Books

Arkamondos has been making a decent living as a scribe. He writes letters, keeps ledgers for merchants, and generally takes any scribing work that pays the bills, even though most of it is utterly boring. When he has the option to become the embedded r...

Kage Baker left us far too soon. Her untimely death in 2010, at age 57, was an immense loss for the science fiction and fantasy world, but she’s sure to pop up on recommended reading lists for many years to come thanks to the treasure trove of genre ...

As is so often the case with great novels, the opening chapter of N.K. Jemisin’s The Killing Moon offers a snapshot of the conflicts and relationships that end up driving the whole story. We meet the Gatherer Ehiru as he stealthily travels through th...

Miriam is a drifter with an unusual gift: when she touches someone skin to skin, she sees a brief vision of the circumstances of that person’s death. It could be decades into the future or later the same day. Some deaths are accidents, some are of ol...

My path to Bradley Beaulieu’s writings was probably different from most people’s: I discovered him only recently through Strata, the excellent science fiction novella he co-wrote and self-published with Stephen Gaskell (review). I enjoyed Strata so...

In the year 2035, all that’s remaining of humanity is a group of twenty-six people who live in the Shell, an enclosure built two decades ago by the alien race known as the Tesslies when an environmental cataclysm made our world uninhabitable. The six...

This week sees the release of The Legend of Eli Monpress, an omnibus containing Rachel Aaron’s first three novels: The Spirit Thief, The Spirit Rebellion, and The Spirit Eater. The fourth novel in the series, entitled The Spirit War, is due out in Ju...

Whether you call it climate change or global warming, by the time Tobias Buckell’s long awaited new novel Arctic Rising gets started, the results are obvious: the Arctic ice cap has melted down, and the Northwest Passage has opened completely for shi...

In the 22nd century, resource depletion and Earth’s ever-increasing energy demands have led humanity to a brand new frontier: huge platforms circle the Sun and draw energy directly from its surface. In the past, corporations offered enticing contract...

You know that saying “For want of a nail”? Well, in Easie Damasco’s case, it was for want of a piece of bread, a chunk of fish and some cabbage that the fate of the entire land of Castoval was changed. When Easie is caught pilfering food from the...

Will McIntosh’s debut Soft Apocalypse, which I reviewed here, was a brilliant novel about normal people trying to survive while society gradually collapses around them. It was easily one of my favorite novels of 2011. His catalog of strong short stor...

Three hundred years ago, a strange and seemingly invincible alien ship visited the Sakhran Empire. Exactly what happened is unclear, because the events were only recorded in the Book of Srahr, a text only Sakhrans are allowed to read. After the ship le...