth century!), a ghost story, a piece of anthropological SF ala Le Guin, a story about gorilla hunting, an extract from a novel centered upon Multiple Personality Disorder and a narrative couched in the form of an academic essay.
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips, by Farah Mendlesohn (11/06/06): Feature Week: The Life and Legacy of James Tiptree, Jr.

Farah Mendlesohn: Biography is the most awkward of the historical arts. Biography of the recently deceased is perhaps the most laden with eggshells, while authorized biography strews in its own path the most delicate-hued, fragile of incubating ovoids. In The Double Life of Alice Sheldon Julie Phillips must contend both with Sheldon's image creation and the determined image creation of others, from her mother and the Chicago society pages through to the feminists who have claimed Tiptree. There are several ways to do this. Phillips might have opted for dissection, but chooses instead immaculate darning, seeking to reconcile these different figurations: mostly this is very effective, occasionally there are funny slips, and sometimes this reader found herself reading sequential comments and struggling to reconcile them in ways that were revealing not so much of what could be read between the lines, but of a specific and unexpected agenda.

Julie Phillips wants Alice Sheldon to be a woman.
Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin, by Lisa Goldstein (11/02/06): Seventeen years ago the city of Ansul was conquered by the war-loving Alds. Ansul was known for its learning, and especially for its library, but the Alds believe that writing is evil and have ordered all books destroyed. They also believe that women should not be seen outside without a man, and so Memer, a seventeen-year-old girl, goes out to do the shopping disguised as a boy.
Jericho, by Alasdair Stuart (11/01/06): Every period of history has its own way of ending the world. The shadow of a mushroom cloud fell across the twentieth century, bringing with it the concept of the un-winnable war, the nuclear winter, and Mutually Assured Destruction. The twenty first century, to date, has been distinguished by a global rise in terrorism and the awareness of terrorism, the fear of the bomb replaced by the fear of the dirty bomb or the sleeper cell no one catches in time. Jericho (CBS, Wednesdays at 8pm) builds on these fears to explore what happens after the world ends.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, by Siobhan Carroll (10/31/06): In case that sounds too deep, I should note that World War Z is also about zombies. Underwater zombies! Legless zombies! Child zombies!
Daughters of Earth, edited by Justine Larbalestier, by Maureen Kincaid Speller (10/30/06): "Feminism is as much a way of reading, as it is of writing," observes Justine Larbalestier in the introduction to this anthology (p.xvi). To which I might add that there are also as many feminist readings of a story as there are feminists to read it, and to write about it. Larbalestier comprehensively illustrates her point, and mine, in Daughters of Earth.
Candle in a Bottle by Carolyn Ives Gilman, by Colin Harvey (10/24/06): Gilman has posited a much subtler, feminist agenda—by updating and upgrading the information mechanics of the cyberpunk movement and replacing the boy-toy faux-noir cliches with a more rounded and mature setting, she has written a feminist novel that doesn’t at first sight appear to be anything to do with feminism.
Farthing by Jo Walton, by Dan Hartland (10/23/06): Alternate histories related to Nazi Germany are of course by now a venerable institution—from Robert Harris's mainstream smash Fatherland (1993) to the stranger works of alt.history scion Harry Turtledove, the post-1945 survival of Nazi Germany is the great "what if" of the twentieth century, and fertile ground for novelists. Harris too, though setting his book in Berlin, chose to create a world in which Britain preferred to reach accommodation with Hitler rather than fight him until whatever end. In Farthing, however, this choice and its consequences is brought front and centre—the men and women who made it and live with it are the novel's protagonists, and the action takes place in the Britain which the capitulation has created.
The Machine's Child by Kage Baker, by Lisa Goldstein (10/18/06): It's just possible for readers to come to the most recent book in Kage Baker's series without having read the others, but I wouldn't recommend it with this one. The Machine's Child starts in the middle and ends with a great many unresolved questions. In between, though, it's a hell of a ride.
Horton, Hartwell, Cramer, Strahan, Datlow, Link & Grant: The Year's Best Fantasy, by Nic Clarke (10/17/06): In fact, there was one quality that came through time and again during my reading of the four Year's Best anthologies for 2005: the power of what is left unsaid. The monster half-glimpsed by night, the dark past alluded to but never fully revealed, the magic that might simply be a delusion of grief (but also might not), the mysterious onset of invisibility (twice), the endings left full of possibility.
Glasshouse by Charles Stross, by L. Timmel Duchamp (10/16/06): In the "post-Acceleration" universe of Charles Stross's latest novel, post-humans live in polities widely scattered through space that are physically constructed and linked with charmingly inventive SFnal ingenuity. One such polity is the Glasshouse, formerly a Houdini-proof panoptic prison. Glasshouse tells the story of what happens when three (unsympathetic) war criminals, posing as researchers conducting a social experiment, lure hundreds of subjects into agreeing to be locked up without civil rights and incommunicado in this closed polity.
The Privilege of the Sword by Ellen Kushner, by Yoon Ha Lee (10/11/06): Once, in a nameless city, in the poor and dangerous neighborhood known as Riverside, a swordsman and his lover were entangled in the aristocrats' power struggles. Their story was told in Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, which introduced us to a...
Scar Night by Alan Campbell and The Fledgling of Az Gabrielson by Jay Amory, by Finn Dempster (10/10/06): You’ll have recognised a few familiar fantasy and horror tropes in the above synopsis, and you’ll notice several more if, as I recommend, you read this novel. Utilising elements of Christian and vampire mythology, Campbell also borrows freely from sources like Ghormenghast, Dickens, and the traditional coming of age parable. Re-inventing rather than recycling, (it’s not often you get to read about a vampire angel whose modus operandi also hints at lycanthropic tendencies), Campbell serves up a dark, explosive fantasy that singles him out as one to watch.
La Science Des Rêves (a.k.a. The Science of Sleep), by David J. Schwartz (10/09/06): As he did in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), [Gondry] builds his irrealities more out of textures than smooth computer graphics. The result is a film that sometimes looks like the inside of an elaborate basement playhouse or a grade-school art class. It's handmade. It smells of glue.
Strange Candy by Laurell K. Hamilton, by Elizabeth Barrette (10/05/06): This book is a must-read, but probably not for the reason you think. Okay, so it’s a Laurell K. Hamilton book—everybody who buys everything she writes will already be headed for the bookstore, and won’t need to read a review. This is for the rest of you.
The Hal Spacejock Series by Simon Haynes, by Colin Harvey (10/04/06): Haynes writes humourous SF, that mutant bastard of Wodehouse and Wells. Only Douglas Adams, who came from outside the genre via the BBC, has had significant commercial success writing only humorous SF, and often Adams' fans include those who don't read "that sci-fi rubbish."
Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett, by Juliana Froggatt (10/03/06): But while joy is important, it's not all there is to be had from Wintersmith. It's clear that Pratchett sees writing for children as no reason to forgo all the issues confronted in so-called adult literature.
American Morons by Glen Hirshberg, by William Mingin (10/02/06): The seven longish stories in Glen Hirshberg’s second collection and third book (after collection The Two Sams [2003] and novel The Snowman’s Children [2002]) are uniformly well-written, with careful delineation of character, mood, setting, and emotional nuance. They’re wide-ranging and varied in their settings and in the knowledge, or research, that supplies their trappings—contemporary Italy; 19^th century New England millennialism, coastal shipwrecks, and lighthouse keepers; contemporary California; ice cream truck driving. In all these aspects they are like—and for the most part, they read like—the kind of fiction associated with literary magazines, both major and “little,” the kind of writing taught in Master of Fine Arts programs, and what Michael Chabon in the introduction to McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2002) characterized as “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story” (“The Editor’s Notebook,” p. 6).
The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle, by Genevieve Williams (09/28/06): Treading the lines between reality and myth, the modern day and the remote past, the concrete and the imagined, has long been Lisa Tuttle’s specialty: books such as The Mysteries and The Pillow Friend highlight both the appeal and the danger of blurring the line between the magical and the everyday. The setting, crossing, and erasure of boundaries, both in the world and in the human heart, is a major theme of Tuttle’s, and it weaves through The Silver Bough like a silver thread.
Jack of Ravens by Mark Chadbourn, by Donna Royston (09/27/06): Jack of Ravens is an ambitious book. This fast-moving adventure tale trawls a time period from the Iron Age until the present day, and pulls in a bursting net of characters—historical and mythical—from ancient Rome, Renaissance Europe, the Lost Colony in America, Victorian London, Haight-Ashbury, Vietnam, and Woodstock.
The Swarm by Frank Schätzing, by Jonathan McCalmont (09/26/06): If environmental catastrophes are caused by another intelligent species, then a progressive attitude towards protecting nature becomes tantamount to appeasing the genocidal butchers who clearly think it better to try and wipe humanity out than reach some kind of agreement.
Twenty Epics, edited by David Moles and Susan Marie Groppi, by Rose Fox (09/25/06): The editors of Twenty Epics begin their paean to the epic story in a slightly backwards fashion, by deploring its decline. "We used to like epics," laments the introduction, but "somewhere along the way, they lost their charm." Reacting strongly to the current crop of unending doorstopper series, Groppi (also the editor-in-chief of Strange Horizons) and Moles went looking for short stories: not the usual source for the grandeur that they assert is the key to the epic sensibility, but when novels have let us down, the theory seems to go, short fiction is the last bastion of hope for lovers of grand gestures and flamboyant flair.
In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss, by Abigail Nussbaum (09/21/06): "My story has the contours of a fairy tale." So begins "The Belt," one of sixteen stories that make up Theodora Goss's haunting debut collection, In the Forest of Forgetting. It's an opening that brims with promise: of the tropes familiar to us from a thousand bedtime readings—the beautiful, motherless girl, the handsome prince, the terrible secret—but also of something unfamiliar. The story, after all, has the contours of a fairy tale, but what of its contents?
Jigsaw Nation, edited by Edward J. McFadden III and E. Sedia, by Mark Teppo (09/20/06): Let's be honest: these are pro-Blue-state stories, written as morality tales, cautionary fables, and horror stories of people caught up by the Red machinery.
John Scalzi's Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, by Justin Howe (09/19/06): Scalzi also gives us a glimpse of humanity on the cusp between what we can recognize as ourselves and an alien society that we would be surprised to see ourselves become. One week John Perry is fighting intelligent rock spiders in the zero-g environment of some gas giant's ring, the next he's stomping through a Lilliputian city like Godzilla armed with a rocket launcher.
Skinks: A Pet Store Odyssey by Clifford D. Taylor, by Tim Phipps (09/18/06): In the darkness I see something flicker behind his eyes, a look that could only happen in the night. A challenge, he's no doubt thinking.

