Mostly fantasy this time. I give the good story award to Fantasy Magazine‘s An Owomoyela, with Strange Horizons a strong contender. Publications Reviewed F&SF, Mar/Apr 2011 Realms of Fantasy, February 2011 Fantasy Magazine, February 2011 Strange Horizons, February 2011 Beneath Ceaseless Skies, February 2011 Lightspeed, February 2011 Tor.com, February 2011 F&SF, Mar/Apr 2011 I usually [...]

A wrap-up, then, of the movies I’ve seen, or had to see, in not my favorite decade so far, in not my favorite century. While we were off seeing stuff, I hope better movies were playing elsewhere. I hope you saw them; we didn’t. How Lawrence and I work: early each year we look at [...]

Locus has asked Howard and me to offer up our respective Top Movies lists for science fiction, fantasy and horror films of 2000-2010 (i.e., The Noughties). But before I get into the meat of my list, I want to make clear what I am (and am not) covering. First off, I’m going to limit my [...]

Shikasta Doris Lessing (Jonathan Cape, 364pp, hc) 1979 Doris Lessing, of course, is much more than a writer of science fiction. Her body of work, stretching from the late 1940s to the present, covers a huge range of themes, both drawn from her life and from the times she’s lived in. (She was born in [...]

Heroic or high fantasy, whether it appears under the guise of multi-volume “epics” or the shorter-length Sword and Sorcery fantasies, is often overlooked when it comes to judging a year’s best. Due to the outsized conflicts and emphasis in most such stories on plot over theme or minute characterization, such stories cannot be judged in [...]

The impressive critical reception that met Nnedi Okorafor’s first adult novel Who Fears Death last year, with its unflinching portrayals of weaponized rape and clitorectomy, shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise to readers who had followed her first two YA novels Zahrah the Windseeker and The Shadow Speaker or her occasional short [...]

The good story prize this time goes to Electric Velocipede, and the Bradley story in particular. I take a look at Daily Science Fiction and wonder if I will continue to review it on a regular basis. Publications Reviewed Electric Velocipede #21/22, Winter 2011 Apex Magazine, February 2011 Bull Spec #4, Dec-Jan-Feb 2010-2011 Daily Science [...]

Any year’s best list should be about passion and depth: the love of a book in the context of a lot of reading. In 2010, my reading was at the very least comprehensive, and I discovered several novels that lived on in my imagination long after I finished them. What I found, most of all, [...]

And now the stories have been pouring in. Quite a few good ones this time, I’m happy to say. The best are “Movement” by Nancy Fulda in Asimov’s and “Like a Hawk in its Gyre” from Redstone. Publications Reviewed Clarkesworld #53, February 2011 Subterranean, Winter 2011 Asimov’s, March 2011 Analog, April 2011 GigaNotoSaurus, February 2011 [...]