Though I’ve usually thought of myself as a science fiction reader primarily, this year’s favorite fantasy fiction has shown me how diverse and vital this vast category can be. None of the nine books in this list resorts to the tired conventions of Eurocentric medieval-style settings and hero questing. Each one takes a completely original […]
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Impressed as I was by Simon Jimenez‘ beautiful and moving first novel, The Vanished Birds, I have to say I’m just staggered by his second, The Spear Cuts Through Water. Using the second person, the narrator lures “you” with intensely lyrical but dramatically apt prose into a world between worlds. One of several story tellers […]
A Storm of Wings – A Novel of Viriconium by M. John Harrison
From the beginning of M. John Harrison’s A Storm of Wings (1980), you know you’re entering a shattered world with a diminishing human presence, but it is also a dazzling world captured in densely brilliant and beautiful prose. This second novel of the Viriconium series caught me by surprise. The first, The Pastel City (1971), […]
Tread of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse
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 […]
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 […]
Fevered Star and Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Fevered Star is the second book in Rebecca Roanhorse’s brilliantly imagined series Between Earth and Sky. Picking up directly after the conclusion of Black Sun, Fevered Star pushes its central characters in new directions while building on their gods-driven purposes played out in a richly imagined setting that draws together elements of many pre-Columbian American […]