He bites into his cigar, before removing it and pointedly blowing smoke towards me. "Explain," he growls. "Where's my review, Phipps?"
Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett, by Jason Erik Lundberg (09/14/06): Once again, Burdett’s prose sizzles with les mots justes and a fast pace; some of the sense of wonder of the exotic setting has worn away, but in return we are exposed to the wider geography of Thailand’s countryside.
Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard, by R. J. Burgess (09/13/06): Life During Wartime is the 66^th book to be released in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series. Originally published in 1987, it's an anti-war novel, set in a near-future world that has been plunged into chaos at the height of the cold war. The war is dirty, fuelled by drugs and fought by elite psychics who are able to manipulate the emotions of those around them.
Absolute Uncertainty by Lucy Sussex, by James Trimarco (09/12/06): This is not Sussex’s only literary outfit—she has darker material in her wardrobe as well. But the best and most original stories here grapple with the tension between the desire to inhabit the subjectivity of people from another time and place and the suspicion that such understanding may be impossible.
Dozois, Horton, Strahan, Hartwell & Cramer: The Year's Best Science Fiction, by Dan Hartland (09/11/06): And so the traditional "Year's Best" anthologies which are churned out every twelve months in the SF field, and purport to present to us the most essential stories of the last year so as to keep us up-to-date with all the very latest innovations and creative explosions, should be approached with an eyebrow circumspectly raised. All these books have to choose from, after all, is twelve months' worth of stories.
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss, edited by Jonathan Lethem, by Graham Sleight (09/07/06): Feature Week: In the Chinks of the Genre Machine

Graham Sleight: Lethem's book was originally published in 2000, and has seemed to me since then a touchstone for some peculiarly contemporary concerns in fiction, not a million miles from the debates which have been going on about "slipstream" fiction the last few years.
ParaSpheres, edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, by Darja Malcolm-Clarke (09/06/06): Feature Week: In the Chinks of the Genre Machine

Darja Malcolm-Clarke: Speculative fiction is a field preoccupied with categories, involved in a constant effort to catalog its narrative strategies, aesthetics, and influences—hard sf, New Wave, cyberpunk, mythic fiction, magic realism, slipstream, interstitial fiction, deep genre, New Weird, what have you. In ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction, the preoccupation extends to the boundaries between "genre" and "literary" fiction.
Feeling Very Strange, edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, by Niall Harrison (09/05/06): Feature Week: In the Chinks of the Genre Machine

Niall Harrison: Hence, perhaps, the belated arrival of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, only seventeen years after Bruce Sterling coined the term. We may have had New Wave Fabulists and Interstitial Arts in the interim, it seems to say, but this time you're getting the Real Deal.
Polyphony 5, edited by Deborah Layne and Jay Lake, by Paul Kincaid (09/04/06): Feature Week: In the Chinks of the Genre Machine

Paul Kincaid: As to what that slippery term "cross-genre" might actually mean, it is not that easy to tell. Is this slipstream? It could well be, since "slipstream" tends to serve as a catch-all term for anything we are not comfortable slotting into clearly defined genre pigeonholes, which means in effect anything that strays away from the tired and overworked genre heartlands. But that still doesn't tell us very much.
Superman Returns, by Mahesh Raj Mohan (08/31/06): When I learned that Bryan Singer would make Superman Returns a direct sequel to the films I'd enjoyed as a youth, I was only mildly intrigued. The recent boom in comic book films has produced far more misses than hits, and even good examples like Spiderman 2 or X-Men have their eye-rolling and/or stupid moments.
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret, by R. J. Burgess (08/30/06): The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God is the first English translation of some of Keret's most popular works. It is a somewhat idiosyncratic collection featuring 21 extremely short stories (less than 1,000 words each) and one extremely long one (well over 10,000 words) that vary between the comedic and the allegorically absurd. Reading it now couldn't be much timelier.
Kafka in Bronteland and Other Stories by Tamar Yellin, by Paul Kincaid (08/29/06): Most of the stories in Tamar Yellin's first collection are clearly and unequivocally realist fictions. All could, indeed, be read as such. Yet every so often there is a shift in perspective, a sudden lurch in the way the world is viewed, which makes you hesitate.
Idolon by Mark Budz, by Niall Harrison (08/28/06): Idolon looks like core science fiction. Or it would, if the genre still had a body of work that could be confidently described as the core. Perhaps it would be better to say that Mark Budz's third novel looks familiar, looks like the sort of thing we might expect to find a lot of on the science fiction shelves, even in the heat of the form's current artistic and commercial diaspora: near-future speculation shaped around a thriller plot, with a cast that fit their roles more neatly than true characters ever do. But—to decode the title and paraphrase one of the cast-members in a single swoop—surfaces are phantoms. They can hide as much as they reveal, and vice versa, perhaps in genre novels more than most. The question, then, is whether there's more to Idolon than meets the eye.
The Lady in the Water, by William Mingin (08/24/06): The Lady in the Water starts with a voice-over background story, minimally-animated, both unconvincing and gracelessly told, flaws that mar the writing throughout.
Catalyst by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, by Duncan Lawie (08/23/06): "Catalyst" is a fair description for Kaslin, a teenage boy who stumbles into a cave and wakes the hibernating sentient spider species within. Like a chemical catalyst, he is largely unchanged by the events unfolding around him.
The Sword of Straw by Amanda Hemingway, by Rose Fox (08/22/06): Hemingway enjoys being unpredictable, however, and mixes in modern-day life and even some science fiction elements to keep things interesting. This is not your Classics professor's Grail quest, not by a long shot.
Marvel's Civil War, issues #1-3, by Jeremy Adam Smith (08/21/06): In the new Civil War mini-series, Marvel Comics finally gets off its creative ass and tackles head-on the issues raised by the War on Terrorism, from overreaching government power and individual conscience to public safety and personal liberty. After a super-powered catastrophe kills six hundred people, the government demands that super heroes reveal their secret identities and go to work for the government as legitimate officers of the law, complete with "pension plans and annual vacation time."
Mendoza in Hollywood by Kage Baker, by Sherryl Vint (08/17/06): Mendoza in Hollywood is the third of Kage Baker's Company novels. It was originally published in 2001, but Tor appears to be reissuing all of the previously-published Company novels in trade paperback form, something long overdue. Baker's series tells a complex story of several cyborg characters, living across the centuries, who work for the mysterious Dr. Zeus Incorporated, also known as the Company.
The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, by Siobhan Carroll (08/16/06): The Blade Itself is an epic fantasy that wears its cynical, postmodern heart on its sleeve. Wise Magi, stern knights and full-bosomed ladies can be found in its pages, but they're hardly the stars of the show. Instead, the novel follows the misadventures of people who seem to have wandered out of a film noir version of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach, by Finn Dempster (08/15/06): Carpet makers are venerated, respected ... and, thanks to the intergalactic revolution they've yet to hear about, shortly to be out of a job.
Throne of Jade and Black Powder War by Naomi Novik, by Rose Fox (08/14/06): The conceit of the series is straightforward: take one Napoleonic Era, add dragons, mix well. The style is strongly reminiscent of Master and Commander and others of its ilk.
The Big Picture Show: Who S2, by Graham Sleight (08/10/06): Feature Week: The Tenth Doctor

Graham Sleight: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But mostly the latter. The second season of the revived Doctor Who had so much going for it: it looked glossier, had more publicity and more spin-off shows, and drew bigger guest stars. The ratings were about the same as for the 2005 season (i.e. extremely impressive), but as drama and as science fiction it was mostly a series of wasted opportunities.
Six Comments on "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday", by Abigail Nussbaum (08/09/06): Feature Week: The Tenth Doctor

Abigail Nussbaum: About halfway through "Army of Ghosts," the penultimate episode in Doctor Who's second season, we finally realize what truly sets the ninth Doctor apart from the tenth.
Happy Times and Places: "Love and Monsters", by Tim Phipps (08/08/06): Feature Week: The Tenth Doctor

Tim Phipps: Russell Davies is, of course, from the Olden Days of fandom. He lived through much of the above. I've no idea if he was explicitly thinking of Ian Levine when he wrote the Abzorbaloff, but I can't help but suspect that Levine was bouncing somewhere around the back of his head.
Doctor Who and the Nostalgia Factor: "School Reunion", by Iain Clark (08/07/06): Feature Week: The Tenth Doctor

