N.K. Jemisin is an award-winning (including the Hugo an unprecedented three times in a row) author of speculative fiction short stories and novels who lives and writes in New York. Besides writing, she also is a counseling psychologist and educator, and a political/feminist/anti-racist blogger. She used to write a science fiction column for the New York Times Book Review, and still writes occasional long-form reviews for the NYT.
The City Born Great is a story of her hometown, New York, telling how it develops to the point where it is being 'born' after growing for a long time, and the challenges that exist for cities what reach this stage of maturity. Neither the idea of cities as entities, living things, separate beings nor the notion of beings, things, groups going through transcending stages and steps are new in themselves. Uncharitably I could describe the short story at hand as Childhood's End for Cities; more charitably I would describe it as fascinating, breathless, headlong, and absorbing in its detail and drive towards (re)birth, and reminiscent of the magic Charlie Human can evoke when he's not too focused on action. And if I feel that some parts of the climactic scene do not live up the the initial setting and build-up then that's my opinion, and yours might well differ. Have a look yourself, it's worth doing so!
The story is hosted on Tor.com, and so is the picture by Richie Pope that goes with it.
I find long series difficult. Not just from the point of reading them – the author changes over time, his/her approach to writing will vary, and what you used to love in the earlier books might be entirely absent in later ones, of course. But also from the point of reviewing them – I mean, The Delirium Brief is book 8 (plus some short stories etc) in Charles Stross' highly entertaining Laundry Files series. This is not a point to jump onto the series (there was one a few books back. But I'd suggest you start at the beginning). This is not where you would start reading his oevre, not at all. And I will, by default, throw out spoilers for the earlier books simply by talking about this one here. So, here I am, preaching to the choir of those who are reading the series, and want to know about the latest instalment. Which is rather different from the early books!
The Delirium Brief picks up directly where The Nightmare Stacks left off. After the clusterfuck (technical term, of course) in Leeds with the invading alien host of Elves the Laundry has to break cover, and become publicly answerable. Our protagonist Bob Howard (yes, we're back with Bob. I missed him!), as one of the senior managers who were not directly or indirectly implicated by said mess, becomes the public face of the agency, with an appearance to be grilled on the Jeremy Paxman show as the booby price. And yes, this is as much fun as you'd expect. But he finds that Paxman is heavily warded, and that someone is briefing against the Laundry at top level it appears. Raymond Schiller, the mega-church leader with trans-dimensional loyalties and brain parasites is also back from his (assumed) death when the portal closed behind him. And he's in the UK, and set up to meet with the Prime Minister!
Lavie Tidhar follows up his 2016 Mosaic Novel/Short Story collection Central Station (John W Campbell winner, Clarke shortlist, and book of the year for me) with Unholy Land, an alternative history concerning a Jewish Homeland in Africa which turns out to be much more more.
It's not as light, not as dancingly sparkling with ideas and concepts as a lot of the former is, but at the same time it's maybe heavier, worthier, loaded with thought-provoking takes on identity, the fluidity of reality, and weighty moral questions which are exhibited rather than discussed or preached.
It starts simple enough, though – we follow one Lior Tirosh (a thinly disguised alter ego, it appears), a moderately successful writer of 'inconsequential fantasies' in some personal crisis, as he is headed to Ararat City, Palestina. Which is set in Africa, in the Great Rift Valley. And so we know we are in an alternative history – or, to be more precise, in a world where the Wilbush expedition to British East Africa returned a different report, had a different outcome, and a Jewish state, a Nachtasyl, was created instead of the country we are familiar with. At first this is, like all such conceits, mightily disorienting. We see Palestinians, who speak Judean, and a culture which inevitably has taken on parts of the area it has settled in and the people it displaced, whilst retaining a lot of the tensions and drivers that brought it here. But back to Tirosh – he is here to visit his ailing father, a general and famous figure, we learn later on. But instead he gets, more or less from the go, caught up in strange happenings involving Border/Secret police, multiple agencies following him, murder (it's actually an attempt on his life which catches an acquaintance), a disappeared niece who campaigned for the rights of the native population, a builder who builds the wall designed to keep the terrorists and suicide bombers out... it's a fascinating and dizzying world, and you get absolutely no time to get used to it before the action kicks off.
“Then he asked you if you thought the world was real”
World, rejoice, for what we believed impossible is coming true! S. P. Somtow, aka Somtow Sucharitkul, who faded from SF and focused on creating and conducting music, his other major muse (and his music is very much worth checking out!) is writing again - and writing more material in the Inquestor universe!
After 33 years, S.P. Somtow is finally creating a fifth book in the Inquestor universe, the galaxy-spanning science fantasy series that Theodore Sturgeon called "the greatest magnitude of spectacle and color since Olaf Stapledon." The book is being released in a series of installments in pulp-sized magazine format.
Besides the new book installments we also get the original short stories which turned into the original 4 books, we get notes on the language and other background material, we get introductions to the stories from other greats of the genre, and we get assorted commentary from the peanut gallery, as it should be. The first two installments are now available on Amazon, and more is to come.
Supporters of the author on Patreon get to read the new stories (and much else) early and for free, but that means you miss all the other fun! So I'd suggest you do both - support the creation of more of this on Patreon, but also buy the individual books. Because it's worth your time and money!
As a researcher into 'the connections between the weird and ecological fiction' (her words) or 'climate-change fiction, in particular its Gothic and weird aspects' (Anglia Ruskin University, where she is a PhD student) Marian Womack is evidently working to her core interests, and to her strengths with this book. She is a Clarion alumni, writing in both Spanish and English, and is involved in the translation of speculative fiction as well as in publishing it as co-editor of Ediciones Nevsky/Nevsky Books.
Lost Objects, her first collection of short stories, was published by Luna Press; a number of her stories have also been published in magazines and other collections, including in 'The Year's Best Weird Fiction'. Besides the expected dystopian and degenerative ecological angle you would expect given her interests and background these stories also at times present interesting windows into promising futures, unusual takes on SF tropes, and evoke both the inevitable New Weird touchpoints like LaLumiere or Tidbeck (whom she translated) but also literary classics like Borchert in her portrayal of slightly hallucinatory states of the mind.
Below I run through the stories in the collection, 4 of which were previously published in magazines and books – if you would rather approach this without all the spoilers this entails then stop here, with my recommendation that I think this collection is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in unusual/weird fiction; even if I found not all stories equally/entirely engaging.
What do you do when a book you've been asking, wishing, begging for finally arrives, several years later than you'd have liked it to? When several Christmases plus your Birthday have come in one go? You complain about it, of course. So, to be clear, this is no way long enough. We want more, and we want it now! Although one notices that the credits contain a Series Editor (Jacob Weisman). There is hope yet...
Peter Watts is an award-winning Canadian hard SF author, a lapsed marine biologist, a survivor of necrotising fasciitis, and a convicted felon (just ask the TSA) who will not enter the US again. I guess there are worse fates... He now has 8 published Novels (one of them published in two volumes for ‘commercial considerations’) and 2 collections of short stories under his belt; he has been labelled a “sociological futurist Lovecraft” in a discussion on Charlie Stross’ blog - a quip which predates the story at hand, but is nevertheless fully appropriate, too.
The Freeze-Frame Revolution is set in his Sunflowers universe, ie the same universe in which the Hugo-Award-winning Novelette The Island (as well as a raft of other stories and snippets published over the last few years) is set in, and follows the same wormhole-building ship/asteroid and its dysfunctional crew and AI.
