Janelle Monáe returns to the dystopian cyberpunk world of her Dirty Computer album with The Memory Librarian, a collection of five long stories that further the narrative set forth in the album. While the New Dawn is intent on standardizing and homogenizing the future, a band of gender-nonconforming rebels persist in retaining, remembering, and celebrating the stories of …
This is a page-turning, easy read that you‘ll be able to devour quickly! It’s a different and unique take on vampire lore and, although it seems as if it was set up to become a series (unfortunately the author died shortly after publication), you can still read it as a stand-alone! I am, however, left …
Even as a diehard Le Guin fan, I was stunned by how much I loved this work of speculative fiction. As the main character visits fifteen alternate universes in order to entertain herself during an airport layover, Le Guin’s ability to breeze through an alternate “plane” or universe provides the magic of Changing Planes. The …
Passing Strange by Ellen Klages is a remarkably restful piece of quiet fantasy that I can’t recommend enough. Set in the queer quarters of 1940 San Francisco, we follow the budding romance between two women: an artist for the pulps and a singer newly arrived trying to find a place to belong. That’s it. And …
Le Guin can do more with a novella than most people can do with a full-length book. She writes with complexity about justice, cruelty, home, and grief just as deftly as she moves between science fiction, fantasy, and realism, and each of these stories is populated by characters so real you can almost feel their …
Charles Soule is back with Anyone. Soule wrote an interesting near future SF novel called The Oracle Year a while back, and he’s tackling the near future again with Anyone. This time around, the premise is human consciousness can be transported between bodies. Naturally, this becomes both thrilling and terrifying (when you start to extrapolate some of the effects …
For those of us who are late catching up with the Oregon writer Molly Gloss, Saga Press is doing a great service this year by bringing much of her work back in handsome new paperbacks. Her books have been balanced between speculative fiction and stories of women in the historical West; Wild Life seems like …
