I’m finding a lot of good stories this time. Commendations to Asimov’s, Lady Churchill, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Publications Reviewed Asimov’s, March 2013 Analog, April 2013 Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #28, January 2013 Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Janaury 2013 Strange Horizons, January 2013 Tor.com, January 2013 Crossed Genres, January 2013 Asimov’s, March 2013 A strong issue. [...]

The Library of America’s American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s was edited by my Locus colleague Gary K. Wolfe, but I would have good things to say about it even if the project had been overseen by Anon instead of a friend and fellow ink-stained wretch. The two volumes of this boxed [...]

Stephen Haffner and his Haffner Press continue to do some impressive heavy lifting in the field of preserving, annotating, and reinvigorating the ancestors of today’s fantastika. The pioneers of our favorite kind of literature receive, in these massive, gorgeous collections, both the honor they deserve for their groundbreaking writings that catalyzed and crystallized our contemporary [...]

Turing and Burroughs, Rudy Rucker’s ‘‘Beatnik SF Novel,’’ deftly combines historic characters and wild flights of imagination, in a spin-off of our world’s history, 1954-55. Though I hadn’t quite reached grade school back then, I recognize (and dig!) its portrayal of mid-century America as a far from monolithic nation that extends beyond the suburbs where [...]

Marking 100 Locus Online review columns. This time there are a lot of ezines: a couple of 2012 leftovers and more new January issues. Publications Reviewed Electric Velocipede # 25, Winter 2012 Fireside #3, Winter 2012 Eclipse Online, January 2013 Lightspeed, January 2013 Kaleidotrope, Winter 2013 Black Gate, January 2013 Bourbon Penn #6, January 2013 [...]

UK writer Steve Aylett is a genius of the bizarre, a whacked-out psychedelic wordsmith and literary prankster whose name should be a byword among all those readers who enjoy the antics of Rhys Hughes or Flann O’Brien, Rudy Rucker or William Burroughs, Michael Moorcock or Grant Morrison, R. A. Lafferty or David Bunch. His brand [...]

If we were to take at face value Tsvetan Todorov’s famously useless definition of the fantastic as existing only during that period of hesitation before a work topples into the truly marvelous or the merely uncanny, then the simple act of identifying a work as SF or fantasy or mimetic realism would constitute a kind [...]

Turning over the yearglass – closing out 2012 and moving on to the new. Publications Reviewed Beneath Ceaseless Skies #110-111, December 2012 Tor.com, December 2012 Clarkesworld, January 2013 Asimov’s, February 2013 Analog, March 2013 Apex Magazine, January 2013 Beneath Ceaseless Skies #110-111, December 2012 #110 deals with wizardry; #111 takes us to storied lands. Particularly [...]