Iain Clark: Bringing back Sarah Jane Smith is one of the most definitive moments of the relaunched Doctor Who. Not just for what it tells us about the show's past, but for what it tells us about its present.
The Plot to Save Socrates by Paul Levinson, by Colin Harvey (08/02/06): At a time when an editor at Tor gave an interview lamenting the trend in speculative fiction towards either mimetic SF or the almost-baroque extreme hard SF, it’s interesting to read a writer of old-fashioned SF whose aversion to flamboyance seems to verge on the near pathological. Not that The Plot to Save Socrates is entirely flawless.
Paragaea by Chris Roberson, by Mark Teppo (08/01/06): Roberson's love for the pulps is readily apparent in his massive world-building. His characters stumble upon, walk past, and run through nearly every pulp convention you can think of, and therein lies the ultimate frustration with this book.
Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead by Alan DeNiro, by Adam Roberts (07/31/06): I shudder, here, at my own reviewerish contrivance; except to say that it registers the effect these stories have on a reader. On this reader at any rate. Some of them haunt the mind after the book has been put down. Others sail past the mind, or past my mind at any rate, at right-angles and leave no trace. Some seem queerly beautiful; more seem too obviously the sort of thing written by the graduate of a prestigious Creative Writing MFA programme. I liked, I didn't like.
Flatland, Flatterland, Spaceland: An education in three books, by Lori Ann White (07/27/06): Flatland seamlessly melds social satire, pointed commentary on the vanity and hypocrisy of the upper classes, philosophical musings, higher mathematics, and a dash of what we would now call hard SF. It has inspired numerous successor books and quasi-sequels: most recently Flatterland, by mathematician Ian Stewart (originally published in 2001), and Spaceland, by mathematician and SF writer Rudy Rucker (originally published in 2002).
The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold, by Greg Beatty (07/26/06): Based on Bujold's other works, readers might assume the novel to be richly inventive, containing well-realized characters and societies that are at once strange, striking, and moving—creations that carry the shock of the new even as they reflect interestingly on our own world. Bujold fans may relax. All of these qualities are definitely present in The Sharing Knife.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, by R. J. Burgess (07/25/06): It's always hard reviewing something that has the word "classic" firmly attached to it. After all, what can be said now that forty years of precedent hasn't already covered? Ray Bradbury's dark tale of gothic intrigue set against a background of nostalgic American life was first published over four decades ago, and since then has re-emerged countless times, most notably as a 1983 Disney movie and now as this, the latest in the excellent Fantasy Masterworks series.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, by Jasmine Johnston (07/24/06): Having been happily impressed with the first "P of C" movie The Curse of the Black Pearl, for reasons mostly to do with Depp, Bloom and, shiver me timbers, an exciting yarn, I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest wondering if it too could offer a real, sustained, two hour and thirty-one minute thrill of the sort I had come to expect. Comedy or crud? It turned out to be a bit of both.
Half-Life 2: Episode One, for PC (Windows 98/2000/XP/ME), by Erin Hoffman (07/20/06): Now with Half-Life 2: Episode One, Valve has again taken the first step forward in alternative distribution, foraying into the realm of episodic game content. The result, some say, is a gaming experience superior even to the highly acclaimed Half-Life sequel.
Emperor by Stephen Baxter, by Jonathan McCalmont (07/19/06): With his new Time's Tapestry series, Baxter has chosen to move away from his traditional stomping ground in favour of the historical fiction he flirted with in Coalescent, the first book of his Destiny's Children sequence.
Keeping It Real by Justina Robson, by Colin Harvey (07/18/06): Keeping It Real is a less than stern rebuttal to the opinions expressed by some publishers that SF readers want to read SF, fantasy readers want fantasy, and thriller readers want neither. Instead we have elvish rockers mixing it with AIs and stalkers in a book that attempts not so much the mixing of genres as the annihilation of the divides between them.
The Palgrave History of Science Fiction by Adam Roberts, by Dan Hartland (07/17/06): In The Palgrave History of Science Fiction, Adam Roberts similarly sidesteps the genre's central definitional question, and chooses to begin his review of the mode, and his search for its exemplars, at more or less the birth of literature.
The Colorado Kid by Stephen King, by William Mingin (07/13/06): King acknowledges in the afterword that some readers may hate this book, but that he is writing about mystery rather than writing a mystery; or rather, he writes a mystery not to resolve it but to put the reader into the sense of Mystery—the mystery of life we are all in. The point of the book is that there is much we can never know, much that is never explained to us.
Bangkok 8 by John Burdett, by Jason Erik Lundberg (07/12/06): The Buddha taught that karma is the cosmic law by which every cause has an effect, and all our actions have consequences that can last many lifetimes. Acceptance of karma can help one to understand why some people are born with disabilities while others are given prodigal talent (and, sometimes, both at once). Karma invokes the concept of individual responsibility for past and present actions, and it is a major theme in John Burdett's exotic mystery thriller Bangkok 8.
Impossible Stories by Zoran Živković, by Nicholas Whyte (07/11/06): PS Publishing have done the world an immense favour by releasing, between one set of covers, five of Zoran Živković's story cycles, plus one more story to end with, all topped and tailed with explanatory pieces by Paul Di Filippo and Tamar Yellin.
Streaking by Brian Stableford, by John Clute (07/10/06): There may be—indeed there is—some genuine pleasure in being teased and tickled by the kind of incongruities Stableford gives us here, but somehow we need to think that all this quite expert hoo-ha is a violon d'Ingres, a secondary kind of creative effort on his part.
Mythic, edited by Mike Allen, by Donna Royston (07/06/06): Mythic, edited by Mike Allen, is a collection of poems and short stories that either draw on myth directly or else take inspiration from it. In selecting the works that were included, Allen has interpreted myth broadly.
End of the World Blues by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, by David Soyka (07/05/06): While the title of End of the World Blues suggests an Armageddon theme—a popular science fictional trope during the Cold War that may of late, unfortunately, acquire a resurgence in relevance—that's not what we get. Rather, this is a story of both literal and psychological rebirth in which the characters achieve, to use the pop-psych term, "closure" for their "blues."
The Good People by Steve Cockayne, by Farah Mendlesohn (07/04/06): Let's just ignore the fact that this is for "younger readers," shall we? Why should they get all the best books? Steve Cockayne, who is already one of our finest fantasy authors, has produced something edgy, liminal, and deeply disturbing, and very, very English.
Nintendo Recent Release Roundup: Fresh Faces on Old Favorites in the Palm of Your Hand, by Erin Hoffman (07/03/06): Based on the Train Your Brain books by Dr. Ryuta Kawashima—runaway best-sellers in Japan—Nintendo's Brain Age and Big Brain Academy make the lofty claim of increasing their audience's IQ, sharpening your grey matter while providing entertainment, all at a discounted shelf price of $20 apiece. Nintendo's New Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo DS is their heavily advertised and highly anticipated latest installation in the Mario franchise. Bang-for-buck, few DS titles currently offer as much game time as this.
Writing the Other: A Practical Approach by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, by Genevieve Williams (06/29/06): Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, two Seattle-based science fiction authors, have developed a useful, nuts-and-bolts approach to creating fully realized, well-rounded characters substantially different from oneself.
Giants of the Frost by Kim Wilkins, by Siobhan Carroll (06/28/06): Pity poor Victoria Scott, a talented scientist who flees a broken engagement to take a job at an isolated Norwegian weather station. She's young, she's bitter, and she's "given up on love." Fortunately for her, she's also the heroine of a fantasy romance novel, so love, true love, (albeit supernatural in nature) lies just around the corner.
Circus of the Grand Design by Robert Freeman Wexler, by Niall Harrison (06/27/06): Meet little lost Lewis, thirty if he's a day, working in PR (for which he has an aptitude but not a talent) and an expert at travelling without moving. It's November and he's alone in drizzle, on his way to the coast for what would have been a romantic weekend if he hadn't just argued with his wife.
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, by C. M. Morrison (06/26/06): Just like everyone else, I am rather suspicious of hype. As soon as I hear something is the best new thing ever I start to wonder what's wrong with it. Sometimes, as in the case of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell the praise seems warranted. Far more often I want to know how the reviewer was bribed to tell me such lies. Which brings me to The Lies of Locke Lamora, a book awash in buildup.
Zootsuit Black by Jon George, by Farah Mendlesohn (06/22/06): In James White's "The Trouble with Emily" (1958), the god-like doctors of the Space Hospital persecute and torture a neo-brontosaurus into developing telekinetic powers, knowing that this will be its species' only hope of survival in the event of planetary disaster. In Jon George's Zootsuit Black, humans do the same thing to themselves.
The Butterflies of Memory by Ian Watson, by Paul Kincaid (06/21/06): Ian Watson is facile and fecund. Ideas come so easily to him, and are scattered so profusely through his stories, that they can get in the way of storytelling. It is a trap he falls into all too often. He will start to tell one story, then when he gets bored bung in another idea that sends the whole thing shooting off in a completely different direction.
Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear, by Steve Berman (06/20/06): I think many of us have been invited to banquets or dinner parties reminiscent of Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron: A Novel of the Promethean Age. If Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? could inspire a fantasy novel, Blood and Iron would be it.
The Worldwired Trilogy, by Elizabeth Bear, by Claire Brialey (06/19/06): Elizabeth Bear's Worldwired trilogy (published in the US during the course of 2005 as three volumes: Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired) tells a lot of stories. Each volume reaches a conclusion—if not a resolution—for at least some of the characters, and can be read as a story in itself; but taken together the books expand to tell a bigger story on a much bigger canvas than seems signalled by the tightly-paced action, complex characterisation and relationships, and already full plot of the first volume.
The King's Last Song by Geoff Ryman, by Abigail Nussbaum (06/15/06): Geoff Ryman's seventh novel, The King's Last Song, unfolds in two narrative strands. One follows the life of Jayavarman VII, the ruler of a minor princedom who in the late 12th century became Cambodia's first Buddhist king. In the other, modern strand, an accident uncovers a book written by Jayavarman, inscribed on leaves of gold.
Black Hole by Charles Burns, by Justin Howe (06/14/06): Black Hole is the story of a group of teenagers living in the Pacific Northwest during the 1970s. Less Dawson's Creek and more The River's Edge, the story details what happens when a sexually transmitted disease emerges among them.
River of Gods by Ian McDonald, by Mark Teppo (06/13/06): River of Gods is a Bollywood novel, and not just because it is set in India. Cleaving to the same mythical mindset which sets Indian cinema apart from so much of the turgid crap coming out of Hollywood, Ian McDonald populates his multi-threaded novel with a phantasmagoric sense of divinity.
Best. Franchise. EVAR: The Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, by Jonathan McCalmont (06/12/06): With the exception of Spirited Away (2001) and 28 Days Later (2002), nominations for this award have been mainstream Hollywood hits, with smaller genre films or foreign-language films resolutely ignored. Indeed, all five of this year's nominees are based on established properties, being adaptations, continuations, or reinventions.
X-Men: The Last Stand, by Iain Clark (06/08/06): X-Men—The Last Stand tries to pick up where X2 left off, dangling threads and all, and adds the tricky burden of turning an open-ended story into a neatly tied-off trilogy. It's only partially successful.
Archaeologies of the Future by Fredric Jameson, by John Garrison (06/07/06): Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions is a major event in speculative fiction studies.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge, by Colin Harvey (06/06/06): For the first time a Vinge novel has a near future setting, exploring current concerns about personal and state security, and how the ever-accelerating progress in technology will affect them.
One Million A.D. edited by Gardner Dozois, by Matthew Cheney (06/05/06): What we have with Gardner Dozois's new anthology One Million A.D. is one example after another of why people writing about the far future would probably be better off thinking of themselves as fantasy writers than as science fiction writers—the attempt to write plausible science fiction has, in most of these stories, limited the authors' imaginations and forced their tales into dullness.
Diana Wynne Jones: Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition by Farah Mendlesohn, by Lesley A. Hall (06/01/06): Farah Mendelsohn's study of Diana Wynne Jones is a delight to read in itself, and also the kind of critical study that sends one galloping back to the books themselves with new and exciting insights.
A Shadow In Summer by Daniel Abraham, by David Soyka (05/31/06): A Shadow in Summer is his first novel; it's very good, grafting an Arthurian love triangle riff onto a loosely Oriental world in which andant (spirits) conjured by poet-sorcerers (so called in part because the magic wielded incarnates ideas into corporeal counterparts of the conjurer, which is perhaps one way to describe poetics) are harnessed to enhance commerce.
The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy, edited by Johanna Sinisalo, by Rose Fox (05/30/06): Johanna Sinisalo, herself a prolific author and winner of the Finlandia Prize, has assembled a masterful collection of Finnish tales of the fantastic for this latest volume in the Dedalus European Fantasy series.
The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod, by Graham Sleight (05/29/06): Like almost everything Ian MacLeod has written, The Summer Isles starts after the fact. The fact, in this case, is a fascist revolution in 1930s England which the narrator, Griffin Brooke, looks back on from the vantage of 1940 and his own sixty years.
Visionary in Residence by Bruce Sterling, by James Trimarco (05/25/06): Visionary in Residence is mostly a book about science, with lots about business thrown in. At its best, the book evokes a sense of wonder at just how deeply technology shapes our posthuman destiny; at its worst, it gives in to an almost stealth-marketer-like obsession with gadgetry—soft or hard—without enough social context to make us feel the human consequences of what is going on.
Gradisil by Adam Roberts, by Finn Dempster (05/24/06): It's a never-quite-answered question why this claustrophobic, zero-gravity existence would appeal to anyone but the most committed misanthropist, much less to Earth's wealthiest. But if you can overlook that, and if you're willing to be patient with a sometimes long-winded and convoluted narrative, Gradisil repays with a reasonably engaging exploration of some of the more relevant and fraught aspects of life on (and around) planet Earth.
Troy by Simon Brown, by Ben Peek (05/23/06): Brown’s work has never been considered that of a stylist. His strength, then, arises from his ability to convey the emotions of his characters and to connect them with the fictional world that he portrays, allowing mood and tone to carry the reader through, rather than plot.
Two Views: The Patron Saint of Plagues by Barth Anderson, by Mark Teppo and Paul Kincaid (05/22/06): Mark Teppo: Anderson's deft assembly of this wide assortment of puzzle pieces makes for riveting reading and an immersive examination of the emotional and physical devastation of a viral outbreak. However, for all its high-tech high jinks and inventive scientific perambulations, The Patron Saint of Plagues is really a cautionary tale for our era.

