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Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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In the opening sentences of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Alien Clay , a spaceship breaks up in orbit over an alien planet, spilling stasis pods whose inhabitants are resuscitated mid-crash, waking to panic and pandemonium as they tumble uncontrollably towards the planet. Some of the resuscitations fail; some of the pods are smashed by debris; some of their chutes fail to deploy. It's a familiar scene, for all its drama; a classic opening of any number of science fiction stories that drop their protagonists into a crisis and then let them work out their survival and the rest of their story from there. But as our narrator, Professor Arton Daghdev, explains—from his vantage point in one of the descending pods, albeit one that makes it to the planet's surface more or less intact—this is not an accident, but the system operating as designed. The ship is carrying convicts to a labor camp. It has been built to survive the journey and no more. Dumping the prisoners out in space, terrifying...
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Recent Reading: A Granite Silence by Nina Allan

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Readers of Allan's novels, as well as her excellent blog , will have for some time been aware of her growing interest in crime fiction and non-fiction. It's not a surprise, then, that her latest book veers away from the fantastic genres and towards crime writing, and it is equally unsurprising that the result is both excellent and entirely idiosyncratic, a book that stretches our definitions of "novel" and "non-fiction" in equal measure. A Granite Silence begins in an autofictional mode, with a narrator presumed to be Allan taking a trip to Aberdeen to research a new novel in one of the early lulls in the pandemic. There she learns about the 1934 murder of eight-year-old Helen Priestly, who disappeared and was later found dead in her working class tenement building. It's a case that still simmers in the city's consciousness, and has been written about extensively in legal academic circles.  This opening segment quickly becomes a compelling, gripping...
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Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy, Reviewed at The Guardian

For the second time, I was invited to cover for Lisa Tuttle, the Guardian 's recent SFF columnist. In the May column , I write about Joe Abercrombie's The Devils , a series starter about a Suicide Squad -like troupe of monsters in a sideways, fantasized medieval Europe; Emily Tesh's The Incandescent , in which the magic school story is told from the point of view of the teacher (a longer review of this book is forthcoming in Strange Horizons ); Land of Hope by Cate Baum, an apocalypse survival story in the vein of The Road with a twist that shouldn't work but somehow does; and Roisin Dunnett's A Line You Have Traced , an example of what Niall Harrison has termed "overshoot" fiction, in which three people in different time periods cope with what seems like the end of the world. Writing these sorts of reviews is always an interesting mental challenge. You have to sum up a whole book in a paragraph, and come up with a way to encapsulate the things it does...
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Track Changes Wins BSFA Award + Hugo Voting Opens

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The 2025 Eastercon was held in Belfast last weekend, and at the announcement of the British Science Fiction Association I was stunned and delighted by Track Changes winning the award for best long non-fiction. This was a particularly gratifying win because Track Changes was nominated alongside such impressive work, representing a broad range of long-form criticism of the science fiction and fantasy fields. Far be it from me to suggest more Hugo categories, but I can't help feeling that the BSFA's approach, which separates essays and other non-fiction from book-length work, makes more sense than the grab-bag that is the Best Related Work category. Even leaving this unexpected honor aside, Eastercon was a very good time. I was on four panels, moderating one—all, I believe, are now available on the con's catch-up platform. I particularly enjoyed the obligatory reviewing panel, which I wasn't even going to request until Niall Harrison asked me to fill in for him. I always...
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The 2025 Hugo Awards: My Two Hugo Nominations

The nominees for the 2025 Hugo Awards, which will be handed out this August in Seattle, Washington, were announced earlier this evening. My book, Track Changes: Selected Reviews is nominated in the Best Related Work category. In addition, I am nominated for Best Fan Writer, my first time back in this category since winning it in 2017. First up, I want to thank everyone who nominated me in both of these categories. I'm extremely proud of both Track Changes and my work as a blogger and critic last year, and it's gratifying for both to be recognized. Track Changes is, of course, a collaborative work, and would not exist without Briardene Books and its tireless publisher, Niall Harrison, whose belief in the power and importance of SFF criticism has lifted up many excellent critics. If you've enjoyed Track Changes , check out their other books, including the forthcoming Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid. Secondly, I want to thank the...
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Review: Luminous by Silvia Park in Locus

One of the problems with reviewing for a venue like Locus , which has a relatively long lag time, is that months can pass between my reading a book and finally getting to talk to a wide audience about. Such is the case with Silvia Park's debut novel Luminous , a book I've wanted to rave about since reading it at the beginning of the year. Set in a unified future Korea in which robots are ubiquitous and increasingly human-like, it feels like a direct follow-up to classics of the genre like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Not to mention, an early contender for one of the best science fiction novels of 2025 . The more we learn about Luminous's world, however, the more this distinction between robot and human feels more like a social convention than a concrete fact. Jun himself is a case in point: Catastrophically injured during his military service, he is now mostly robotic ("They repaired him by attaching not the bionic to his body but his body to the bionic")...
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Track Changes is a BSFA Award Nominee

The British Science Fiction Association has announced the shortlists for its annual award, which will be handed out at Eastercon in Belfast next month. My collection Track Changes: Selected Reviews is nominated in the category for long non-fiction. As pleased as I am by this nomination, I am even more flattered, and humbled, by my fellow nominees, an absolute murderer's row of the some of the most interesting non-fiction published in the fields of science fiction and fantasy last year. I will be on hand for the BSFA Award ceremony, and the rest of Eastercon, next month, where Briardene Books will also be launching its next publication, Paul Kincaid's Colourfields: Writing About Writing About Science Fiction . Paul is one of my fellow nominees for the BSFA, for his book Keith Roberts's Pavane: A Critical Companion . It really feels like we're in a moment of tremendous flowering for critical writing about the fantastic genres, and I'm thrilled that my book gets to b...
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