At Strange Angles: An Appreciation of Dark City
Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998) is science fiction wearing the skin of noir, riffling through its drawers and playing with its accessories as misdirection — or commentary? — while the actual plot unfolds. The “neo-noir” is a popular film style...
Queering SFF: A Review of Wilde Stories 2011
Lethe Press has been running the Wilde Stories collections since 2008 — last year’s reviewed here — and the newest edition has just been released, also in tandem with Lethe’s 10th anniversary as a publisher. Wilde Stories 2011 follows in the sa...
Fables Reread: Jack of Fables—The New Adventures of Jack and Jack (V. 7)
The seventh collected volume of Jack of Fables is The New Adventures of Jack and Jack, which puts together issues #36-40. (As you may notice, #33-35 are missing; they were put into Fables V. 13, The Great Fables Crossover, instead.) There are two story...
Reading Joanna Russ — We Who Are About to… (1977)
Following The Female Man comes a short novel called We Who Are About to…, originally published in two parts by the magazine Galaxy in 1976’s January and February issues. Dell published the novel in book form the next year, 1977. This text didn’t ...
Fables Reread: Jack of Fables—The Big Book of War (V. 6)
The sixth volume of Jack of Fables is The Big Book of War, which collects issues #28-32. The Big Book of War is all one big arc made up of five chapters, following the confrontation between Revise and the Bookburner on the grounds of Golden Boughs thro...
The Urban Landscape is Crucial: A Review of Naked City, edited by Ellen Datlow
This is the year of the urban fantasy anthologies—Welcome to Bordertown, edited by Ellen Kushner & Holly Black (reviewed here); the upcoming Gardner Dozois & George R. R. Martin anthology Down These Strange Streets; and The Urban Fantasy Anth...
Fables Reread: Jack of Fables—Turning Pages (V. 5)
The fifth collected volume of Jack of Fables is Turning Pages, which compiles issues #22-27. This volume tells a story from Jack’s past, titled “1883,” and then continues the current storyline in the titular Turning Pages arc, which fills the sec...
A Review of The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, ed. by Rich Horton
In February, I reviewed The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (V. 5) edited by Jonathan Strahan and published by Night Shade—and now, in July, Prime Books has released Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011. The...
Fables Reread: Jack of Fables—Americana (V. 4)
The fourth collected volume of Jack of Fables, Americana, collects issues #17-21. It follows another attempt of Jack’s to get rich quick, this time in the “nearly forgotten lands of Americana” (as the flap copy says), facing new and strange dange...
Reading Joanna Russ – And Chaos Died (1970)
The next book on the reading-stack is the short novel And Chaos Died, published in 1970 as an Ace Special. It was reprinted a few times—my copy is a Berkley paperback—but is no longer in print and hasn’t been since the 1980s. The book was a Nebul...
Fables Reread: Jack of Fables—The Bad Prince (V. 3)
The third volume of Jack of Fables is “The Bad Prince,” collecting issues #12-16. This is the bit of Jack’s story that gets one panel in Fables, at the Christmas where Ghost puts the fake sword through the doll!Jack, and something happens in Jack...
Literary Play and the Great Detective—A Study in Lavender: Queering Sherlock Holmes ed. by Joseph R. G. DeMarco
A Study in Lavender, edited by Joseph DeMarco, is a new anthology from Lethe Press that features a variety of queer-themed stories set in the Sherlock Holmes canon(s); some are (obviously) about Holmes and Watson’s relationship, but others deal with ...
