Asking the Wrong Questions

Being on an award jury has been a dream of mine for years. I suppose it's only to be expected; I spend so much time telling people which books they should or should not read, that naturally I would leap at the opportunity to do so with the imprimatur of an award behind me. This year, I finally got my wish, and was invited to be a member of the jury for the 2026 Otherwise Award . Over the next few months, I and the other members of the jury will be reading books, stories, and other works published in 2026, with the award list and honor list to be announced in the spring of next year. Formerly known as the Tiptree award, the Otherwise seeks to recognize works that expand and explore the definition of gender, a topic on which science fiction has always had a great deal to say, and all the more so in the 21st century. Members of the jury may request and recommend works for consideration, but so can members of the public. If you've read something that you think I and the other juror...

My June 2026 Locus column had a bit of an informal theme of considering the influence—acknowledged and unacknowledged—on the works under review. Plastic, Prism, Void , which I discussed earlier this month, was reviewed though the lens of how it fit—and defied—the category of romantasy. My two other reviews, both published online in the last week, are of works that seem to draw inspiration from more specific sources. Andrew Dana Hudson's debut Absence feels like a mashup of The X-Files , The Leftovers , and the MCU's "blip" arc. It imagines a world in which people disappear at random and with no apparent explanation, and follows two government agents who travel to a small town to investigate a woman who claims to be the first person to have returned from such a disappearance. Hudson takes these inspirations and makes them his own, but he also uses their fusion to craft a touching reflection on the recent pandemic and how it affected both institutions and indivisuals....

Violet Allen has been on my radar for years, since I read her transcendent short story "The Venus Effect" in Lightspeed Magazine . She's also a fun follow on BlueSky , which is where I learned that she was hard at work on her first novel. I've reviewed that novel , Plastic, Prism, Void , for Locus , and what I found in it more than delivers on the promise of that long-ago short story. Like "The Venus Effect", Plastic, Prism, Void is insouciant with a core of seriousness, experimental but also plotty. It follows a trans woman who may also be a witch, and her on-again, off-again boyfriend, a trans man who may also be a mech warrior, as they negotiate their relationship while saving (or is it destroying?) the world. It's also a novel that cheerfully demolishes every stylistic convention in existence, deploying multiple fonts, copious footnotes, and fourth-wall breaking interludes in a way that is delightful, but also invites readers to question the very f...

Earlier this year, the literary and genre fiction communities were startled by the announcement that Daniel Kraus's Angel Down , a fantasy-horror novel in which a squad of WWI soldiers discover an angel on the killing fields of 1918 France, had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. This is not the first time that a novel in the fantastical genres had won this award—it is preceded by books like The Underground Railroad , A Visit from the Goon Squad , and The Road —but as I write at the beginning of my review of the book, published today at Strange Horizons , there are different kind of genre fiction, just as there are different kinds of literary fiction. I was surprised that the Pulitzer jury had the kind of genre fiction that Kraus writes on their radar, and even more surprised that the Pulitzer board, when offered a choice between Angel Down and more traditional nominees like Katie Kitamura' Audition and Torrey Peters's Stag Dance , would choose to recognize Kraus's n...

Sometimes I make very odd reading decisions. For example, in late March of this year, a time when I was regularly running for shelter ahead of Iranian missiles, I made the inexplicable choice to read Francis Spufford's latest novel Nonesuch , which takes place during the London Blitz. But although there were moments during my reading when I found myself wondering why I'd done this to myself, for the most part I found the experience of reading Nonesuch cathartic. There was something reassuring about the insight, sympathy, and yes, humor with which Spufford wrote about the experiences of his heroine, stock exchange clerk by day, good time girl by night Iris Hawkins, as she found her footing in a world where a bomb might kill you, but if it doesn't, there's still work to do in the morning. Iris's already complicated life is complicated further when she learns that a secret occult society associated with the British Union of Fascists is trying to use magic hidden in Lo...

I had three reviews in the April 2026 issue of Locus , and they are now all online. First up, I reviewed Samantha Mills's collection Rabbit Test and Other Stories . The title story was one of the most talked-about pieces of SFF short fiction of the last few years, racking up multiple award wins due both to its topicality—it is a story about America backsliding on reproductive health published just as this happened in reality—and the excellence of its execution. In my review I try to detect how a collection built around a single, attention-grabbing story manages to buttress it with other readings, and what those other stories tell us about Mills as a writer. One of the earliest pieces, "Strange Waters", feels almost like a first attempt at the framework that would eventually become "Rabbit Test", relying, like it, on a sense of the ebb and flow of history. Mika, a fisherwoman, has been swept out to sea, away from the city she calls home. But the currents she...

