Time to pick from the long list of nominees for the Locus ballot 2023, covering work published in 2022. It’s a big list, since it represents the consensus judgment of a large group of reviewers at Locus magazine, and I can’t pretend to have read it all. I think part of the purpose of such […]
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh set herself a difficult task in Some Desperate Glory. Present the reader with a young protagonist raised in a militaristic society who is all about duty, war-breeding, xenophobia, homophobia and worse, then draw her through enough world-shattering experiences to make her interesting, flaws and all, from start to finish. And Tesh hits the […]
Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott – Book 2 of The Sun Chronicles
Kate Elliott’s Furious Heaven is a big, richly detailed reworking in space of the career of Alexander the Great, though you don’t need to know that background to enjoy this epic space adventure. At more than 700 pages, it’s long but never tedious, and each chapter repays close reading. In this volume Sun Shan, daughter […]
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, author of the remarkable The Centenal Cycle, is a many-layered book that becomes more and more interesting upon closer examination. On the surface, it is a very good mystery about the search for a missing man. It is also a fine relationship story about the investigator, Mossa, […]
The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill
Kelly Barnhill’s The Crane Husband is, in many ways a companion piece to her longer work, When Women Were Dragons. In both, the desire of a woman to break free of the normal bounds of life takes literal form, but at great cost to others. In one case, they become dragons – at times on […]
Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee
Fonda Lee has turned in a bravura performance in the new novella, Untethered Sky. Set in a vividly imagined desert kingdom of Dartha, a young woman named Ester narrates the story of how she came to devote her life to raising and flying giant hunter birds called rocs. From an early age, when her brother […]
