Asking the Wrong Questions

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...

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...

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...

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...

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")...

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...

Around the mid-point of Flow , the independent, micro-budget Latvian movie that won the Oscar for best animated film earlier this week, there is an image that continues to haunt me. Floating through a flooded, woodland landscape, a ragged sailing boat carrying a small black cat and a capybara fetches up against a manmade tower. The tower is in ruins—one wall open to the elements, upper floors missing, a flight of stairs leading up to nowhere. But it is also a rare instance of intentional order rearing its head in this film, only to slip below the water's surface. All over the tower's floor, and up those pointless stairs, colorful glass bottles and jars have been carefully arranged. A lone lemur is walking around the arrangement, selecting some of the items to go in a woven basket. Did the lemur arrange the bottles? Did some missing human place them, and then disappear? Where did all this glassware even come from, and what is it for? Like so much else in Flow , these are questio...

Gautam Bhatia might best be known to science fiction and fantasy fans as the editor in chief of Strange Horizons , and as the author of the intriguing, Ursula K. Le Guin-meets-China Miéville novels The Wall and The Horizon . In his everyday life, however, Bhatia is a lawyer and a scholar of the Indian constitution. These specialties come to the fore in his third novel, The Sentence , which takes the surprisingly rare step of examining how laws, constitutions, and trials play a role in fantastic worldbuilding. Set in a city that emerged from a bloody civil war with a tentative, shaky arrangement held in place by an order of lawyers, The Sentence examines how a single legal action might end up impacting on a whole society. My review, which appeared in last month's Locus, is now online . Nila – and her trusty roommate and sidekick Maru – discuss both the facts of the case and the merits of their legal strategy. Should she try to impugn long-accepted testimony, or take a purely proce...

The nominating period for the 2025 Hugo awards, which will be handed out this summer in Seattle, is now open, and will continue until March 14th. Members of the 2024 Worldcon in Glasgow, Scotland, and those who became members of the Seattle Worldcon before January 31st, 2025, are eligible to nominate. There are instructions for how to log into the nomination website, and how to contact assistance if you're not sure about your eligibility, at the Seattle Worldcon site. Before I get into the works I'm planning to nominate this year, I'd like to mention that my book, Track Changes: Selected Reviews , is eligible in the Best Related Work category. I'm very proud of the work I and Briardene Books publisher Niall Harrison did on this book, and its reviews and public reception have been gratifying—earlier this month it appeared on the Locus Recommended Reading List and the longlist for the BSFA award for non-fiction. If you're nominating in this category, I hope you...

Usually when I put together a recent reading roundup, I try to come up with some sort of common thread or guiding principle for the books discussed. This time around, we've just got a grab-bag of some of the best reads from the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025. Two of these books are short, weird exercises in pushing at the very edges of what fantastic fiction can do. Another is doing the same thing to literary fiction. One is core science fiction, and another plays fascinating games with what core fantasy can be. And the last one is a prototypical plotless, closely-observed literary novel, and a reminder of how great that can sometimes be. In other words, whatever you're in the mood to read next, you might find something to suit your tastes in this post. The Repeat Room by Jesse Ball - The first half of Ball's short, disquieting novel plays out like a familiar near-future dystopia, with shades of 1984 , The Trial , and Squid Game . A large group of people have been s...