Paul Di Filippo – Locus Online
- ️Fri Jan 24 2025
Ludluda, Jeff Noon and Steve Beard (Angry Robot 978-1915998316, trade paperback, 400pp, $18.99) December 2024
I am happy to bring readers this exciting news: the genre known as New Weird is currently alive and kicking, despite any rumors of its moribund state, or lack of recent exemplars. The evidence? The fascinating and thrilling duology set before us, Gogmagog and Ludluda.
New Weird—with undeniably deeper roots, not to be ...Read More
Depth Charge, edited by Hank Davis & Jamie Ibson (Baen 978-1982193829, trade paperback, 288pp, $18.00) December 2024
Not so very long ago, the fantastika publishing ecology held open a niche for a species known as the “reprint anthology.” These creatures flourished under the expert hands of such caretakers as Damon Knight, Groff Conklin, Isaac Asimov, Richard Lupoff, Judith Merril and scores of other expert compilers. Their reason for living ...Read More
Disavowed, John E. Stith (Experimenter Publishing Company 979-8888315439, trade paperback, 510pp, $16.99) December 2024
I am extremely happy to see that John Stith’s career is experiencing something like a renaissance. His novel, Reckoning Infinity, the last in a continuous flow of fine books, appeared from Tor in 1997. We did not see another until Pushback in 2018—and that one was non-SF. Twenty-one years constituted a long gap for ...Read More
Mechanize My Hands to War, Erin K. Wagner (DAW 978-0756419349, hardcover, 320pp, $28.00) December 2024
Erin Wagner’s debut novel is a highly sophisticated tale, constructed in clever fashion, which revolves around the classic motif of human versus nonhuman, specifically man against android. It does not necessarily expand the frontiers of this theme—Wagner’s sociological and technological speculations about androids and their uses hew pretty closely to the standard SF textbook, ...Read More
The Final Orchard, C.J. Rivera (Angry Robot 978-1915998262, trade paperback, 400pp, $18.99) November 2024
As her CV informs us: until now, C.J. Rivera’s creative output has occurred in media other than print, making this not only her debut novel, but apparently her debut prose fiction of any sort. (ISFDB believes so too.) But we need fear not, because her skills earned elsewhere translate to a rousing good tale benefiting ...Read More
Suite 13, David J. Schow (Subterranean 978-1645241621, hardcover, 384pp, $45.00) November 2024
When I reviewed Cixin Liu’s story collection A View from the Stars a few months ago, I made a big deal of how Liu had pulled a radical move by issuing a hybrid volume of fiction and non-fiction. Well, now comes an identical blend from master of shocks David Schow, half tales, half essays. There must be ...Read More
The Ancients, John Larison (Viking 978-0593831168, hardcover, 400pp, $30.00) October 2024
Writers from outside our genre seem to have fixed upon four major themes or topics that they find congenial to their arguably more “literary” way of writing.
Time travel. Robots and Androids. Dystopias. And Apocalypse or After the Collapse scenarios.
You don’t see many “mainstream” folks writing about, say, “talking squids in outer space,” or starship troopers or ...Read More
The Tongue Trade, Michael J. Martineck (Edge 978-1770532410, hardcover, 224pp, $34.95) October 2024
Michael Martineck has had the kind of respectable bubbling-under career that many writers enjoy—but which they also might ambitiously seek to surpass. (Has any writer ever been truly satisfied with his or her current status?) He sold his first story in 1999, then several novels, with the most recent being The Link Boy in 2017. Good ...Read More
Nether Station, Kevin J. Anderson (Blackstone 979-8200688449, hardcover, 316pp, $27.99) October 2024
The crew of a small survey spaceship voyages out to investigate a spacetime anomaly, and encounters deadly supernatural (?) entities. Am I about to take a second pass at reviewing Adam Roberts’s recent Lake of Darkness? Not at all! But by phrasing the plot of that novel generically, I can point out that although certain adjacent ...Read More
Alien Clay, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Orbit 978-0316578974, trade paperback, 432pp, $19.99) September 2024