Paul Kincaid: You might gather from this that Barth Anderson is no great shakes as a literary stylist. What he can do is string along a reasonably competent thriller plot. Every so often it has a storytelling-by-numbers feel to it, but when he gets excited by his story there is a great deal of energy in the tale.
Crystal Rain by Tobias S. Buckell, by Donna Royston (05/18/06): Crystal Rain contains some hidden places where wonders lie concealed, ready to break out into the light of day when the old-fathers' works are brought back to life.
I Live With You by Carol Emshwiller, by Maureen Kincaid Speller (05/17/06): Half threat, half promise, the title of this collection of stories unequivocally sums up the effects of its contents. Like fish hooks, Carol Emshwiller's stories possess barbs; once caught in the mind, they're almost impossible to dislodge.
The Burning Girl by Holly Phillips, by Dan Hartland (05/16/06): Rye has our sympathy. But, in the course of Holly Phillips's debut novel, The Burning Girl, the reader has difficulty ever really caring.
The Weight of Numbers by Simon Ings, by Abigail Nussbaum (05/15/06): Simon Ings' fifth novel, The Weight of Numbers, makes for a frustrating descriptive experience. Its plot—if such a thing can even be said to exist—is a tangle of yarn. Tug at it at any point, and you'll find a beginning.
The Highway Men by Ken MacLeod, by Farah Mendlesohn (05/11/06): The Highway Men is a taster book. Those who are already MacLeod fans will enjoy it, but its real potential may be as a juvenile.
The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana by Jess Nevins, by Tim Phipps (05/10/06): I've held onto this book for a good couple of months before reviewing it. Mainly, this was because I felt I could do it more justice if I spent more time reading it. But I also couldn't actually face reviewing it for some time, so boggled was my mind by the contents.
A Darkling Plain by Philip Reeve, by Martin Lewis (05/09/06): This far into any series—this is the fourth and final book of Philip Reeve's Traction Cities series—there is a wealth of backstory that cannot be readily explicated for the newcomer. Suffice to say the story takes place in a post-apocalyptic far future where vast moving cities battle the airborne armies of mountain fastnesses, for reasons that are as much ideological as resource based.
Shadow of the Colossus, for PlayStation2, by Erin Hoffman (05/08/06): I've played a lot of games, and I'm as much a sucker for the pretty as anyone else, but the first time I moved the main character in Shadow of the Colossus, a chill actually went up my spine.
Darkland by Liz Williams, by Colin Harvey (05/04/06): Darkland is thought-provoking and at times unsettling, and there was a sense throughout that at any time, the SF could turn into outright horror. For three hundred and five of its three hundred and eight pages, I enjoyed Darkland more than any other SF novel I've read in the last three or four years.
Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, by Genevieve Williams (05/03/06): Zahrah the Windseeker is a most impressive debut from newcomer Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, combining as it does an engaging, empathetic young protagonist, a rousing jungle adventure, and the weirdest fantasy world this side of The Neverending Story.
Alexandre Aja's The Hills Have Eyes, by Jonathan McCalmont (05/02/06): For every Amityville there is also a House of Wax (2005), a film so narcissistically insipid that the only possible explanation for its existence is that it is some kind of high-budget Al Qaeda recruitment film showing the moral and aesthetic decay of the West. Alexandre Aja's remake of a 1977 Wes Craven classic continues the trend by being a decidedly mixed bag.
The Coyote Trilogy by Allen Steele, by Justin Howe (05/01/06): It's easy to see in the first book that Steele wanted to tell a good story and investigate the mythology of the American Dream. He won favor with Coyote, continued that intensity through Coyote Rising, but by Coyote Frontier the signs of fatigue were clear.
London Revenant by Conrad Williams, by Kelly Christopher Shaw (04/27/06): Williams seamlessly blends plot threads involving a philosophical serial killer, a secret race of Underground dwellers, a lost subterranean city called "Beneothan," and an apocalyptic earthquake to create a city brimming with danger and decadence.
Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge, by Donna Royston (04/26/06): The story, however, relies on more than the invention of an eccentric world—Hardinge’s characters are varied and have an inner life: they do not (for the most part) violate credibility by acting randomly or senselessly, and yet, like real people, they are never entirely predictable in what they do or transparent in what is going on in their minds.
Past Magic by Ian R. Macleod, by Niall Harrison (04/25/06): Perhaps a certain unevenness is to be expected. There is, after all, a suspicion that Past Magic exists less to present a coherent portrait of its author than to fill in the gaps, to collect the early stories missed by Voyages by Starlight (1996) and the late stories missed by Breathmoss and Other Exhalations (2004).
The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) by L. Timmel Duchamp, by Lesley A. Hall (04/24/06): Eve is the character who would normally be at best a supporting, more likely a marginal, character in a story about the prisoner resisting the pressures upon her or the rebel bent on bringing the system down.
The Children of the Company by Kage Baker, by Colin Harvey (04/20/06): The Children of the Company is essentially a fix-up novel, comprising a half-dozen stories published between 1999 and 2000, including "Son Observe the Time."
The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow, by Farah Mendlesohn (04/19/06): To pause a moment before proceeding to the rest of the tale: the genius of this book—and I think it partakes of genius—is that it perfectly captures the prismatic situation of science and theology in the eighteenth century.
Capacity by Tony Ballantyne, by Finn Dempster (04/18/06): A techno-thriller that aspires to be more than just detective fiction with gadgetry, Capacity successfully tackles themes like free will, accountability, and the nature of human consciousness. Humans have taken a back seat, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, by Jasmine Johnston (04/17/06): So the whacked, wicked narration veers from spoke of spiral to radial, moments of myth to bathos, in a series of feathery postmodern interpretations of slapstick comedy in the self-aware tradition of Wodehouse or, much more familiarly to me at least, the hallucinatory Loony Tunes.
Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison, edited by Mark Bould and Michelle Reid, by Paul Kincaid (04/13/06): One cannot help but imagine a gang of cowboys turning up at the resplendent home of Science Fiction Foundation Publications Inc.: "Want a book then, Missus?" And what we have is undoubtedly a book, if you ignore the fact that as you read you are increasingly aware of the literary equivalent of cracks in the surface, bubbles under the paper, and nothing quite lined up properly.
The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford, by Rose Fox (04/12/06): I frequently bemoan the days when collections were more than just a jumbled pile of stories tossed together in any old order. Jeffrey Ford seems determined to revive those days, and he has crafted this collection (his second) with the same care and attention that he brings to crafting his individual stories. There are several distinct themes, each addressed with the quietly melancholy signature style that has sometimes led me to comment that Ford writes in the genre of sorrow.
Venusia by Mark von Schlegell, by Justin Howe (04/11/06): I like subtlety A-OK; it's bloviation and confusion I have a problem with. Von Schlegell escapes the former by his clean and imaginative prose, but unfortunately succumbs to the latter. I fear he may have let his love of the genre get in the way of his storytelling.
Write 'Em Until We Can't: Battlestar Galactica Lays Down Its Burdens, by Dan Hartland (04/10/06): Battlestar Galactica is simultaneously a show compulsively attached to continuity and one with a logic which often doesn't bear the most superficial of inspections.
Living Next-Door to the God of Love by Justina Robson, by Tanya Brown (04/06/06): Feature Week: The Novels of Justina Robson

