A recent post over at Tor.com:
This week I want to talk about books by three different authors—all very different to each other, but all very good.
Sleeps With Monsters
New Posts and Reviews at Tor.com
Recent reviews and columns at Tor.com
Sleeps With Monsters: Forthcoming (Queer) Novels Starring (Queer) Women:
A few days before I sat down to write this post, I asked a wide range of my acquaintance on the hellsite known as Twitter whether there were any novels or novellas featuring f/f relationships or starring queer women that they knew and were looking forward to in the second half of 2019 or definitely earmarked for 2020. It turns out that there are quite a few—forty-odd, in fact.
More Trouble to Come: Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse:
Rebecca Roanhorse burst onto the SFF writing scene in the last couple of years. Her “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” (Apex, 2017) took home the Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Short Story, and she has also won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her debut novel, Trail of Lightning, came out last year to wide acclaim. It has the distinction of being a post-apocalyptic novel by a Native American author about Native American (Navajo, or Diné) characters. The same is true for the sequel, Storm of Locusts, which strikes me as a stronger, leaner novel.
Trouble on Silicon Isle: Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan:
Chen Qiufan is a Chinese science-fiction author whose works have won a number of awards. His short fiction has appeared in translation in Clarkesworld and Lightspeed, among other publications. His first novel, The Waste Tide, was published in China in 2013. As Waste Tide, it’s now been translated into English by Ken Liu, whose translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem won the 2015 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and whose fiction has won awards in its own right.
Sleeps With Monsters: Forests, Kingdoms, and Secrets
A new post over at Tor.com:
This week I want to talk to you about two very different books: Joan He’s debut fantasy Descendant of the Crane, set in a world which draws inspiration from Chinese history and culture; and Jaime Lee Moyer’s Brightfall, a fresh new approach to the Robin Hood mythos set in a medieval Sherwood Forest filled with Fae lords and magic.
Sleeps With Monsters: Two Uneven SF Sequels
A new column over at Tor.com:
This week I’m going to talk about two sequels, one of which I liked a lot better than the other. Part of this is down to my enjoyment of the characters, but part of it, too, is that one of the novels is advertised as the second part of a duology, but it closes on a note that raises as many questions as it answers. The other novel makes no claims to completing its series arc, but it finishes in an emotionally satisfying place, even if it does leave a wide-open door for “further adventures”—and terrible threats.
Sleeps With Monsters: Brief and Complementary Tales
A new column over at Tor.com:
I’m sitting here, friends, trying to think of how to frame this week’s column. Because sometimes you read two books that seem complementary, but you’re not sure if you can put the reasons behind that feeling into words. For all its variety and flexibility, language occasionally falls short when it comes to articulating intangibles.
Rude of it.
Round-up of published things
My ability to stay on top of everything has slid significantly lately. (Planning a wedding is stressful, guys! Everyone wants to sell you shit and you have a budget here!) I’m doing my best with that on top of the usual strains, but my best is significantly less great than I’d like.
But! Here are my three most recent posts on Tor.com:
Sleeps With Monsters: Intimate Space Operas
Sleeps With Monsters: Intrigue, Espionage, and Capers
I’m behindhand in crossposting. Here’s the latest column over at Tor.com:
I’ve been waiting for a follow-up to Amanda Downum’s Kingdom of Dust for years. Downum’s first three novels, The Drowning City, The Bone Palace, and Kingdom of Dust were rich, detailed works involving plenty of magic and even more intrigue. Now she’s published The Poison Court, an excellent novel of murder and palace intrigue, and it’s every bit as good as I’d been hoping for.
Sleeps With Monsters: Engaging Fantasy Thrillers
A new column at Tor.com:
How’s 2019 treating you so far, friends? I’m personally finding the onslaught of new and excellent books a little overwhelming.
Into that overwhelming (but excellent) category fall the two novels I want to talk about this week, Michelle Sagara’s Cast in Oblivion and Claire O’Dell’s The Hound of Justice.
Sleeps With Monsters: A Coincidence of Prisoners
A new column over at Tor.com:
An odd coincidence saw me read two books back-to-back—both with the word “prisoner” in the title—by authors who began their novel-publishing career in the 1980s. Both Barbara Hambly and Lois McMaster Bujold have definitely grown as writers in the last four decades, and their recent works can be relied on to provide deep, thought-provoking reads—and deeply entertaining ones, too.
