The reviews this time will focus on the current issues of the Dell digests, beginning with the Analog double. Time to get my fingers used to typing “1212″. I also review the ezine stories that didn’t make it into the last column. Publications Reviewed Analog, January/February 2012 Asimov’s, January 2012 Tor.com, November 2011 Fantasy Magazine, [...]

Both: Finally, to make up for the Skylines and Thors, Locus sent us to a great movie. Lawrence Person: While reviewing The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, I jokingly suggested in passing that Terry Gilliam should make a serious crime drama and Martin Scorsese should make a Gilliamesque fantasy. Little did I suspect Scorsese would actually [...]

Here are the monthly ezines, some various stuff in print from various sources, and a preview that bodes not well. Publications Reviewed Beneath Ceaseless Skies, November 2011 Lightspeed, November 2011 Fantasy Magazine, November 2011 Strange Horizons, November 2011 Weird Tales, Preview, October 2011 On Spec, Summer 2011 The New Yorker, November 14, 2011 The Journal [...]

With three outstanding novels and plenty of stories on his résumé, Daryl Gregory has found ways to explore the human mind and spirit – for good, bad, or any of the strange places between such absolutes – that seem very much his own in his first collection, Unpossible and Other Stories. What’s he doing? If [...]

The name Laini Taylor may still be an unfamiliar one for many readers of fantasy, but probably not for much longer. Taylor’s first novels, Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer (later shortened to just Blackbringer for Firebird’s reprint edition) and Silksinger, were wonderful middle-grade fantasies that brought cheroot-smoking crows and powerful djinn into the realm of fairy, [...]

A sizable batch of first-of-the-month ezines and one small press printzine. After a bit of a drought, I bring out the Good Story award again, this time for Catherynne M Valente’s piece in Apex, a good issue of this zine. Publications Reviewed Apex Magazine, November 2011 Clarkesworld, November 2011 Intergalactic Medicine Show, November 2011 Abyss [...]

Not quite 20 years ago, Vernor Vinge produced an instant classic in A Fire Upon the Deep, a complicated mix of New Space Opera, cosmology opera, planetary romance, alien encounter, and intrigue adventure with a set of givens and a back-story that would take most of this column to outline, which means that reviewing its [...]