I've made no secret of my admiration for Ancillary Review of Books 's podcast A Meal of Thorns . In every episodes, host Jake Cassella Brookins invites a guest—an author, critic, or academic—to discuss a single book. Selections range across genres (a recent episode focused on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep ), discussing books new and old, famous and obscure. I guested on A Meal of Thorns last year with a discussion of Iain M. Banks's Excession , and Cassella was kind enough to invite me back in 2026. This time our topic was David Mitchell's 2004 breakout success Cloud Atlas , a novel in which six nested narratives, set in different time periods and written in different styles and genres, reveal unexpected connections, as well as a meditation on humanity's tendency towards cruelty and exploitation. As I say at the beginning of the episode, it is by no means an exaggeration to say that Cloud Atlas was one of the novels that made me. It's a book I discovere...

Reviewing every installment in a series is a rare accomplishment, even for a prolific critic. Reviewing every installment in a series by Adrian Tchaikovsy, who routinely publishes multiple novels and novellas every year, is surely an accomplishment worthy of note. Few series, however, reward this sort of sustained engagement as much as Tchaikovsky's Tyrant Philosphers series, which I strongly believe is one of the major achievements in fantasy of this decade. I reviewed the first novel in the series, City of Last Chances , in 2023, calling it a resurgence of the New Weird. Then late last year I published an omnibus review of the next two novels, House of Open Wounds and Days of Shattered Faith , as well as the novella Lives of Bitter Rain , which allowed me to observe how the books examine the workings of the fascistic Palleseen empire, and the deterioration of its ideals of "perfection" in the face of a bloody war and the costs of maintaining an empire. It was in res...

Readers of this blog will know how much I admire the writing the of Aliya Whiteley, not least because of how varied it is. She has written fungal horror ( The Beauty ), satire ( Greensmith ), planetary romance ( Skyward Inn ) and much else. And even within those genres, her writing is often hard to pin down, taking strange and unexpected turns and refusing an easy summation. I reviewed Whiteley's latest novel, The Misheard World , in last month's issue of Locus, which also gave me an opportunity to tease out a common thread that is becoming apparent in much of her writing. It's common, in the genres of science fiction and fantasy, to say that a certain work is about the power of storytelling. Often what's meant by this is something rather misty-eyed: the power of stories to inspire, to give meaning, to imbue the world with magic and wonder. In a career that has spanned some ten novels and novellas in a range of genres and styles, Aliya Whiteley has returned often to th...

One of the unexpected curiosities of growing older is watching the train of "rediscovered" books come back around for a second try. In my teens, I read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men , by a Belgian-Jewish author named Jacqueline Harpman. A gender-based dystopia about a young girl who grows up in an underground bunker with a group of women, it was a dark, elliptical novel (one that many critics have tied to Harpman's experience of fleeing the Nazis as a child). I didn't particularly get on with it, but it has lingered with me for decades. Flash forward an undisclosed number of years, and I Who Have Never Known Men has become a BookTok sensation and a runaway bestseller. Naturally the response by publishers is to see if the rest of Harpman's voluminous catalogue might prove a similar hit. They are now testing the waters by reissuing a novel that was already translated into English in the 90s, Orlanda . Pitched at a very different emotional register than I...

I waited most of September for my review of The End of the World As We Know It to appear on Locus 's website, and now my two other reviews from the August issue have both turned up in quick succession. First up, The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar, a Ruritanian fantasy in which a court magician must save a pair of star-crossed young lovers. There's always been a certain "you know it when you see it" quality to YA fiction, and all the more so in the decades since it has become popular for adult readers to consume it alongside its intended audience. Louis Sachar, author of the beloved YA classic Holes (1998) as well as a raft of novels for younger readers, describes The Magician of Tiger Castle as his first novel for adults. Which of course encourages the critic to read the novel with an eye towards identifying those aspects of it that distinguish one reading category from another. Is it simply that Anatole, our narrator, is a man nearing middle age, a self-d...

Like a lot of genre fans of my generation—and perhaps several generations before and after—I had a Stephen King phase. The adage that the golden age of science fiction is thirteen might just as easily be applied to the mega-prolific horror-meister, who, besides being a gifted scribe with an eye for both the sentimental and the absurd, is a good entry point for young readers looking to explore darker, more disturbing topics. And, also like a lot of King fans, I reached a point in my early twenties where King's work started delivering diminishing returns, and where other authors—some of them, like Shirley Jackson or Daphne du Maurier, he had originally pointed me towards—turned out to have more to offer. I am—once again—most likely not alone in being encouraged to revisit and reevaluate King by the excellent podcast Just King Things , whose hosts, Michael Lutz and Cameron Kunzelman, are reading and discussing King's works in publication order. It's been interesting to be remi...

