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Unlocking the Full Brilliance of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle
Ursula K. Le Guin left us with a wealth of stories and universes, but my favorite might be her Hainish cycle. I recently read, or re-read, every single novel and short story in the Hainish universe...
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Reading Children of Blood and Bone, Chapters 9-17
The reread of Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi continues with chapters 9-17, in which Inan goes heavy on the self-loathing, Amari makes some sacrifices, Tzain moves into Grumpy Town, and...
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Star Trek: Discovery’s General Order One Is Likely Evolving into the Prime...
In Star Trek: Discovery, Anson Mount’s Captain Pike is probably the most by-the-book Star Trek captain since Captain Picard, insofar as he’s a dude who really, really doesn’t want to violate the Prime...
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Broken Stars Gives a Tantalizing Glimpse of All That Chinese Science Fiction...
In 2016, I read Invisible Planets—a book that served, for English speakers and/or cultural philistines such as myself, as an introduction to contemporary Chinese speculative fiction. “China has a...
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Trying Hard to Get It Right in Andre Norton’s Dragon Magic
Dragon Magic is the most ambitious single Andre Norton novel I’ve read so far. It spreads across four historical periods in four parts of the world, plus the contemporary (as in 1972) United States. It...
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Miranda in Milan Sweepstakes!
With Miranda in Milan, debut author Katharine Duckett reimagines the consequences of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, casting Miranda into a Milanese pit of vipers and building a queer love story that lifts...
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Rereading the Vorkosigan Saga: Cryoburn, Chapters 8-11
Welcome back to the Vorkosigan reread! This week’s cover is Francois Lamidon’s art for the French edition published by J’ai Lu. This is the cryocombs, and the image captures the chaos and confusion...
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Reading the Wheel of Time: Arrogance, Knowledge and Fear in Robert Jordan’s...
It is a big day for Reading of the Wheel of Time. We’re just five days past the anniversary of the first post in this series, and today we start in on the third book, The Dragon Reborn. It seems that...
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Editor Ken Liu Shares Some of His Favorite Lines from Broken Stars
When putting together Broken Stars, a new anthology of contemporary Chinese science fiction, my guiding principle was to pick stories that stayed with me in some way, like the memory of a shooting star...
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Backwards and in Heels: Russian Doll, Happy Death Day, and How Women Survive...
If Nadia Vulvokov and Theresa “Tree” Gelbman met in the women’s bathroom at a party, they would see little in common, standing side-by-side looking into the mirror: 36-year-old redheaded game designer...
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8 Books to Help You Rebuild After an Ecological Catastrophe
So you’ve lived through an ecological disaster that’s drastically changed the world (or at least some corner of it): the water’s dried up, the bees have disappeared, temperatures are soaring, multiple...
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New Detective Pikachu Trailer Features Mewtwo and Snorlax!
Rejoice! We have a staticky new Detective Pikachu trailer, and this one begins in time-honored noir fashion with a world weary voiceover from an amnesiac detective. The twist being, of course, that the...
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Striking and Ambitious Fantasy: The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
If there’s one thing one can say for sure about Ann Leckie, it’s that so far in her career she shows no signs of settling into a rut. All her novels have been ambitious in their own separate ways, and...
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Five Books Featuring Complex Mother/Daughter Relationships
Fantasy has a reputation for orphans and absent parents, but that’s certainly never a rule. I’d like to turn that tired stereotype on its head and showcase some novels that were formative for me as a...
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Never-Contented Things Sweepstakes!
Seductive. Cruel. Bored. Be wary of… Never-Contented Things. Sarah Porter’s new YA standalone novel about dark faeries with surefire appeal is available March 19th from Tor Teen, and we want to send...
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Sleeps With Monsters: Engaging Fantasy Thrillers
How’s 2019 treating you so far, friends? I’m personally finding the onslaught of new and excellent books a little overwhelming. Into that overwhelming (but excellent) category fall the two novels I...
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A Quiet Hero’s Journey: Processing Trauma in Fantasy
In The Goblin Emperor an airship explodes, killing the emperor and his three eldest sons. We later learn that this was not an accident, but the work of assassins. Later still, we learn that those...
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Four SFF Novels with Something Very Specific in Common
It’s only natural to sort books into sets, just as we all meticulously sort our M&Ms by color so that we can consume them in the correct order. Sometimes it’s obvious why one categorizes as one...
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The Fantasy Roots of Pern: Dragonflight, Part One
In later interviews with press and fans, Anne McCaffrey would bristle at any attempt to classify her Dragonriders of Pern series as fantasy. Her dragons, she pointed out, were genetically engineered...
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Good Comic, Great TV Show — The Umbrella Academy Actually Improves on Its...
The Umbrella Academy is a delightful comic book series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, which basically answers the question, “What if Professor X was a complete and total asshole?” It’s won awards and...
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