Trigger Warning contains perhaps a half dozen of his strongest short fictions and a handful of rather hasty ones, but by the time we’re done with it we feel like we’ve been celebrating not only Gaiman’s considerable imaginative skills, but also those of Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury…

The fact that toward the book’s end Alice, revitalized, has written a novel titled The Man with the Compound Eyes speaks to the way in which larger cosmic forces flow through all living things, redeeming their inevitable losses, even through such seemingly crass instruments as a horde of seaborne trash.

Allow me to now propose the McDevitt ramble, which wanders through time more than space, rummaging around in the apparently empty areas of a deep past, retrieving objects and records, reconstructing lost stories, and filling in blank spots.

These 16 stories, mostly of novelette length, aspire to resuscitate not only the obsolete, imaginary planetology of Old Venus, but the iconography and tropes that filled the pulp adventure stories once set there…

Whereas C was somewhat old school and massive, a big canvas with lots of characters, Satin Island is slim and bleeding edge, almost a claustrophobic monologue. But it’s a compelling, fascinating monologue, probably the best J.G. Ballard book not written by JGB himself.

A new Kelly Link collection is still major news, in part because you can never really read a Link story for the second time, much like you can’t step in the same river twice.

Trichter’s noirish dystopia Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is hallucinogenic naturalism, a prickly, disturbing descent into a world where only love — carnal or positronic — can offer a shelter from the artificial storms.

There’s no better series of words for describing Elizabeth Bear’s newest, Karen Memory, than “excellent grown-up steampunk yarn.” And, just FYI, “grown-up” modifies “steampunk,” rather than the yarn itself…

Brian Staveley acknowledges genre tradition, yet still finds ways to undermine it. The Providence of Fire starts with a flashback connected to the title, showing royal siblings Adare, Kaden, and Valyn as children whom their father has commanded to witness an Imperial Deed from the top of a very high tower…