Tanya Brown: In Natural History, Justina Robson gave us a tale of alien contact with a happy ending: a brave new world where the lost and rootless, the restless and adventurous, were offered the opportunity to become one with a benevolent consciousness, Unity, that offered them a kind of transcendence. Living Next-Door to the God of Love opens some thirty years later. It deals with what happens after that happy ending, about the dark lining of that silver cloud. It's about what people—humans, Forged, and others—choose to do, and what is forced upon them.
Natural History by Justina Robson, by Tony Keen (04/05/06): Feature Week: The Novels of Justina Robson

Tony Keen: Natural History begins with the cover: a very nice design by Steve Stone, depicting the novel's opening moment, which almost acts as part of the narrative. What follows is a strong piece of writing, that I (and others) was surprised didn't make the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist (although it was nominated for that year's BSFA Award). The nomination of the book for this year's Philip K. Dick award, therefore, is welcome.
Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson, by Nicholas Whyte (04/04/06): Feature Week: The Novels of Justina Robson

Nicholas Whyte: Mappa Mundi was published in 2001, a year in which many things changed in international politics. It is a tensely paced and densely written novel, techno-thriller in substance but not at all in style, set a very few years from now—indeed, reality has caught up with Robson's setting rather more quickly than she perhaps anticipated.
Silver Screen by Justina Robson, by Maureen Kincaid Speller (04/03/06): Feature Week: The Novels of Justina Robson

Maureen Kincaid Speller: the Bradford space port represents something I had not properly appreciated about Silver Screen before, which is that it sits very firmly in the tradition of—I hesitate to use the word ‘domestic’, but it is the correct word in this instance—British domestic science fiction.
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier, by Paul Kincaid (03/30/06): The first chapter of this novel, which first introduces us to the city and its multifarious puzzled inhabitants, appeared as a short story in the New Yorker in 2004 and immediately generated a buzz among those looking for something new in the literature of the fantastic.
Rocket Science by Jay Lake, by Rose Fox (03/29/06): In this first novel, Campbell Award-winner and prolific short fiction author and editor Lake pays thorough homage to the pocket book genre. The volume's light weight and flexible slenderness in the hands is a sign of the youthful exuberance within, a reminder of earlier days when bad guys were really bad and good guys were really good and fistfights went Biff! Bam! Pow!
V for Vendetta, by Iain Clark (03/28/06): If you were to pick any comic to adapt into a major Hollywood blockbuster, it probably wouldn't be V for Vendetta. Even if you didn't yet know that suicide bombers would soon make their first appearance on British soil, in a post-9/11 world it would be a brave person indeed who would film a mythologised bomber fighting to bring down a fascist UK government.
Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder, by Ursula Pflug (03/27/06): Toronto-based Karl Schroeder's third novel, Lady of Mazes need not take place off-world in the far future. The technology it describes is coming soon to a theatre near you. Like, next week.
Ghosts of Albion: Accursed by Amber Benson and Christopher Golden, by Nicholas Whyte (03/23/06): In this, the first of a promised series of novels picking up the characters and settings from the BBC webcast stories by the same authors, siblings William and Tamara (not, repeat, not Willow and Tara) are the chosen Protectors of Albion, magically gifted teenagers charged with protecting their country from its supernatural enemies (so it is completely different from any other story or TV series you may have encountered).
Firebirds Rising edited by Sharyn November, by C. M. Morrison (03/22/06): Firebirds Rising is the second in what is now an ongoing series of Young Adult anthologies edited by Sharyn November. There are contributions by a number of well-known authors, most of whom have been published by November's Firebird imprint. For the most part that is all that connects these stories together—there's no theme or overarching mood to give the anthology a sense of unity.
Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer, by Abigail Nussbaum (03/21/06): Shriek: An Afterword, the first Ambergris-set novel proper, shines a stronger spotlight onto this history, connecting the disparate stories in City of Saints and Madmen into something resembling a single narrative. Sadly, the novel falls short of City of Saints and Madmen's brilliance, and the Ambergris that emerges from it is less appealing than the one encountered in that earlier book.
20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill, by Graham Sleight (03/20/06): What would a moral writer's horror stories look like? What would it be like to write in this tradition so rooted in schlock and degradation, but to do it as a feeling adult?
Knowing Where To Look: The 2005 BSFA "Best Artwork" Award Shortlist, by Pete Young (03/16/06): Visual, static two-dimensional art is possibly the only art form in which everything is presented to the audience at once and not over a span of time, but good SF art, because it relies principally on the imagination, necessarily encourages the viewer to imagine what else might exist beyond the immediate context of the image itself.
Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra et alia, by Jed Hartman (03/15/06): The series follows young escape artist Yorick Brown and his capuchin monkey Ampersand as they travel across the US toward various goals, after the sudden death of all other male mammals. Traveling with them are a woman known only as "355"—an agent of a secret American intelligence agency—and Dr. Allison Mann, a bioengineer working on human cloning.
Two Views: The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, by Juliana Froggatt and Mattia Valente (03/14/06): Juliana Froggatt: While I toyed with the idea of submitting a three-word review (to wit: BUY. THIS. BOOK), on further reflection I was willing to admit that most people might feel they need more than my say-so to justify plopping down $150 for something they might already own, albeit in lesser form.

Mattia Valente: Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes swept us along for the adventures of a perennially 6-year-old Calvin and his best friend, the tiger Hobbes—to Calvin as real as you or I, to his parents nothing more than a stuffed animal. The slippery reality of the comic strip is one of its most endearing features.
Polder: A Festschrift for John Clute and Judith Clute, edited by Farah Mendlesohn, by Niall Harrison (03/13/06): Polder is a festschrift (and how fitting it is that the book's title may not be immediately transparent): a collection of tributes, anecdotes, poems, essays and stories about the Clutean triptych. It is, in a word, eclectic.
The Pale Horseman by Bernard Cornwell and Mordred, Bastard Son by Douglas Clegg, by Christopher M. Cevasco (03/09/06): A close connection between otherwise distinct genres is again made manifest: just as science fiction allows us to view the human condition by extrapolating forward to where we might end up, historical fiction does this by looking back at where we have been.
Cultural Breaks by Brian Aldiss, by Mark Rich (03/08/06): Aldiss engages in some of that stylistic hopscotch he has always practiced, moving from one fictional voice to another; and as always some of these voices and approaches are more successful than others.
Counting Heads by David Marusek, by Dan Hartland (03/07/06): Counting Heads, David Marusek's startling debut novel, is a book acutely aware that science fiction achieves its true power and potency only when it also exhibits self-belief.
Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, by Rob Gates (03/06/06): It's made clear from the start of Fledgling that we should not expect a comfortable read. Within moments of waking in darkness and hunger and pain, with no memory of how she got there, our narrator is approached by some large noisy creature. She waits until the creature is touching her, then pounces. She tears out its throat and feeds on its blood and terror. Perhaps our narrator is not quite the helpless victim we first assumed. It gets less comfortable from there. This is Octavia Butler, after all.
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet, by Ben Peek (03/02/06): It was from this moment, fourteen pages into Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, that I began to suspect that I was falling in love. It was the description of the blast that did it. The great terrible flower. The sky being lifted up in a sear of light.
The Rosetta Codex by Richard Paul Russo, by Finn Dempster (03/01/06): He may be heir to the wealthy Alexandros Estates, one of Lagrima's pre-eminent trading Families, but young Cale Alexandro's formative years are nonetheless surprisingly turbulent. His difficulties begin when his father's spaceship is attacked by pirates, forcing him and his nursemaid into a chaotic crash-landing on the nearest planet, and they never really stop.
The Extraordinary Voyage of Jules Verne by Eric Brown, by Colin Harvey (02/28/06): In some ways, this romantic streak makes Brown the perfect author for a scientific romance about one of the grandfathers of SF. What this novella also illustrates, however, is what a chameleon-like and undervalued writer Brown is.
His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, by Rose Fox (02/27/06): There's no question that underneath all the hype is a becomingly modest Napoleonic fantasy that satisfies on several levels.
Electroplankton, for Nintendo DS, by Erin Hoffman (02/23/06): Most impressive about Electroplankton is not its versatility, its amazing synthesis of visual and auditory art, or its intuitive interface, but its remarkable tuning. The designers have structured this game such that within moments of manipulation any electroplankton group can provide a totally unique, startlingly tranquil musical sequence intricate enough to stand up to long-term listening. This kind of refined environment, where it is nearly impossible to go wrong, is a staggering undertaking....
Macrolife: A Mobile Utopia by George Zebrowski, by Justin Howe (02/22/06): Zebrowski writes in the tradition of authors such as Olaf Stapledon, Alexei Panshin, and H. G. Wells. Like them, he is one of those writers who can shape the vision of a whole generation and plant the seeds of a hundred new ideas.
Babylon Babies by Maurice Dantec, by James Trimarco (02/21/06): Some of the most interesting achievements of this consciously avant-garde revisitation of cyberpunk themes are stylistic ones, and those who enjoy a hard-boiled yet experimental approach to language will no doubt appreciate translator Noura Wedell and the Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series for making this writer, already a figure of fame and controversy in France, available to the English-speaking world. At the same time, however, Dantec's attempts to portray a grimly futuristic tableau are frustrating for a variety of reasons, including an inexplicable downplaying of state power and a reliance on exotic locales.
Last Week's Apocalypse by Douglas Lain, by Matthew Cheney (02/20/06): Last Week's Apocalypse is less a collection of stories than a book of shreds and fractals. Over and over again the world dissassembles before the eyes of a bewildered man, over and over again fragments of pop culture and historical factoids scar the lives of people in Portland, Oregon.
Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente, by Niall Harrison (02/16/06): Feature Week: Modern Myths

