Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky, the third novel in her White Space series, tells a stand-alone story, full of grand space opera tropes, including Alcubierre-White drives that fold space for faster than light travel, space pirates, sentient ships, a diverse crew of “syster” species, and a star about to go nova. But it’s not just […]

Death of the Author marks the second time (the first being Who Fears Death) Nnedi Okorafor has led me through a reading experience that felt interesting but not overwhelming only to deliver an ending section that made me wonder how she does it. For that ending delivers a powerful impact that changes my view of […]

Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus is the second novel in his Astra Black series (following 2022’s Sweep of Stars) and moves the story of the Muungano world forward from multiple perspectives, each of which probes the internal struggles of a large cast of characters. While the novel shifts more to deepening our understanding of […]

We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed is the second part of the story she began a couple of years ago in The Annual Migration of Clouds. It’s another strong novella that continues the story of nineteen year-old Reid, surviving in a post-apocalyptic western Canada. The story picks up directly from where the last […]

Tobi Ogundiran, the award winning short fiction author, has produced his debut epic fantasy, the first part of which is the novella, In the Shadow of the Fall. It is a beautifully rendered story about a young acolyte of the orisha whose attempt to commune with the gods triggers a sequence of events that almost […]

After yet more downtime caused by, first, the misery of a post-covid illness, something like a cold from hell, and then happy times during a special family birthday gathering, I managed to start reading again with Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. I was so impressed with her earlier The Monsters We Defy […]