Rebecca Roanhorse has created a stark fantasy world in the weird west of her powerful novella, Tread of Angels. From its brilliant opening, as a dark and violent wind blowing off a mountain called Abaddon storms into the grim town of Goetia and slams down Perdition Street into the Eden, its main den of gambling […]
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds is a masterful surprise in this author’s work, and I found myself reading it straight through. Instead of opening in one of Reynolds’ future worlds, the action starts on a sailing vessel, the Demeter, in a stormy sea off the coast of Norway in either the late 18th or early 19th […]
Needle by Linda Nagata (Inverted Frontier Book 3)
Needle is the third book in Linda Nagata’s compelling Inverted Frontier series that began with Edges and continued with Silver. This is an epic story of the search for remnants of human civilizations reaching back from the farthest reach of settlement toward the origin of it all. Urban and the crew of the Dragon encounter […]
Neom by Lavie Tidhar – A Review
In the helpful afterward to his hauntingly beautiful new novel, Neom, Lavie Tidhar describes his process of writing it as one of discovery. He wrote about a robot going to the flower market of the bustling city of Neom to buy a single rose. But why? He had to write another story to answer that […]
The Dragon Waiting by John M. Ford – A Review for Wyrd & Wonder
John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting is a brilliant reshuffling of fantasy tropes and alternate history but at heart also a beautiful study of a group of extraordinary characters. First published in 1983, this is the first of Ford’s novels to be republished since his death in 2006 when, apparently because no one could trace […]
Moon Witch Spider King by Marlon James, A Review for Wyrd & Wonder
Marlon James’ Moon Witch Spider King (second book of the Dark Star trilogy) impressed me at first as everything I had missed in the first novel, Black Leopard Red Wolf. There was a story of emotional depth I could link into and a brilliant character I could care about, as opposed to the strangely alienating […]
Amazing Cities in SFF – 3
To round out for now this series on cities in SFF, I’m revisiting a few novels that capture the importance of how people experience urban environments and how the massive structures affect their language and thought. A city, after all, is not just buildings and a way of physically organizing dense populations, but also a […]
Five Favorite Fantasy Novels Read This Past Year: Wyrd & Wonder
It’s Wyrd & Wonder time again and, though I’ll have other kinds of posts this month as well, I thought I’d start with this Fantastic Five meme. I’ve read a lot more than five great fantasies since last May, but here are the most recent ones (actually six) that haven’t yet been in any other […]
