From Last year:
The NY Times asked multiple authors to rank the Ten Best Books of the 21st Century. A surprising number of genre authors were included – Stephen King, Rebecca Roanhorse, Jonathan Lethem, Paul Trembly, Elizabeth Hand – and most of them did the right thing by including other genre works in their picks. (Most of them.) It’s behind a paywall. If you are not a subscriber, use these links: The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 100 best books of 21st century author picks
If you write reviews and would like a link to them to appear here, get in touch, let us know and we’ll be happy to oblige.
The Gentleman and his Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide
The Gentleman and His Vowsmith is a well-mixed blend of Regency murder mystery and queer romantasy. It takes two rival noble families and their underlings, traps them in an isolated manor house, and mixes in a little murder and a dash of ghostly apparitions. The result is a pot bubbling over with emotions, ranging from love to resentment.
Locus Online
Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite Should a mystery be deemed “cozy,” almost by definition, if it contains a yarn shop and some interesting talk about knitting that actually proves to be a central clue? What if that yarn shop is located on a gigantic interstellar generation ship named Fairweather—helmed naturally by an AI dubbed “Ferry?” And what if one of the interlocutors in the knitting conversation is hundreds of years old in her essence, but currently inhabiting the body of a twenty-something woman?
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky Shroud’s dystopian machinery is background to a story of planetary exploration and First Contact: an expedition across an extreme-environment planetscape as seen by human and nonhuman characters. The extreme environment in this case is Shroud, a tide-locked moon of a superjovian planet, a “lightless, crushing, freezing abyss” hostile to ordinary surveys thanks to its high gravity, optically opaque chemical-soup atmosphere, and its “constant, all-frequencies storm of radio traffic that blazed bright on every instrument.” If Shroud is going to be properly exploited (that is, resource-stripped), it must be surveyed, so the managers in Opportunities wake up a Special Projects team from hibernation and put them to work figuring out how to get the necessary data.
Asimov’s: Short Fiction Reviews by A.C. Wise The January/February issue of Asimov’s opens with “In the Splinterlands the Crows Fly Blind” by Siobhan Carroll, a novelette full of gorgeous imagery and excellent worldbuilding. When Charlie’s younger brother Gabe goes missing, he initially tries to wash his hands of the situation. He’s spent a lifetime caring for Gabe, finding them a new home on Earth 3, and he’s done cleaning up after his messes. But when Gabe’s girlfriend Sarah goes missing as well, Charlie reluctantly seeks help from the Crowmind that controls the planet and ends up roped into a dangerous rescue mission involving pirates and a shard of another universe lodged in their own.
A Palace Near the Wind by Ai Jiang Liu Lufeng belongs to the Wind Walkers, a small, tree-like race of people who live in the forests, live on sunlight and air, and can control the wind to varying degrees. The more human-like Land Wanderers are slowly uprooting the Wind Walker’s trees and building over their forests in the name of progress, led by a cruel and mysterious King. They’re slowed—not stopped—by a series of bridal trades. The daughters and granddaughters of the Wind Walker Elder have all married the king, one by one, and never came back. Lufeng’s mother and sisters have already gone; now it’s her turn to enter the Palace and face her fate.
Something about the way this novella is built and described reminds me a little bit of the Jim Henson film The Dark Crystal.
Century 21: Classic Comic Strips From The Worlds Of Gerry Anderson Volume 2 
These ‘Century 21: Classic Comic Strips’ volumes collect reprints from the famous ‘TV Century 21’ British comic, later just ‘TV21 that first came out in 1965-66. They are produced on high-quality paper, mostly from scans of the original artwork, not the comics, and you won’t see those pictures more elegantly displayed. Here’s what you get in volume 2. As with the first volume review, I include details about the writers, artists, and original publications for aficionados. The issue dates are a century ahead of the actual release, as the comic was pretending to be a newspaper from the future.
Slan by A. E. van Vogt
van Vogt’s Slan is his first novel and something of a minor SF classic. Minor, because it has not really stood the test of time despite winning the Retro-Hugo for 1941 in 2016 at the MidAmeriCon II Worldcon in Kansas City. ‘The Retro for 1941’ I hear you cry? Well, yes, because the novel was originally serialised in the Astounding Science Fiction over their September–December editions in 1940. But is it any good? Well, truth be told, opinion is divided. First, the story…
It is 1,500 years in the future. Young, nine-year old, Jommy Cross is out with his mother in the capital Centropolis, both are telepathic being ‘slans’ and as such they are being hunted. They are spotted and the authorities are closing in. They decide to split up and while his mother is captured, Jommy escapes by riding on the rear bumper of a car. He escapes but is caught by an impoverished, old, drunken woman, Granny, who recognises that by having a pet telepath she could make a living out of petty crime. And so Tommy embarks on an uneasy relationship with Granny who gives Jommy a place to live.
Related
Bruce Sterling reads Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling’s Big Jelly on Youtube.
Want more readers for your reviews? (Authors – want more reviews of your works?) Send us a link!
