Yoon Ha Lee’s collection Conservation of Shadows contains sixteen stories, but seems far faster in the reading. Lee’s many worlds seem to multiply exponentially with each paragraph, and each turned page.
There are soldiers and scientists, space travel and dragons, leather-bound books, locked doors, and genocidal rampages. Each tale strains at the edges of possibility. No [...]

In Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole, Oscar Britton is an officer attached to the Supernatural Operations Corps. He might doubt the system now and then, but he puts his life and the life of his men on the line to uphold it.
And then he begins to manifest magical abilities. According to the post-Great [...]

There’s much to enjoy (and admire) about M. C. Planck’s debut novel, The Kassa Gambit. There’s the gritty, well-textured world-building; the lead characters Lt. Kyle Daspar, a “Bruce Willis-like” spy, and Prudence Falling, a “kick-ass . . . but not brash” heroine who holds together a motley crew of space adventurers.
The prose stays punchy and tough throughout, but [...]

A man emerges from the sea with news of death. “Our home is no more,” he says.
It’s that simple, at first. Complete catastrophe; total loss. But it’s not the end for the characters in Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds. It’s merely the beginning, as the men of a once powerful culture, decimated [...]

Two men row a boat above the trees. Below them, eels swim through the branches and bream swirl in birds’ nests. Soon, the two men float over a silt and moss covered town; they hear “unquiet spirits” and remembered laughter. The opening pages of Jesse Bullington’s new novel, The Folly of the World, flow with [...]

In Slow Apocalypse by John Varley, sitcom writer Dave Marshall’s life is disintegrating. His career has fallen apart. His finances are a mess. His wife isn’t really speaking to him. It’s all happening in a sort of painful slow motion.
Then Marshall stumbles upon a story that just may be his lucky break—a bacteria that eats [...]

As a distorted, exaggerated, skewed, and otherwise mutated vision of the reality that surrounds us, satire shares a lot with speculative fiction. It’s to isolate humor as the element that separates the two genres, but it’s not that easy. As far back as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (whose macabre premise could be the stuff [...]

Intense, immersive, and startling, China Miéville’s novels have done more than won many major awards—they’ve helped change the face of speculative fiction. The English-born fantasist attended Cambridge University, earned a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and has taught at Harvard University. He’s the author of the Bas-Lag series, which comprises Perdido Street Station, [...]

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress opens with a deformed teenage boy kidnapping a baby from a hysterical mother. The boy, Pete, has come from the future, using alien technology, to save the baby from the ecological disaster that will soon befall the world she lives in.
Pete is also [...]

I sat at a table full of professors and tried to explain the idea of world-building.
This was five years ago. Jeff VanderMeer and I (along with about a dozen others) were scrambling to put the final touches on Shared Worlds, a writing and world-building camp for teenagers at South Carolina’s Wofford College.
There was a math [...]