Echo is Jack McDevitt’s fifth novel featuring antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and his starship-pilot/assistant/narrator Chase Kolpath. McDevitt often uses the detective story as the armature for his novels (‘‘I’ve always loved a good mystery,’’ he has written), and Alex Benedict’s profession can be depended on to provide a plot-starting and -propelling McGuffin, usually in the [...]

A lot of the stories in this batch of ezines are just plain weird. Most of the stories in Beneath Ceaseless Skies are not weird, but the zine is celebrating its 2nd anniversary with a double issue. The new historical fiction zine Alt Hist is making its debut. At the same time, Realms of Fantasy [...]

I don’t think anyone I know claims to have a good handle on the career of Michael Moorcock. With 70-odd novels in just about every genre he could find, scores of stories, novellas, and anthologies, rock albums, comics and graphic novels, fanzines, professional magazines (most notably New Worlds), reviews, essays, and for all I know [...]

I found two outstanding pieces of fiction in this batch of stories. Publications Reviewed F&SF, Nov/Dec 2010 Subterranean, Fall 2010 Songs of Love and Death, edited by George R R Martin and Gardner Dozois Asimov’s, December 2010 F&SF, Nov/Dec 2010 A ghostly issue, starring an excellent novella by Robert Reed. Mostly light entertainment from Cowdrey [...]

by Gary Westfahl Young filmgoers, accustomed to seeing big-budget science fiction, fantasy, or horror movies opening almost every week, may struggle to believe that there was a time, not so long ago, when major studios and stars almost entirely shunned fantastic films in favor of realistic stories set in the past or present. Indeed, only [...]

Make Room! Make Room! Harry Harrison (Doubleday, 216pp, hc) 1966 There are, I’d suggest, two canonical SF novels about overpopulation. One, John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), is a vast, sprawling work whose encompassing rage is not nearly well known enough outside the SF field. The other, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! is well [...]

In the PR material for Anthony Huso’s The Last Page, David Drake calls it ‘‘an excellent story told in the High Style,’’ then cites Wolfe, Vance, and Eddison. At 400-plus pages, with maps, sometimes-ornate language, and an apparently familiar plot (raw new king, persecuted-witch girlfriend, a secret text, and a looming war – complete with [...]

Issues of ezines posted at the beginning of the month and one small press anthology in print. Publications Reviewed Clarkesworld, October 2010 Apex Magazine, October 2010 Abyss & Apex, 4th Quarter 2010 Intergalactic Medicine Show, October 2010 Tor.com, September 2010 Panverse Two, edited by Dario Ciriello Clarkesworld, October 2010 Both stories this month deal, in [...]

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer’s newest collection of short fiction, The Third Bear, is how the juxtaposition of these initially unrelated 14-plus stories creates a much larger narrative about a larger undiscovered country. Each narrative is like a textual postcard from a singular land, with each missive capturing [...]