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First, a highlight of our own in-house reviews:
From Matt’s Reviews – a review of Dune by Frank Herbert
From Burn Enough – a review of Orders of Magnitude by Yval Kordov
Where The Axe is Buried by Ray Nayler
Zoya, a revolutionary leader, is living on borrowed time. Lilia, a scientist, is quietly lighting a match under a corrupt regime. Both feel their world is falling apart in slow motion. Resistance movements aged into institutions, rebellion calcified into bureaucracy, and some people became symbols at the expense of their humanity. Surveillance became part of daily life, social credit systems force social obedience. Huh. Actually, it doesn’t feel like a far-off dystopia.
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (Reviewed by Caitlin)
A Drop of Corruption is another rousing success from Robert Jackson Bennett, at once both a twisty mystery and harsh critique of colonialism. Returning fans will settle right back in with Ana and Din’s familiar cadence: Din does the leg-work, interviewing witnesses and assessing crime scenes, while Ana takes the information and works out how the pieces come together. I was glad to see how Din had grown into his role, understanding that Ana’s sometimes odd requests always have a reason, and knowing what kinds of information Ana is looking for.
Greenteeth by Molly O’Neill: Review by Colleen Mondor
Greenteeth is steeped in all sorts of faerie magic with hints of the always-popular Arthurian lore attached to the British Isles. Jenny, Temperance, and Brackus take to the Wild Road, make a deal with the Faerie King, and are even joined by a member of the Wild Hunt as they face three trials on their way to getting the magic they need to beat The Erl King (AKA Parson Braddock). Along the way they must come to terms with the difficulties of maintaining their unlikely friendship, survive some seriously dangerous attacks and then, when all seems lost, find a way to defeat the most powerful dark magic the country has ever seen.
When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi: Review by Adrienne Martini
There are moments that get a little too inside SF/F baseball for my taste (including a bit with an editor named ‘‘Tamara Nelson’’) but they aren’t deal-breakers because of how much emotional weight the story ultimately accrues. Balancing that out are the cheese puns (which take longer to get to than I’d anticipated), a tour-de-force text thread, and a running bit about competing cheese shops. When the Moon Hits Your Eye is more than you think it will be while also delivering what you’ve come to expect.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Small Wonders and Lightspeed: Reviews by Charles Payseur
January’s Beneath Ceaseless Skies issues deal with family, death, and hope, and Marie Croke does a great job of exploring those themes in “Our Echoes Drifting Through the Marsh”
Small Wonders opens up 2025 with a great issue, including A.Z. Louise’s “Cooking Tutorial ASMR – soft spoken – beef shank”, a slightly surreal poem that is framed as a description of a video, the narrator the host speaking to the audience and reader both.
B. Pladek kicks off Lightspeed’s 2025 with “Tell Them a Story to Teach Them Kindness”, a heartbreaking story about Jude, a trans man living in what was the Midwest and now is its own nation, Lakes United, part of a fractured former United States.
There are no doubt dozens of different possible definitions for the subfield of science fiction known as “space opera,” and in his introduction to this collection, editor Jonathan Strahan offers a few. Space opera has been called the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, starship yarn,” “colorful action-adventure stories of interplanetary or interstellar conflict,” or perhaps just “straight fantasy in science fiction drag” (p. i). Ultimately, Strahan settles for “romantic adventure set in space and told on a grand scale.” With scale and adventure in mind, Strahan explains he has selected the fourteen stories forming this enjoyable volume using three additional criteria: that the story be set primarily in space (either in ship or on a space station), in a populated universe, and possess high stakes. “It should,” Strahan says, “feel like the world might, emotionally or physically, be about to end”
The Book That Held Her Heart (The Library Trilogy book 3) by Mark Lawrence
‘The Book That Held Her Heart’, book three of ‘The Library’ series, does not begin where I expected. We find ourselves in what seems to be our world, in a small bookshop in a small town in Germany in the late 1930s. Not where we left off, with our heroes jumping through a portal into the unknown to escape the clutches of their enemies. After the frenetic pace of the series up to this point, it was a strangely tranquil moment, even knowing what happened at that time in history. Strange as well, as it brings the very different world of the Library into our own where there is only one moon and it is not occupied by another race who can build a robot army. For just one example. This brings all of the broader issues that author Mark Lawrence puts amid his warring species and political intrigues right into the foreground that coloured the rest of the book for me.
SF Concatenation:
An index of multiple reviews.
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