If Michael Bishop and Tom Disch had collaborated to script an episode of the Aliens franchise, and then the result had been filmed by Toho Studios, the result might have well come to resemble Adrian Tchaikovsky’s newest kick in the pants, Alien Clay. This is one of three great books Tchaikovsky has released in 2024; similar ...Read More
No/Mad/Land, Franceso Verso (Flame Tree Press 978-1787589278, hardcover, 384pp, $26.95) September 2024
Even when deploying familiar tropes of the genre in totally au courant ways, science fiction by non-Anglo authors always reveals an idiosyncratic slant or attitude or worldview. This has been evident at least since Stanislaw Lem burst onto the English-language publishing scene, and is witnessed more recently in works from such accomplished authors as Cixin Liu, Hannu ...Read More
Rebel, David Weber & Richard Fox (Baen 978-1982193607, hardcover, 496pp, $28.00) September 2024
I seem to be on a bit of a quest lately to try to acquaint myself with authors I’ve shamefully overlooked. That’s always a healthy move, I think—aligned with, but distinct from, keeping up with brand-new debut writers. I reviewed a Michael Flynn book for the first time recently in these pages (alas, only after he ...Read More
Key Lime Sky, Al Hess (Angry Robot 978-1915998125, trade paperback, 304pp, $18.99) August 2024,
It has been said that Irish fantasist Flann O’Brien had a penchant for involving the humble bicycle in his surreal fiction, until the vehicle became a kind of numinous totem or idiosyncratic symbol. A few other writers of fantasy have deployed such a technique—recurring enigmatic touchstone with multiple meanings—and now Al Hess joins their ranks, ...Read More
Time’s Agent, Brenda Peynado (Tordotcom 978-1250854315, trade paperback, 208pp, $16.99) August 2024
Would it be possible to write a piece of fiction that exhibited or contained no emotions? That seems highly unlikely. Humans are made of emotions—and intellect. Those two realms are—to truncate the famous phrase coined by Stephen Jay Gould when he was trying to categorize the barrier between science and religion—“overlapping magisteria.” Two vast territories with a ...Read More
To Turn the Tide, S. M. Stirling (Baen 978-1982193539, hardcover, 464pp, $28.00) August 2024
Time travel novels—recently, a trendy favorite of non-genre slipstream authors—have reached a state of incredible complexity. Multiverses, paradoxes, change wars, closed loops, and doppelgangers proliferate. This is all very entertaining, but sometimes it’s nice to read a simple, straightforward “person visits past, gets stuck, makes do” kind of book. A chrono-Robinsonade. That’s exactly what S. ...Read More
In the Belly of the Whale, Michael Flynn (CAEZIK SF & Fantasy 978-1647101015, trade paperback, 400pp, $19.99) July 2024
Why is the field of fantastika like Walt Whitman? Because both are “large and contain multitudes.” (And also, parts of it contradict other parts.)
Seriously, though, for at least the past twenty years or thereabouts, the output of fantastika has been so large that no single reader can keep up ...Read More
Lake of Darkness, Adam Roberts (Gollancz 978-1399617673, hardcover, 320pp, £22.00) July 2024
The newest novel from Adam Roberts—purveyor of endless unrepeating and unduplicatable narratives—is a utopian metaphysical suspense/thriller space opera—which also happens to be a commentary, I think, on progressive culture and progressive SF. Now, if you imagine that’s an ill-assorted congeries of tropes and styles and themes, you are underestimating the powers of Mr. Roberts. He weaves every ...Read More
Saturation Point, Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris 978-1837861743, hardcover, 176pp, $29.99) July 2024
Adrian Tchaikovsky is surely one of the hardest-working writers in fantastika. In 2023, besides a handful of short fiction, he delivered And Put Away Childish Things (which I reviewed here); Lords of Uncreation; and House of Open Wounds. This year has already seen Alien Clay and Service Model. And today we have to hand his ...Read More
Echo of Worlds, M. R. Carey (Orbit 978-0316504690, trade paperback, 512pp, $19.99) June 2024
I pled for the author’s and publisher’s mercy in my review of the first captivating book in this series—Infinity Gate—begging for a quick sequel. Well, about fourteen months later, a reasonable interval, here we are. Prayers answered!