Sleeps With Monsters: Quiet Novels About Changing The World
A new post over at Tor.com:
This week I want to talk about a pair of short, independently published novels that deal with marriage, communities, and the process of change in conservative societies. It takes hard work and hope to begin to change the world, but the work is worth doing.
Sleeps With Monsters: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power
A new column over at Tor.com:
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power showcases a variety of powerful women, making a variety of different choices about what to do with their power. This is a show with an argument to make about community and responsibility, and being honest about (and responsible for) one’s choices.
Sleeps With Monsters: Epic Fantasy and Feminism in THE WOMEN’S WAR and THE RUIN OF KINGS
A new post over at Tor.com:
Who doesn’t like epic fantasy? And feminist epic fantasy, at that?
The Women’s War by Jenna Glass and The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons are both opening volumes in new epic fantasy series. I read them one after the other, and can’t help comparing their approaches to feminism—because both of them set themselves within oppressive societies. And yet, though The Women’s War spends more of its time with female main characters and sets itself amid a violent struggle for the liberation of (some) women in a rigidly patriarchal society, I found The Ruin of Kings more inclusive and more persuasive—more liberatory—in its approach to a patriarchal society.
Sleeps With Monsters: Queering Classic Fantasy Stories
A new post over at Tor.com:
New year, new queer! If that’s not a catchphrase somewhere, it ought to be, and—as you may have guessed—queerness is the element that unites the stories I want to talk about this week. The presence of queer women in the stories I read is becoming so delightfully frequent as to begin to feel unremarkable, and I’m really enjoying this current state of affairs. It’s not something I feel I can allow myself to get used to, because it was a rarity for years.
Sleeps With Monsters: Phyllis Ann Karr’s Sword and Sorcery Novels
A new post over at Tor.com:
Recently, Sonya Taaffe chanced to mention Phyllis Ann Karr in one of her blog posts. Karr has never been a prolific author of science fiction and fantasy, and she remains best-known for her Arthurian murder-mystery The Idylls of the Queen and for the pair of fantasy novels, first published in the 1980s, which I’m going to talk about here: Frostflower and Thorn (1980) and Frostflower and Windbourne (1982).
Sleeps With Monsters: More Books to Look Forward to in 2019
A new post over at Tor.com:
In a previous column, I outlined many of the sequels and series continuation books that I’m looking forward to in 2019. (Which I, like many people I know, continue to type “2018” as often as not. It feels very strange to be this far into the science fictional future of the 1980s. But that’s time for you.) In this column, I want to mention some of the standalone or series-opening novels that are due out in 2019, which I’m looking forward to very much.
Sleeps With Monsters: What I’m Looking Forward to in 2019
Happy New Year, friends! There’s a new column over at Tor.com, in which I talk about some of the books I’m looking forward to reading in the coming year.
Sleeps With Monsters: Swords and Salvage
A new post over at Tor.com:
It seems appropriate to talk about Melissa Scott’s Finders and Ursula Vernon’s (writing as T. Kingfisher) Swordheart together. Although in terms of setting and tone they’re very different books—Finders is a space opera with elements of a thriller, a fast-paced adventure story that ends up shaped like an epic; Swordheart is a sword-and-sorcery story with a romance at its centre—they share an interest in relationships and in consequences, and in a certain underpinning of kindness that unites them despite their otherwise disparate elements.
Sleeps With Monsters: Jumping Into C.J. Cherryh’s Alliance-Union Books
A new post over at Tor.com:
A little while ago, I received an ARC of Alliance Rising, C.J. Cherryh’s collaboration with her spouse Jane Fancher, set in Cherryh’s Alliance-Union continuity—the universe of Cherryh’s acclaimed Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988). While I tried to read Downbelow Station years ago, before I understood the rhythms of Cherryh’s work, Alliance Rising is the first work in this particular setting that I’ve ever finished. It spurred me to find a couple more—the omnibuses Alliance Space and The Deep Beyond, available in ebook form—to see just how representative Alliance Rising is of the works in this setting.
Sleeps With Monsters: More Stories With Queer Women
A new column over at Tor.com (though it’s last week’s, because I’m behind in everything due to moving house):
Let’s start with a novel, the humorous and playful Daughter of the Sun by Effie Calvin, published by Nine Star Press. Daughter of the Sun is Calvin’s second novel, after The Queen of Ieflaria, and it’s a much more forthrightly humorous work, one with a fine eye for the ridiculous and a deep sense of compassion about human nature, and human (or human-adjacent) weakness.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea 