Asking the Wrong Questions

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...

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...

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...