Specifically, at least night's Hugo award ceremony held at the Seattle convention center, my book, Track Changes , did not win the Hugo for Best Related Work, but I did win—for the second time—the Hugo for Best Fan Writer. This last development was a total and delightful surprise, and as I expressed in my speech I had prepared no remarks against what seemed like an impossibly remote eventuality. As a result, I can't recreate my acceptance speech the way I did after winning Best Fan Writer in Helsinki in 2017 (though you can hear what I said in the official Hugo award ceremony stream , around the 40-minute mark). But the general gist of it was: I am grateful to the award's administrators and everyone who voted, deeply appreciative of my fellow nominees, and take this award as recognition of the importance of SFF criticism to the ongoing health and vitality of the field. I was disappointed not to win Best Related Work for a book that I am incredibly proud of, but I think its ...

Readers with an encyclopedia memory of my work may recall that I already wrote about Emily Tesh's second novel, in brief, in a Guardian reviews roundup in May. Strange Horizons were good enough to offer me space to give the novel a more extended view .  In her Hugo-winning novel Some Desperate Glory (2023), Emily Tesh tore through many of the conventions that govern modern, popular SF. Barrelling through a trilogy's worth of plot in a single novel, playing merry hell with time and space, nodding at the familiar structure of the YA novel of self-discovery and self-actualization before thoroughly upending it, the novel seemed determined to confound the reader's expectations at every turn. In one respect, however, Some Desperate Glory hewed closely to the familiar form of a YA adventure. As its heroine, Kyr, uncovered the lies she had been raised on and rebelled against them, the teachers who promulgated those lies inevitably took a background role: sometimes villainous, som...

A Meal of Thorns , from the fanzine Ancillary Review of Books , is one of the most exciting new podcasts of the last few years. A bimonthly critical book club in which host Jake Casella Brookins discusses a work of science fiction, fantasy, or something harder to define with a rotating cast of guests, it's not just an opportunity to go deep into a single work and how it reflects on the genre around it, but an impetus to discover (or rediscover) some great books. In a critical landscape that tends to focus only on the most recent (I'll hold my hand up in that respect), A Meal of Thorns is a great chance to dig into the foundations of the fantastical genres, whether famous or little-known. I was thrilled to be invited to appear on A Meal of Thorns , and after a bit of thought about what I'd like to discuss, realized that it presented a perfect opportunity to revisit a book that I've long felt deserved a second look, Iain M. Banks's Excession . Published in 1996, it r...

As June wraps up, the third of my reviews from the May issue of Locus appears on the magazine's website. This review discusses Megan Giddings's third novel, Meet Me At the Crossroads . I reviewed Giddings's previous novel, The Women Could Fly , in the Guardian a few years ago, and was very impressed by what I found. Meet Me At the Crossroads , in which mysterious doors appear at various points on the planet, and reveal a strange, simultaneously dangerous and wondrous landscape when they open, is very similar in both its vibe and its quality. Like its predecessor, it is a gentle, slyly humorous fantasy that is primarily interested in how people live in a world where the numinous is possible. [Giddings's] focus in Meet Me at the Crossroads is faith, and how people grapple with the numinous and unexplainable. And sometimes, how they do not grapple with it. Many of the people Ayanna encounters seek to explain and systematize the doors. A faith healer who claims to have ...

If the first of my reviews in the May 2025 issue of Locus was a bit of a downer, the second now comes along to offer a bit of consolation. A Letter From the Lonesome Shore by Sylvie Cathrall completes the duology begun in last year's A Letter to the Luminous Deep . Set among a society of scientists and academics who live on islands and atolls on a water planet, the two novels are both an investigation of this setting's genesis, and a charming epistolary romance. One of the chief pleasures of these books is their use of language. Among the recent trend for tales about cod-Victorian scientists in fantasyland (a group that includes Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde series and Malka Older's Mossa and Pleiti novellas), Cathrall stands apart for her ability to capture both the mannered formality of her characters' diction, and the charming earnestness that shines through it. "I brought only my scientific journal with me, and I hate to sully it with anxious ramblings o...

I had several reviews in the May issue of Locus , and the first of them is now online . Alex Foster's debut novel Circular Motion joins the increasingly crowded ranks of climate fiction, but with a twist that is both original and bracing. It posits a technology that permits near-instantaneous travel from any point on the planet to any other, and then introduces a cost: the more these transport pods are used, the faster the planet rotates. As a metaphor for climate change, this on the nose but also effective. If our society possessed a technology as revolutionary, as instantly habit-forming, as the transport pods, I think it’s hard to argue that we would not give into denial and short-term amelioration rather than give it up, even in the face of eighteen-, nine-, and seven-hour days. As the novel eventually reveals, there are entire industries designed to encourage such behavior, and even make it seem virtuous. There's been a lot of pushback in recent years at the talking point...

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...

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")...