Reviews of stories in new issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and On Spec

Special to Locus Online

The Big Aha — the title riffs on a state of deliberately triggered cosmic consciousness — picks up many of the themes Rucker has been exploring of late… Biotech; engineered telepathy, other-dimensional beings; and the nature of consciousness. Like a jazzman, Rucker takes his intellectual obsessions as chords and juggles them into fascinating new patterns each time out.

From Locus Magazine’s January 2014 issue

Datura, which takes its title from a flowering plant whose seed pods come to take on a more than metaphorical meaning as the tale unfolds, begins with the narrator offering us the Dickian proposition that “reality is nothing more than a working hypothesis.”

From Locus Magazine’s January 2014 issue

Jeanette Winterson’s short novel The Daylight Gate tackles the jittery years of Protestantism’s first hold in England, where mobs could view both witches and Catholics with the deep suspicion we now reserve for Arab terrorists.

From Locus Magazine’s January 2014 issue

Joe Haldeman’s Work Done for Hire is a tricky book to review, thanks to its membership in the intrigue/mystery/pursuit family, the pleasures of which include having to withhold from the reader answers to various questions about who is doing bad things and how they’re doing them.

Reviews of stories in new issues of Interzone, Analog, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, and of a novella by Octavia Cade, with recommendations of stories by Greg Kurzawa, Rebecca Campbell, and Adam-Troy Castro

Reviews of stories in new issues of Subterranean, Clarkesworld, Mythic Delirium, and Apex, with recommendations of stories by Jeffrey Ford and Ursula Vernon