Walter Jon Williams keeps on mix-and-matching genre elements and coming up with satisfying concoctions. In This Is Not a Game and Deep State, he combined near-future SF and international-intrigue materials in a now-familiar techno-thriller way. In The Fourth Wall, a sequel to that pair, he adds to the recipe one of my personal favorite guilty-pleasure [...]

Experienced genre readers approaching the mere title of Hari Kunzru’s new slipstream novel, Gods Without Men, will surely flash upon an old riff of fantastika: those deities who lose human worshippers and are deprived of prayers and fear and respect and adoration will dwindle away in power and status, until finally they are rendered mortal [...]

There are least a few passages in her new novel The Drowning Girl: A Memoir in which Caitlín R. Kiernan seems determined to reinvent the terms of Gothic fiction from the ground up, and she comes amazingly close to succeeding. Her protagonist Imp (short for India Morgan Phelps) is a narrator so unreliable she doesn’t [...]

In the forthcoming volume of essays authored by Damien Broderick and myself, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, we accord Jack Vance the slot at number 48, for his novel from 1996, Night Lamp. (The positions are assigned strictly chronologically, by publication date, not some estimate of comparative merit.) This is what we said [...]

It’s been more than two decades since Tim Powers’s The Stress of Her Regard appeared in 1989, and, rather appallingly, it was out of print for several of those years until Tachyon issued a new edition a few years ago. It’s always been among my favorite Powers novels, partly because it’s a sheer wallow for [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]