Much of this column is devoted to a review of the ghost story anthology Haunted Legends. Also a brief rant on another topic. Publications Reviewed Interzone, 229 Jul-Aug 2010 Fantasy, July 2010 Strange Horizons, July 19 2010 Lightspeed, July 2010 Tor.com, July 2010 Subterranean, Summer 2010 Haunted Legends, Ellen Datlow & Nick Mamatas, eds. Interzone, [...]

Guy Gavriel Kay, hunting in the twilight zone between fact and dream, has written a shimmering novel, a fantasia on T’ang China, the epitome of Chinese civilization, as beautiful and as alien as the rings of Saturn. Midway through the Ninth Dynasty, as Kay dubs it, Shen Tai, younger son of a distinguished general of [...]

by Gary Westfahl Like the architects of dreams in his film Inception, writer-director Christopher Nolan has constructed a world in the form of an intricate labyrinth and challenges his viewers to make their way through its many corridors and dead ends to finally escape, having solved all its mysteries. With only twenty-four hours of real [...]

Publications Reviewed Analog, September 2010 Asimov’s, August 2010 Realms of Fantasy, August 2010 Beneath Ceaseless Skies, July 2010 Tor.com, July 2010 Subterranean, Summer 2010 Analog, September 2010 One of the most enjoyable issues of this magazine that I’ve read in quite a while. “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone The narrator, [...]

Charles Stross’s The Fuller Memorandum offers a melding of spy-intrigue and the fantastic that also occupies the borderland where two sides of Stross-the-writer’s personality overlap: the antic wit (in the Renaissance sense) and the darker dreamer. The world of the supernatural secret service nicknamed the Laundry is generated by a kind of programmer/engineer’s jeux-d’esprit foolery [...]

John Barnes’s new novel could have been titled Everything Falls Apart since the large-scale action concerns what happens to civilization when a handful of foundational technologies get taken away, but instead it’s called Directive 51, in honor of the document (which actually exists) that details how the US government will maintain itself in the face [...]

While I was waiting for the digest zines to appear in my mailbox I had the time to look at the stories in some new publications. Zines Reviewed Bull Spec, #1, Spring 2010 Redstone Science Fiction, June 2010 Fantasy Magazine, June 2010 Strange Horizons, June 2010 Cosmos, June 2010 Shareable Futures, June 2010 Retro Spec: [...]

Robert Silverberg has had a long and productive career, and one that still continues, so before talking about some of his most famous works, it might first be worth trying to make sense of the chronology. The Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction records his first published story as ‘‘Gorgon Planet’’ in 1954 and [...]