A new review over at Tor.com:
There have been many fantasy treatments of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, several on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even one or two (I believe) on Coriolanus, but this is the first novel I recall to deliver a fantastical take on The Tragedy of King Lear.
Though it must be said my appreciation for the book was rather tainted by reports of Gratton’s objectionable behaviour.
A new post over at Tor.com:
Last month, I went looking for comfort reading. It turns out that my comfort reading at this point in time can be divided into two: pulpy space opera after the manner of David Drake’s RCN novels, and SFF stories in which queer women feature prominently and get to be a combination of (a) successful, (b) happy, and (c) in relationships with each other. I’m going to talk about a couple of the latter today, because although I’ve looked high and low…
…Well, there’s not much that combines the two, is there?
A new column over at Tor.com:
Annihilation is luminous. It’s dizzying and visionary and strange, a balletic question with no certain answer, peculiar and horrifying and layered and gorgeous, and lit from within with its own artistic vision: unified, structurally and thematically, in a way that few Hollywood films ever are. It’s a film that speaks with its silences, embraces them. It layers implication, symbolic meaning, from the opening shot of a dividing and re-dividing cell—revealed by Natalie Portman’s Lena in a lecture to her students to be a tumour cell—to its asides about grief and self-destruction, and from the horrifying wonders (and bewildering horrors) of the Shimmer to the fact that the film is subtly framed as Lena’s narrative, and all things considered (“Lena is a liar,” as Anya Thorensen, played with brilliant intensity by Gina Rodriguez, says in a moment fraught with psychological horror), we can’t be entirely sure about our narrator’s reliability.
A new review over at Tor.com:
This is an interesting novel, a compelling and entertaining read. But it’s also a novel engaged in—in conversation with—political dialectic about change and systems of power, and on that count, it doesn’t examine nearly enough of its assumptions.
A new review over at Tor.com:
In 2015’s Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear introduced us to Karen and her compelling, colloquial storyteller’s voice. Stone Mad follows on from that story, with Karen recovered from her injuries and enjoying a nice dinner out at a fancy hotel with her lover and partner Priya before they move into the farmhouse they’ve bought together. But events, in the form of a pair of travelling Spiritualist sisters, rather intervene…
A new column over at Tor.com:
I’ve only ever read a handful of books that treat the question of religion in fantasy with any serious weight. The presence or absence of gods and their powers, the (un)knowability of divine things, the question of whether or not one can get, or understand, an answer from a god—the question of whether, if you’ve given your fealty to a god, it matters if you understand the use said god makes of you—is not a question that fantasy in general deals with in great detail, even—or perhaps especially—in those works that take the existence of gods for granted.
A new post over at Tor.com:
I thought I’d share with you some of the things I intend to nominate in the fiction categories, just in case anyone feels like they want to discuss literary merits vs. popularity in non-juried awards. I’m not going to share more than two or three things in a category: these are as much ideas for discussion as they are recommendations. There’s so much out there that’s good that even a much longer list will exclude some amazing work.
A new review over at Tor.com:
On a backwater planet whose inhabitants live parochial lives surrounded by the artefacts and wreckage of a long-vanished civilisation, a somewhat-disinterested religious autocracy dispenses subsistence wages and food for devotion and prayer—or salvaged artefacts—at their technological Temples. The head of each Temple is called the Muljaddy, and they’re all part of one single family, and the Temples—which are sometimes moved—are strung out along the length of a Road through a wasteland landscape, around which towns grow and falter, and along which people occasionally move.
A new post over at Tor.com:
I’m also looking forward to seeing more work by Karen Healey and Robyn Fleming, who recently funded their first co-written novel The Empress of Timbra through Kickstarter. (It’s now widely available as an epub.) Healey has form: her previous solo novels (like Guardians of the Dead and While We Run) were well-received SFF YA. This first offering from the Healey-Fleming team, though, while certainly YA-friendly, feels a lot more like epic fantasy: the epic fantasy of yesteryear, where young people go out into the world and learn complicated lessons.
κῆπος τῶν βιβλιοθηκῶν | a garden from the libraries 