Niall Harrison: How can a life be described? Most of the time, we have to look at lives from the outside: we say that someone did this, and did that, and we sketch their path through the world. Fiction, of course, can let us pretend to look at a life from the inside. Not just what happened, but how it felt; a clearer path through a sketchier world. Or, perhaps, in the case of a book like Yume No Hon, worlds.
Oracles: A Pilgrimage by Catherynne M. Valente, by J.C. Runolfson (02/15/06): Feature Week: Modern Myths

J.C. Runolfson: Oracles: A Pilgrimage, by Catherynne M. Valente, is a collection of poems about modern day sibyls in cities across the United States.
The Cosmology of the Wider World by Jeffrey Ford, by Tony Keen (02/14/06): Feature Week: Modern Myths

Tony Keen: [I]t does a disservice to Ford to suggest that he is solely or for the most part reacting against the cuteness of the Disney corporation. What he’s actually doing, or so it seems to me, is working in an entirely different and older tradition, that of the English fantasists.
Weight by Jeanette Winterson and The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, by Dan Hartland (02/13/06): Feature Week: Modern Myths

Dan Hartland: From Malory to Moorcock, writers of all stripes have long returned to every kind of myth, revisiting and rewriting time-honoured tales in an attempt to extract new truths. The Scottish publishers Canongate have recently moved to get in on this tried and tested literary act, inaugurating a series of slim volumes by prominent mainstream authors which seek to retell some of our most timeless myths in "a contemporary and memorable way".
The Affinity Trap by Martin Sketchley, by Mahesh Raj Mohan (02/09/06): The Affinity Trap is an ambitious far-future space opera by first-time novelist Martin Sketchley.
The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, edited by Roger Dutcher and Mike Allen, by Elizabeth Barrette (02/08/06): Altogether, this collection presents an ideal resource for fans of speculative poetry; for those new to this branch of poetry, it provides an ideal introduction.
Life on Mars, by Martin Lewis (02/07/06): This has to be the Doctor Who effect: you wait ages for the BBC to produce a science fiction programme and then two come along at once. As well as Hyperdrive, a Red Dwarf-aping sitcom, they are also currently showing Life On Mars, a genre spin on the format that's the bread and butter of networks the world over: the police procedural. It's safe to say, though, that Doctor Who never contained the phrase "I don't give a tart's furry cup."
Touched by Venom by Janine Cross, by Liz Henry (02/06/06): From the snarking frenzy that consumed the blogosphere in the wake of last year's World Fantasy Convention, I expected Janine Cross's first novel, Touched by Venom, to be a badly written, laughable book. Something on the order of Slave Women of Gor, perhaps, or at best, those trashtastic Sharon Green soft-porn books about blood-drinking Amazonian women who ride around on giant lizards and rape men in their spare time. My reaction to the bad reviews went a bit like this: "OMG, sex with dragons, guys with dragon-viagra hardons, probably so bad it's funny, I must read it!"

So I did. To my surprise, I found a thoughtful, enjoyable work of feminist speculative fiction. It is a woman's hero-tale, the story of a survivor; a true dystopian fantasy, and one written with an awareness of non-Western cultures.
No Present Like Time by Steph Swainston, by Donna Royston (02/02/06): No Present Like Time revisits the universe of Steph Swainston's debut novel, The Year of Our War.
9Tail Fox by Jon Courtenay Grimwood, by Mark Teppo (02/01/06): In 9Tail Fox, Jon Courtenay Grimwood uses the Hero is Already Dead conceit to tell the tale of how Sergeant Bobby Zha of the San Francisco Police Department comes to solve his own murder.
Numbers Don't Lie by Terry Bisson, by Nicholas Whyte (01/31/06): Well, everyone's mileage varies, and it's interesting that the only other write-up I've found for Numbers Don't Lie, by a distinguished reviewer on my side of the Atlantic, concludes that it's funny if you like this sort of thing which he personally doesn't. I personally did like Numbers Don't Lie. I'll go further—I thought it was hilarious.
Scalpels and Surgical Masks: A Review of the Aurealis Awards Short Fiction Finalists., by Ben Peek (01/30/06): On December 18th 2005, the finalists for Australia's Aurealis Awards were announced. On February 25th, the winners will be announced in Brisbane. This review, of the fifteen short fiction nominations in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror categories, therefore approaches the stories nominated with the assumption that they are the best offered by Australian authors in 2005.
The Resurrection Man's Legacy by Dale Bailey, by Colin Harvey (01/26/06): Dale Bailey is a 30-something fantasist from North Carolina whose work has appeared regularly in Fantasy & Science Fiction since 1993. The best of his work has been collected in this, his debut collection, from Golden Gryphon Press.
Tides by Scott Mackay, by Justin Howe (01/25/06): Overall, Tides most resembles a first contact novel set in the Age of Sail, which is an interesting premise in and of itself. However, Mackay drops the ball in a number of places.
The House of Sounds and Others by M.P. Shiel, by Greg Beatty (01/24/06): S.T. Joshi is a master of H.P. Lovecraft lore, and has provided the foundation of a new critical understanding of the weird tale, establishing or reviving a canon in this area through critical works such as The Weird Tale (1990), The Modern Weird Tale (2001), and The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004), as well as editing a number of single author collections that have formed part of the lineage. The House of Sounds and others is one of these collections.
Futureshocks, edited by Lou Anders, by Mahesh Raj Mohan (01/23/06): Futureshocks (as Anders writes in his introduction) "is an anthology of science fiction stories that envisions the dangers lying in wait for us on the road ahead or lurking just around the corner of history."
The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl by Tim Pratt, by Kelly Christopher Shaw (01/19/06): Marzi, a Generation Y college drop-out, fills her evenings working as a coffee-shop manager, while creating a comic book called The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl in the daytime. Unbeknownst to her, she's also the gatekeeper of a door in the coffeehouse storage room, and an accomplice to the creation of the world behind the door—a phantasmagorical Old West, one that coincidentally resembles the fictional world of her comic-book.
The Clock-King and the Queen of the Hourglass by Vera Nazarian, by Martin Lewis (01/18/06): The world is running down. The last of humanity is clustered round the toxic puddle that is all that remains of the Pacific, eking out an existence with the help of a magical technology called the harmonium. The massively swollen Sun now dominates the sky, earning it the title Day God. Unique amongst the world's dwindling population is Liaei, the Queen Of The Hourglass. She is the last of what we would consider true humans.
Two Views: Doctor Who, "The Christmas Invasion", by Graham Sleight and Tim Phipps (01/17/06): Graham Sleight: I doubt very much that Russell T Davies read my earlier, pretty positive review of the 2005 revival of Doctor Who, but he certainly seems to have gone out of his way, in the recent Christmas special, to isolate those elements of his writing I was most critical about, and do them a whole lot more.

Tim Phipps: To all intents and purposes, with all that it had to achieve and with all that the production team had riding on it, "The Christmas Invasion" may as well be a pilot for an entirely new series. And it's a series I really, really want to see.
Christopher Priest: the Interaction, edited by Andrew M. Butler, by John Clute (01/16/06): It might be assumed, from its congenial cover and its initial release at the WorldCon honouring Priest, that Interaction was a text addressed to an non-academic audience comprised of those interested in Christopher Priest because they knew him and/or his works and were looking for a guide to the whole man and the whole oeuvre. Interaction is not that book. It is both more and less than what might have been assumed.
Eeku by Karen L. Newman, by Donna Royston (01/12/06): Here is a quirky little chapbook, a collection of dark "scifaiku" [...] The poems can be cryptic in their syntax, requiring the reader to figure out what's not stated, or who's doing what.
Aeon Flux, by Neil Anderson (01/11/06): Serious, quality films are wonderful, but there are times when you just want some mindless entertainment, a fun distraction from the world. Aeon Flux, the adaptation of MTV's animated series of the same name, is just such a decently exciting, but mindless, hundred-odd minutes of escape.
Little Machines by Paul McAuley, by Paul Kincaid (01/10/06): The overwhelming sense that one takes from the stories set in the future is of loss; indeed the farther ahead of our present moment McAuley reaches, the more transitory everything seems.
Insert Your Lost Pun Here: Is ABC's Ratings Phenomenon Losing Its Way?, by Abigail Nussbaum (01/09/06): The teaser that opened the second season was a reminder of what Lost used to be—the strangest and most exciting show on TV—but in the episodes that followed, that show was nowhere to be seen.
Of Mice And Gender: The Best Laid Plans of Battlestar Galactica, by Dan Hartland (01/05/06): It's time for a recap. Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica returns to us this month having sparked in the third quarter of last year some fairly passionate debate. It is a sign of the show's quality that it can encourage such comment, but at the same time much of the discussion revolved around a profound and increasing sense of discomfort with the show's content, in particular its treatment of the Cylons and, by extension, gender.
Galileo's Children, edited by Gardner Dozois, by Tim Gebhart (01/04/06): Intelligent Design. Cloning. Global warming. None of these make an explicit appearance in Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition, a 13-story anthology edited by Gardner Dozois, issued as part of the relatively new Pyr imprint. There is, however, no doubt that the tales here are relevant to some of today's hot-button issues.
The Crown Rose by Fiona Avery, by Genevieve Williams (01/03/06): As a quasi-historical fantasy set in 13th-century France, The Crown Rose is a somewhat surprising first novel from Fiona Avery, whose many credits writing for television and comics—mostly science fiction properties such as Earth: Final Conflict and Babylon 5—have awarded her a certain amount of name recognition.
2005 In Review, by Our Reviewers (01/02/06): We asked our reviewers to pick the favorite SF-related thing they encountered in 2005—books, films, TV, anything. This is what they said.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe, by Neil Anderson (12/22/05): Adaptation is the name of the game in Hollywood these days, and the 2005 holiday season is full of it ... Into this veritable throng of old ideas strides another, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, a screen translation of the first book in C.S. Lewis's beloved fantasy series. It's a film that demonstrates what adaptation should be all about.
Snake Agent by Liz Williams, by David Soyka (12/21/05): In what her publisher’s publicity describes as a "near future occult thriller," Liz Williams partners a self-doubting human, Detective Inspector Chen (echoing the venerable Charlie Chan), with Seneschal Zhu Irzh, a self-assured demon who is, of all things, a vice officer in Hell.
Thud! by Terry Pratchett, by Juliana Froggatt (12/20/05): Over the course of 35 novels and several short stories set on the Discworld, Pratchett has moved from parody to satire (or so his later reviews claim), and the funhouse mirror that reflects what is laughably referred to as the "real" world has gotten smoother, though by no means less warped ... there is still much to enjoy in this latest offering, not least of which are the things in it that are eerily reminiscent of the world in which we have to live.
Science Fiction Quotations, edited by Gary Westfahl, by Jeremy Adam Smith (12/19/05): We live in a culture defined by deracination: political careers rise and fall on a single quotation, amplified by friends and opponents; hip-hop depends upon quotation; so does blogging. Today it hardly matters who first uttered the quote or what meaning they intended—what counts are the mosaics we shape from a brittle world of sharp-edged, flying fragments.
Two Views: Learning the World by Ken Macleod, by Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland (12/15/05): Process Story by Niall Harrison: Ken Macleod's previous novel, Newton's Wake, was subtitled 'a space opera'. His latest, Learning the World, continues the game: the UK edition is 'a novel of first contact', while the US cover declares the book is 'a scientific romance'. In each case, such a blatant statement of intent sets our expectations.

