Every once in awhile, it’s good for a fool like me, entering mid-career, to check the pulse of what’s going on among the emerging writers who will one day call you a curmudgeon. Keeping tabs on this unruly, diverse lot not only lets you see the end of the road coming from [...]

Despite having already published several novels, Australian writer Margo Lanagan first came into focus in most readers’ minds with the publication of World Fantasy Award-winning collection Black Juice (2004) and its signature story, “Singing My Sister Down.” Since then, she has published another collection, Red Spikes, [...]

"John Grant" is the pen name Paul Barnett uses for his non-editorial work, including the book Corrupted Science, a compendium through the ages of situations in which facts have been trumped by ideology, pride, selfishness, and avarice.
Corrupted Science made a USA Today best-of list last year and has recently been prominently [...]

Every few years a writer appears who re-invigorates or re-establishes the tradition of weird fiction in a way appropriate for the times but with an eye toward the past as well. Laird Barron, with his first collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, has put his own imprint on horror fiction. His enjoyably dense style [...]

John Picacio is one of the respected artists in the field, having won the World Fantasy Award and the Chesley, among others, along with being a four-time Hugo nominee. Picacio is also one of the nicest people in the field, so perhaps it’s no surprise that one of his most recent [...]

K.J. Bishop’s first novel, The Etched City, was published by indie press Prime Books and then picked up by Bantam as well as Pan Macmillan, in addition to foreign language editions. It garnered excellent critical attention and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, in addition to winning the Crawford [...]

Kage Baker is one of my favorite writers—wise, clever, funny, shrewd, deep, and sometimes horrifying, her stories and novels display a range and sensibility uniquely her own. She has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Award, in addition to having won the Sturgeon Award. Her novels have been translated [...]

Steven Erikson has built up a loyal and devoted following for his Malazan novels, which first began appearing from Bantam UK in the 1990s, when he made news by selling a series of ten novels in an extraordinary high-six-figure deal. Erikson is known for writing gritty, realistic fantasy fiction that subverts [...]

I have heard, more times than I care to admit, what I call the language of defeat. I’ve heard it on panels and on blogs, at genre conventions, at books festivals, and at academic conferences over the past decade.
This language of defeat has to do with accepting a paradigm of the [...]

Steph Swainston, from the publication of Year of Our War (Crawford Award winner), the first of her Fourlands novels, has been highly touted as a writer of unique and challenging fiction that just happens to be set in a secondary world—although Swainston, as is evident below, sees her creation more as [...]