I also mentioned then that Infinity Gate was billed as the first book in a series. ...Read More
Pulsifer: a Fable, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474918, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Jan 2024
Land of Ice, a Velvet Knife, Wm. Michael Mott (Spatterlight Press 978-1619474932, trade paperback, 306pp, $16.95) Feb 2024
It is very seldom—perhaps almost never—that one opens up one’s copy of the Sunday New York Times and discovers that the lead article in the Magazine section is devoted to a still-living author whose roots ...Read More
Ghost of the Neon God, T. R. Napper (Titan 978-1803368115, hardcover, 128pp, $17.99) June 2024
This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and, arguably, 1984 can serve as the birthday of the cyberpunk genre as well or better than any adjacent year. I think at this point, we can cease debating about the nature of cyberpunk, its utility and whether it’s here ...Read More
Escape Velocity, Victor Manibo (Erewhon Books 978-1645660842, hardcover, 368pp, $28.00) May 2024
The Jacobean Revenge Tragedy is a mode not unprecedented in SF. The instance that comes most readily to mind is Bester’s The Stars My Destination, modeled on one of the most famous such, The Count of Monte Cristo. And now, with Victor Manibo’s sophomore novel, the field gets another vivid enactment of injustices avenged. Except ...Read More
The Downloaded, Robert J. Sawyer (Shadowpaw Press 978-1989398999, trade paperback, 199pp, $14.95) May 2024
It’s a testament to Robert Sawyer’s skill—and his generational wisdom—that he has created, with his latest book, a novel that is at once exuberantly old-school and utterly au courant. It reads like Greg Egan rebooting Neil R. Jones’s Professor Jameson cycle. This book exemplifies the “best of both worlds” approach that charts a viable future ...Read More
Lost Ark Dreaming, Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Tordotcom 978-1250890757, hardcover, 192pp, $19.99) May 2024
Thrillers confined to a single stage set or venue have an admirable lineage. One has only to think of the original Die Hard film or David Morrell’s novel Creepers to provide strong examples. In SF, this approach is often conflated with the Big Dumb Object trope: let’s explore Ringworld or Rama. James Cambias’s The Scarab Mission ...Read More
I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger (Grove 978-0802162939, hardcover, 336pp, $28.00) April 2024
Brian Aldiss famously coined the label “cozy catastrophe” to designate such books as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, wherein civilization crumbles, but our protagonist manages to carve out a relatively safe and rewarding existence for himself and his posse, a harbor from the storm. Aldiss characterized the plot and atmosphere of such novels ...Read More
A View from the Stars, Cixin Liu (Tor 978-1250292117, hardcover, 224pp, $27.99) April 2024
Most authors segregate their fiction from their non-fiction, compiling the two classes of work into separate collections. I always recall one exception I read as a teen, a minor Frederik Pohl volume titled Digits & Dastards, which featured two essays along with the stories. And I suppose that Harlan Ellison’s inclusion of long anecdotal ...Read More
In Universes, Emet North (Harper 978-0063314870, hardcover, 240pp, $26.99) April 2024
I never would have predicted that the fantastika genre would be graced in 2024 with a novel that resonated so vibrantly with two classics from the 1970s: Joanna Russ’s The Female Man and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. And yet that is precisely the vibe that I feel confident in proclaiming emanates from Emet ...Read More
The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865878, $27.99, hc, 240pp) February 2024.
Cory Doctorow is certainly experiencing a “hot hand” run. That sports phenomenon, where one success impels and invites a subsequent triumph, sometimes in a long streak, can be seen in Doctorow’s two most recent books, which have appeared practically back to back. In November of 2023 came The Lost Cause (reviewed by me for this very publication), which showed ...Read More
Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson (Del Rey 978-0593497500, hardcover, 384pp, $28.99) March 2024
It seems safe to say that the evergreen SF trope of a high-tech city or culture besieged by low-tech outsiders or “barbarians” goes back at least to H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) with its depiction of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Of course, Wells had myriad historical examples to inspire his conception, ...Read More
The Morningside, Téa Obreht (Random House 978-1984855503, hardcover, 304pp, $20.00) March 2024
Is the New Weird still a going concern? Dating roughly from the turn of the century (China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is the Monolith that enlightened the hominid readers), with the term itself harking to the year 2002 (courtesy of M. John Harrison), the subgenre with famously leaky borders and hazy definitions is approaching its 25th birthday. ...Read More
The Stars Turned Inside Out, Nova Jacobs (Atria 978-1668018545, hardcover, 320pp, $27.99) March 2024
With the loss (hopefully not permanent) of Gregory Benford’s talents to a medical incident a bit over a year ago, the SF field was deprived of perhaps the most accomplished voice in depicting the reality of “doing science.” His masterpiece, Timescape, is of course the most salient example of that mode, but the steeped-in-the-academy-and-the-laboratory ...Read More
Tomorrow’s Children, Daniel Polansky (Angry Robot 978-1915202857, trade paperback, 384pp, $18.99) February 2024
Postapocalypse tales don’t get any grimmer or funnier, more slambang or more nuanced, more hopeful or more despairing, than Daniel Polansky’s Tomorrow’s Children. If that catalog of virtues sounds oxymoronic, please restrain your doubts. Polansky’s accomplished novel is large and contains multitudes, and foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind.
This is my ...Read More