Month: April 2018

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TIME WAS by Ian McDonald

A new review over at Tor.com:

Multiple-award-winning Northern Irish writer Ian McDonald has a significant body of work behind him, from 1988’s Desolation Road to 2017’s Luna: Wolf Moon. Time Was, his new novella from Tor.com Publishing, is a peculiar story of time, mystery, books, love, and war, compact as a parable, layered like a complex metaphor… and in some ways, strikingly unsettling.

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FROM UNSEEN FIRE by Cass Morris

A new review over at Tor.com:

These characters engage in political intrigue, magic, and war. In emotional terms, From Unseen Fire focuses on whether Latona will allow herself to claim ambition for herself—to move into spheres that custom and habit would deny her—and whether or not she’ll allow herself to act on her attraction to Sempronius Tarren. Meanwhile, Tarren is aiming at election to the praetorship, with an eye to having control of the legions in Iberia and advancing his ambitions for the future of Aven, but his enemies have no hesitation at stooping to dirty tricks to try to bar his way.

 

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BEFORE MARS by Emma Newman

A new review over at Tor.com:

Before Mars is the third novel in Emma Newman’s Planetfall universe, loosely connected to its predecessors, 2015’s Planetfall and 2016’s After Atlas. Readers of After Atlas will come to Before Mars with some foreboding: we already know that the creeping sense of horror Before Mars’ protagonist experiences will have to pay off, one way or another—especially as it becomes clearer how the timeline in Before Mars lines up with that of After Atlas.

 

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THE FAIRIES OF SADIEVILLE by Alex Bledsoe

A new review over at Tor.com:

Bledsoe’s prose, as always, is carefully precise and elegantly measured, a delight to read. But The Fairies of Sadieville feels more scattered and less unified than his previous Tufa novels, without—it seems to me—a compelling through-line to draw the whole work together. Thematically and in terms of characterisation, the book feels slight, lacking the depth of its predecessors. Its strands are woven together without the deftness of connection that I hope for in a Bledsoe book, failing to support each other for the maximum tension or strength of feeling. It’s not quite all that one desires in the capstone volume of a series with the Tufa series’ strengths.

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Sleeps With Monsters: Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

A new column over at Tor.com:

This week, I’d like to talk about a film that qualifies as SFF either tangentially or by association, and which I enjoyed enormously. If Argo counts as SFF enough to find itself on the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo ballot, then surely Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is sufficiently close to speculative fiction for our purposes.

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THE BARROW WILL SEND WHAT IT MAY by Margaret Killjoy

A new review over at Tor.com:

Killjoy’s prose is clean and precise, elegantly atmospheric. The Barrow Will Send What It May is a brisk and entertaining read, and I recommend it. It’s complete in itself, but it feels like a continuing installment of an ongoing adventure—and I hope this means that there will be more Danielle Cain novellas to come.

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Hugo Award Nomination for SLEEPING WITH MONSTERS

Nominated for the 2018 Best Related Work Hugo Award.

 

Sleeping With Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Aqueduct Press, 2017) has been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. I’m thrilled to be in the company of so many excellent nominees.

You can read a sample from the book over at Aqueduct Press. And you can buy it in paperback from Blackwell’s, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble, and The Book Depository, as well as directly from Aqueduct Press themselves.

The ebook version is available directly from Aqueduct Press, as well as from  Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and Amazon.co.uk.