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 [...]

Out of all the forms of fiction, surely allegory is the hardest to bring off successfully. If the subtextual parable is too dominant, too overwhelming and up front, then all naturalism is lost, and the characters are rendered lifeless, their actions clockwork, all to hammer home an arid lesson. If, on the other hand, the [...]

When Margo Lanagan’s novella ‘‘Sea- Hearts’’ received the World Fantasy Award in 2010, it was already widely known that a full-length novel was in the works, and it didn’t seem at all unreasonable when a few people I spoke to expressed excitement leavened by apprehension, as is often the case when a well-formed tale is [...]

All Men of Genius makes no attempt to hide its main sources of inspiration: an odd couple of famous comedies, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Rosen’s twins of two sexes, a female character’s masquerade as a young man, several cases of infatuation spurred on by interfering tricksters, plus the [...]

Is it time to be talking about the neo-New Space Opera, or possibly the post-neo-New Space Opera, or even the Phase Space Space Opera (in the sense of all possible states of a system being represented at once)? It’s been more than five years since Hartwell and Cramer’s massive and argumentative Space Opera Renaissance anthology, [...]

Sometimes, you (or, to be more specific, since I can’t really speak about your reading habits, I) need a nice little bite of well-done whimsy in order to keep pushing through all of the unpleasantness that life can dish out. Hellbent by Cherie Priest is that perfect bite. No, this tale of Raylene Pendle, vampire [...]

Briarpatch by Tim Pratt (a Locus senior editor) takes place in a modern Bay Area that’s weirdly porous: riddled by hidden passages into the many – infinite? – worlds collectively known as the Briarpatch. An epigraph from ‘‘Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby’’ (traditional) uses that word for somewhere Br’er says he really doesn’t want [...]

The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories Roger Zelazny (Doubleday, 230pp, hc) 1971. A lot of the problems particular to SF can be thought of as problems of register. SF stories have to shift from naturalistic dialogue to infodumping to (sometimes) the high-flown language of transcendence. The argument against [...]

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, [...]