A heavy load of digests, all rather disappointing. Publications Reviewed F&SF, Mar/Apr 2012 Asimov’s, April/May 2012 Analog, May 2012 Tor.com, February 2012 F&SF, Mar/Apr 2012 I’ve been waiting for another issue of this zine as good as last year’s superior September/October. This isn’t it, though the Beagle story is a fine one. “Electrica” by Sean [...]

Nova Samuel R. Delany (Doubleday, 280pp, hc) 1968. Cover by Russell Fitzgerald. If fiction aspires to be – in John Gardner’s phrase – a vivid and continuous dream, then surely SF of all genres should prize vividness in the worlds it gives readers. But too often, SFnal futures are described with all the colour of [...]

A month’s worth of online publications plus one more 2011 leftover, mostly on the weird and absurd side. Some nice not-the-same-old stuff to be read. Publications Reviewed Electric Velocipede, Winter 2011 Lightspeed, February 2012 Strange Horizons, February 2012 Beneath Ceaseless Skies #88-89, February 2012 Journal of Unlikely Entomology #2.5, February 2012 Electric Velocipede #23, Winter [...]

The Best of Kage Baker makes me mad – not in a “reading this was a waste of time” way but in a “she had so many stories left” way. My anger is purely selfish. While the bulk of the stories collected here have turned up in other publications and online, it is lovely to [...]

Among the bioscience professionals who practice taxonomy, two camps exist: the “groupers” and the “splitters.” Groupers are philosophically in favor of overlooking small differences among related living beings and agglomerating many critters into the same species. Splitters prefer breaking out distinct individuals from a group and creating separate sub-species. Literary critics are taxonomists of a [...]

With a title taken from a Bob Dylan song and epigraphs from The Bhagavad Gita, John Shirley’s Everything Is Broken might seem like a natural for his own stomping ground, the San Francisco Bay Area. One young character, who spent the last two years ‘‘vaguely majoring in English’’ back in Akron OH while living with [...]

Claude Lalumière: At first, Chronicle appears to be nothing special, yet another entry in the teen POV-cam subset of fantasy cinema, made especially popular with The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. The first act introduces the main characters: a nerdy boy (Andrew, played by Dane DeHaan) with an abusive, alcoholic father (played by Michael Kelly); [...]

During the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt, the USA’s official attitude toward Latin America was characterized as the “Good Neighbor Policy.” A high-minded and friendly manifesto, the policy of course did little to stop self-serving American interventions in the affairs of the region for the next several decades. It did, however, incidentally give us the [...]

As readers should have noted, the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2011 has just been released, which in my mind is the kickoff for the annual awards season. As one of the contributors to the short fiction section, I must say that I am rather pleased with it this year. Which is to say, a [...]

by Jeff VanderMeer In 2011, “the field” continued to shift and fragment and in the process proved itself to be exciting, deep, and passionately engaged with the world around it. The mammals are partying with the dinosaurs until late into the night, and the result is a wonderful diversity of approaches. Novels bubbling up just [...]