A Proportional Response by Dan Hartland: Learning The World is the kind of SF book that does very well amongst fans. It picks up ideas from all your favourites, everyone from Bradbury to Vinge, and tries its best to say some things about process and post-modernism. But what it winds up doing is preaching a rather weak sermon to the baying choir.
Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham, by Paul Kincaid (12/14/05): In his last novel, The Hours, Cunningham considered three women in three different periods, one of whom was Virginia Woolf and the other two of whom were significantly affected by Woolf’s work. Specimen Days follows the same basic plan, but the timescale is larger, ranging from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 22nd.
The Traveling Tide by Rosaleen Love, by Lesley A. Hall (12/13/05): Though slender, this volume is far from anorexic. It has a lapidary density; there is a weighty complexity to these stories that lingers in the mind. Rosaleen Love produces pieces that are intensely flavoured reductions of her material. Her themes are pressed down like the tons of rose petals that are condensed into a single ounce of precious attar.
The Year's Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume 1, edited by Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt, by Ian McHugh (12/12/05): So, being conscious of the frailties of the local market and with a twitching national inferiority complex to boot, when one of the small press collections not only cops a bollicking in an international forum (CSFG's Encounters, reviewed here by Paul Kincaid in November) but the reviewer generalises that the "latest wave seems to have passed Australia by", it's a source of angst.
A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity and Difference by Jeffrey Allen Tucker, by Greg Beatty (12/08/05): A Sense of Wonder is a serious critical appraisal of many of Samuel R. Delany's central works.
The Adventures of the Faithful Counselor by Anne Sheldon, by Donna Royston (12/07/05): If the idea of a narrative poem about the Sumerian gods and goddesses gives you pause as you search for the next good read, cast aside your doubts and forge ahead.
The Healer by Michael Blumlein, M.D., by Lori Ann White (12/06/05): The Healer moves far beyond a novel of political or social awakening. Nor is it a novel of revolution. It is a much more heartfelt and personal work.
Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen F. McHugh, by Abigail Nussbaum (12/05/05): As the title suggests, most of these stories deal with the ways in which the people closest to us—the ones we take care of and the ones who are supposed to take care of us—can turn monstrous.
The Narrows by Alexander C. Irvine, by Kelly Christopher Shaw (12/01/05): I approached Alexander C. Irvine’s third novel The Narrows with great anticipation. Its central conceit appeared to be the perfect marriage between the sub-genres of urban fantasy and secret history: During World War II, golems are being clandestinely created by kabbalistic magic on a Detroit assembly line to fight the Nazis. Golems versus Nazis!
Alanya to Alanya by L. Timmel Duchamp, by Matthew L. Moffett (11/30/05): It's 2076, and the nations of Earth have developed into class-driven societies descended from today's corporate culture. Mostly male, power-driven Executives run the show while Professionals perform all the hands-on work. But when the Marq'ssan, a race of aliens from a distant star, broadcast a message across every possible radio, television and internet frequency possible, Earth suddenly faces great change.
The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce, by Lynda E. Rucker (11/29/05): Graham Joyce is a writer who's staked out the liminal territory at the fringes of genre fiction, just as his characters seem to inhabit worlds where dreams and hallucinations draw them to (and sometimes over) the edges of consensual reality. His narrator in The Limits of Enchantment, Fern Cullen, warns us on the first page that "If I could tell you this in a single sitting, then you might believe all of it, even the strangest part"; it is a tribute to Joyce's skilled and subtle hand that it's often the strangest parts of his stories that we do come away believing.
Robot Stories and More Screenplays by Greg Pak, by Gwenda Bond (11/28/05): The robots of Greg Pak’s anthology film Robot Stories are down-to-earth as these things go. There’s nothing unbelievable or magically CGI about them. They run the gamut of complexity from a Mr. Potatoheadesque trial baby that records everything and emits graphite in “My Robot Baby,” to an almost human couple of G9 office tempbots in “Machine Love,” to the toy robots of “The Robot Fixer” and the eternal life of uploaded consciousness in “Clay.” These variations, coupled with the subtle shifts in timing and texture between the individual stories, deliberately build a complex, coherent world rich with human flaws.
Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, by Mark Teppo (11/24/05): There's a piece of rock in eastern Nevada, near the Great Basin National Park, where the Long Now Foundation is planning to build their Millennium Clock. Designed to tick once a year, chime once a century, and with a cuckoo that will sing once a millennium, the clock is an artifact designed to make us think about the deep future. In his new novel, Spin, Robert Charles Wilson pulls a similar trick: he collapses the future down into a 364-page mediation on humanity's potential and persistent impact over time.
The Rose and the Beast by Francesca Lia Block, by J.C. Runolfson (11/23/05): This collection is subtitled ‘Fairy Tales Retold,’ but the nine stories it contains are less retellings than reflections and reactions, along with a few refutations.
Orson Welles's Dracula, by J.M. Comeau (11/22/05): Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula has been adapted many times for stage and screen, from F. W. Murnau's plagiarism, Nosferatu (1922), to the Balderston-Deane stage adaptation (which served as the basis for the famous 1931 Tod Browning movie Dracula starring Bela Lugosi), all the way through to Gary Oldman's chilling performance of the Count in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 version. But by far the closest to the original novel is the little-known hour-long radio drama adaptation of Dracula directed by Orson Welles.
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison, by Dan Hartland (11/21/05): Hurrah, then, for Small Beer’s Peapod Classics imprint, which seeks to republish quirky classics that have for too long been mouldering in the corners of second-hand bookstores. As the second book in this series, they have published Mitchison’s 1952 fairy story, Travel Light.
Night Watch, by Liz Batty (11/17/05): Based on Sergey Lukyanenko's bestselling novel, Night Watch is an inventive reworking and extension of the vampire mythos.
Mirrormask, by Alex Saltman (11/16/05): Neil Gaiman and Dave Mckean first collaborated in the late eighties on comics that changed the genre. In Mirrormask, they have attempted to perform a similar transformation on the needier genre of family fantasy films.
Best Short Novels: 2005 edited by Jonathan Strahan, by Colin Harvey (11/15/05): With Karen Haber, Jonathan Strahan co-edits one of the three anthologies that claim to present the Year’s Best SF. One of the weaknesses of that volume is its relatively small size, which limits their ability to include longer works, so Strahan has resurrected an idea first tried by Terry Carr in the late 1970s, and now gives us Best Short Novels: 2005, a solo-edited volume that collects the best novellas of the year.
Double Vision by Tricia Sullivan, by Claire Brialey (11/14/05): Imagine a world in which you’re taking part in a war: a war against an enemy you can’t quite define and don’t wholly understand and who may not exactly be the enemy anyway.
Doom, by Neil Anderson (11/10/05): Ultimately, saving the day (and probably the world) falls to a single badass hero. Toss in a taste of an evil megacorporation and a bit of excessive of violence, and you are now experiencing the film Doom, based on the hit games from id Software.
Nova Scotia: New Speculative Scottish Fiction, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson, by Martin Lewis (11/09/05): Nova Scotia is a beautifully produced original anthology from Mercat Press, an independent Scottish publisher. David Pringle, long-time editor of Interzone and Scot-in-exile, provides the introduction and just as much as the packaging his words make clear that this collection is aimed at the general reader, rather than just the genre reader.
Encounters: An Anthology of Australian Speculative Fiction, edited by Maxine McArthur and Donna Maree Hanson, by Paul Kincaid (11/08/05): There was a time, not so long ago, when it seemed certain that the next big thing in science fiction was going to come out of Australia. It didn’t; while everyone was looking the wrong way we got the British renaissance instead. Considering this recent anthology of Australian speculative fiction, it is not hard to see why the latest wave seems to have passed Australia by.
Two Views: Air by Geoff Ryman, by Geneva Melzack and Iain Emsley (11/07/05): Breathing Change by Geneva Melzack Air is the mass media. Air is television and the internet. Air is commerce and fashion and globalised culture. Air is change and it is coming to Chung Mae's village.

