Reading some of the strange stuff that people send me. As often is the case these days, the best stories come from Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Publications Reviewed Interzone, 243 Nov-Dec 2012 Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 107-109 November 2012 Tor.com, November 2012 Journal of Unlikely Entomology, 4 November 2012 Stupefying Stories, November 2012 Unidentified Funny Stories, , […]

A couple of years ago Hannu Rajaniemi made one of the most spectacular first-novel debuts in recent memory with The Quantum Thief, which employed a powerfully seductive – if not entirely new – narrative strategy of linking a wildly inventive and disorienting post-singularity future with a comparatively straightforward adventure plot, partly derived from the decidedly […]

The “power chord” of the slower-than-light, multigenerational starship is a potent one still, despite decades of literary exploration. (The trope seems to date back to 1928, and the non-fiction work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.) Something about the combination of heroic sacrifices, the vast void of space, clannishness in a tin can, historical nescience, cultural degeneration, the […]

The storm surge recedes and the digests wash onshore, although the fiction is a bit washed-out. Also the regular monthly ezines. Publications Reviewed Analog, January/February 2013 Asimov’s, January 2013 Eclipse Online, November 2012 Lightspeed, November 2012 Nightmare Magazine, November 2012 Strange Horizons, November 2012 Analog, January/February 2013 Here’s a double issue with double novellas, both […]

David Levithan is best known as the author (and co-author) of several sharp contemporary novels. His work has openly and refreshingly tackled politics – most notably in Wide Awake – but is also often about exploring the human heart and its politics. He wrestles with the ways we connect to the people around us and […]

Anna Tambour is the author of one short story collection—quirkily titled Monterra’s Deliciosa & Other Tales &–and of one novel, Spotted Lily. Although her stories often end up on annual recommended-reading lists, she might very well have slipped under your literary radar, since she does not publish overmuch, nor in lots of big-name venues. But […]

For the past few years, there have been a number of salutary efforts to bring international SF to the attention of the wider community (by which I mean monolingual English-language readers) – a new translation award, recent Japa­nese and Latin American anthologies, sterling reviews for Angelica Gorodischer, Johanna Sinisalo, and Hannu Rajaniemi, etc. Now Cheeky […]

Again no digests, so here are the first of the month ezines and some other stuff I didn’t have time to fit into the column in October. The Good Story award goes to the Robert Reed novella. Publications Reviewed Clarkesworld, November 2012 Apex Magazine, November 2012 Bourbon Penn #5, September 2012 Three-lobed Burning Eye, October […]

Miles Vorkosigan, the offbeat young hero whose passage into adulthood took place over a number of adventures, is no longer central in Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, but the title character turns out to be his cousin, Ivan Xav: a member of the Barrayaran ruling class, which strongly resembles 19th-century Britain’s aristocratic warriors and public servants, in […]