Information Gecko by Iain Emsley Geoff Ryman's Air is a strange book, at once hopeful and elegaic. Ancient ways of being come to terms with new ways of thinking.
Fantasy Magazine #1, by Pam McNew (11/03/05): Focusing upon original, fantastic stories with unconventional approaches, Sean Wallace, the editor of the publication, hopes to present fiction that will leave the reader with "a sense of wonder and excitement." Showcased in the premiere issue are fifteen stories supporting that statement.
From The Files of the Time Rangers by Richard Bowes, by Mark Rich (11/02/05): Time Rangers is a wide-canvas panorama of a novel, full of strange and wonderful characters, action and incident, invention and history; and it is a bringing-together of an eclectic set of ideas and science-fictional tropes not typically associated with one another.
The Prodigal Troll by Charles Coleman Finlay, by Genevieve Williams (11/01/05): This impressive debut from Charles Coleman Finlay begins familiarly enough: a castle under siege, a few loyal servants, a child spirited away. It's awhile before events take an interesting turn, but when they do, it's a hard skew into unfamiliar territory.
Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, by Graham Sleight (10/31/05): The premise is irresistible: 85 minutes of quality time in the company of the Heath Robinson Jay and Silent Bob, the chance to see the world’s most famous claymation characters vaulting through the hoops of a real movie plot, and the name Peter Sallis above the title of a Hollywood studio picture.
The American Astronaut, by Justin Howe (10/27/05): Originally released in the weeks after 9/11, The American Astronaut suffered from one of the worst possible opening dates in history. Not many people were in the mood for a Musical, Western, Science-Fiction film.
Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Lori Ann White (10/26/05): Now I'm all grown up, but when I heard that Tim Burton was remaking Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I squealed. And with Johnny Depp as Willie Wonka, no less! I whooped.
H.G.Wells: Traversing Time by W. Warren Wagar, by Paul Kincaid (10/25/05): In this fascinating book, W. Warren Wager examines how this long view of time permeates throughout Wells’s fiction and non-fiction, particularly underlying the utopian political views that were to be such a feature of his work.
Looking for Jake by China Miéville, by Kelly Christopher Shaw (10/24/05): How would [Mieville] adapt his wildly imaginative brand of storytelling, so obviously suited to a broad canvas, to the constrictions of the short form?
A Tale of Two Sisters, by Lynda E. Rucker (10/20/05): If, as A Tale of Two Sisters unfolds, you’re put in mind of a fairy tale—albeit by way of Angela Carter or Tanith Lee—you wouldn’t be wrong; the story is in part based on a Korean folk tale that’s made it to film several times before in that country. And yet this haunting retelling has an utterly original feel about it.
Essential SF: A Concise Guide by Jonathan Cowie and Tony Chester, by James Palmer (10/19/05): Jonathan Cowie and Tony Chester's Essential SF: A Concise Guide is precisely that: a concise guide to science fiction authors, books, stories, films and TV series. The Essential part is in the eye of the beholder.
Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic, by Dan Hartland (10/18/05): There are innumerable over-used comparisons that lie temptingly at the finger-tips of literary reviewers. One of these is "Kafkaesque." Another is "Borgesian." This review will resolutely refuse to mention The Trial or The Aleph, in an attempt to give Serbia's leading writer of the absurd, Zoran Zivkovic, some deserved space to breath unaided.
Two Views: Serenity, by Mahesh Raj Mohan and Niall Harrison (10/17/05): Serenity Now!: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying About "No Aliens" And Love a Kick-Ass Movie by Mahesh Raj Mohan Whedon had a tough task. His first film has to work as an offshoot of a TV series, tie up some loose ends, but still stand on its own. So does Serenity succeed for someone who hasn't seen Firefly?

You Can't Take The Sky From Me: A Firefly Fan's View by Niall Harrison A film like Serenity, which arrives carrying heavy loads of both backstory and expectation, can be measured by too many criteria. Is it a good film? Is it good Firefly? Is it a good story? Is it good science fiction? For such a film, what you make of it may depend on what you bring to it, and what you want it to be.
The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold, by Greg Beatty (10/13/05): The Hallowed Hunt is the third book in Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion series. Following on the heels of her beloved Vorkosigan series, the Chalion series has a lot to live up to. Up until this point, the series had been doing well.
The 4400, by Selila Honig (10/12/05): In the case of The 4400, we follow Tom Baldwin, an investigator with a personal connection to the 4400, and Diana Skouris, a former CDC worker of some sort, a scientist who often seems to ground her quixotic partner. Sound familiar?
The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal, by Mark Teppo (10/11/05): What begins as a futuristic fish-out-of-water story metamorphoses—through Enki Bilal's gritty illustrations and masterful use of the cinematic and textual possibilities of the graphic novel—into a resonant and symbolic rumination on the nature of family, humanity, and memory.
In The Palace of Repose by Holly Phillips, by Yoon Ha Lee (10/10/05): Phillips's stories glide between the world of dreams and the bright-dark realms of terror, between the real and the imagined. Often they are the same; often these realms are related in ways that unfold slowly and subtly through the narrative.
The Lost Generation: Threshold, Surface, and Invasion, by Mattia Valente (10/06/05): Now September 2005 rolls around, and Lost wins six Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. The Big Three seem convinced: if Lost can do it, so can they! It's time to bring SF back to the mainstream!
Here, There & Everywhere by Chris Roberson, by Mahesh Raj Mohan (10/05/05): Roberson seasons the tale with many pleasant tips of the hat to old masters like Heinlein and Bradbury, but the ending is pure, non-ironic SF that evoked Clarke and Asimov
Howl's Moving Castle, by Laura Blackwell (10/04/05): Hayao Miyazaki's animated feature Howl's Moving Castle opens doors to unexpected places, surprising us with humor, excitement, and an awakening of self-awareness.
Peeps by Scott Westerfeld, by John Joseph Adams (10/03/05): With Peeps, Westerfeld has crafted an infectious and clever reinvention of the vampire novel
Lego Star Wars, by Tim Phipps (09/29/05): I bought a secondhand PS2, and copies of FFX, FFX-2 and, erm, Lego Star Wars. I'm honestly not sure how that last one happened. One minute there was thirty pounds in my hand, and the next minute it had been replaced by a copy of Lego Star Wars.
A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park, by Kat Jong (09/28/05): It's a story you know you've heard before: an adopted girl finds out that she's really a princess. But this starting point is all that Paul Park's A Princess Of Roumania shares with that commonly told tale.
Battlestar Galactica, season two: the opening quartet, by Dan Hartland (09/27/05): Almost all television shows, from ER to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, reach a point at which they cease to revolve around their concepts and begin to focus with great import on the tortured souls of their characters. There is an argument to be made that Ronald D. Moore’s re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica reached this point more quickly than almost any other science fiction show in history.
Bear Daughter by Judith Berman, by Jane Acheson (09/26/05): Berman conjures a distinctive world of moss, rotting fish, cedar bark, cold rain and pungent smoke, as filtered through Cloud's perspective.
Storyteller by Kate Wilhelm, by Greg Beatty (09/22/05): Oh, but this is a lovely book. Everyone who wants to understand science fiction as a community will want a copy. Many people who want to become professional writers, or better writers, will also want copies
Dead Men Do Tell Tales by Byron de Prorok, by Justin Howe (09/21/05): The book reads like a cross between Indiana Jones, Commander McBragg, and those lost-world explorers that litter the wings of HP Lovecraft's stories. Dismissive of the scientific method and impatient with the true spadework of actual archaeology, de Prorok's own method appears to have been to charge forward (necessary paperwork and passports be damned), take pictures, loot, and get out alive.
Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, by Geneva Melzack (09/20/05): These are stories that sit in an unsettlingly indefinite space. They’re challenging, daring the reader to come forward and confront ambiguity head on, but if you’re willing to accept this challenge they’re also stories that are compelling and rewarding and even tender.
Take Me to the Fantastic Place: Doctor Who 2005, by Graham Sleight (09/19/05): It’s striking, too, how often in this series the Doctor has not been the one to take the world-saving action: in the first episode, it’s Rose; in Mark Gatiss’s Victorian romp “The Unquiet Dead,” it’s the girl Gwyneth; and in “The Empty Child,” it’s the single mother Nancy. As Davies has said, this is the real message of the series: “Doctors make people better.”
Louise Marley's The Child Goddess, by Greg Beatty (05/16/05): The Child Goddess is a science fable. That is to say, in this novel Louise Marley uses the settings and tools of science fiction to tell an intentionally simplified and stylized story of extreme moral clarity.
Steam Power to the People: China Miéville's Iron Council, by Myke Cole (11/22/04): In its vivid prose, focus on working class protagonists, detailed fantasy world, deftly presented political flavor and most importantly skillfully crafted story, it's an absolute must-read for Miéville fans old and new alike.
Cyberpunk Festivals and Nanotech Genies: Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, by Paul Lucas (11/15/04): The book manages to successfully marry the old genre of space opera to the newer memes of cyberpunk, nanotech, and twenty-first century physics.
Stories You Should Read: A Review of Gene Wolfe's Innocents Aboard, by Sean Melican (11/08/04): If you are too cynical to believe that ghosts exist, or that candy wrappers hold the secrets of the universe, or that monsters and gods live everywhere, then this is not a book for you.
Two Horror Classics for All Hallows' Day, by Jeff Edwards (11/01/04): [I]f you just can't get enough [horror], here are a couple of lesser-known collections from the blood-soaked pens of two of the biggest names in the genre.
Her Story is Legend: Queen of the Amazons by Judith Tarr, by J.G. Stinson (10/25/04): The Amazons as [Tarr] shows them make a lot more sense than the ones the ancient writers described. Tarr presents them, not as the Other (the stranger, the scapegoat, the enemy), but as a people with different customs and an alternate philosophy from the Greeks.
Apocalypse Then: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, by Marian Powell (10/18/04): Can a novel over a half a century old speak to current concerns?
Bewitching Women: Kelley Armstrong's Dime Store Magic, by Lara Apps (10/11/04): Armstrong has created believable, likable characters . . . they are strong, witty, and imperfect, and it does not take long before the reader is whole-heartedly rooting for them.
A Journey of Words: Keith Miller's The Book of Flying, by Yoon Ha Lee (10/04/04): Throughout The Book of Flying, Miller's prose delights with its alliteration, wordplay and teasing rhymes.
Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: Magic Chuses To Reemerge in Regency England, by Luc Reid (09/27/04): Clarke goes beyond writing about a magical England of the early 1800's: her style suggests that she has spent a good deal of time there, and gotten in the habit of writing and thinking as though it were her home.
Considering The Ordinary: A Review of Grimsley's The Ordinary, by Steve Berman (09/20/04): For aficionados of speculative fiction new to the author, The Ordinary will be an interesting but long-winded offering.

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