Science Fiction & Fantasy

It’s hard to keep up with Xia Jia: literary scholar, filmmaker, actress, painter, translator, and, oh right, speculative fiction author. She speaks fast, as if she has to cram an unusual number of syllables into each unit of time to keep up with the speed of her thoughts. In the middle of one of our [...]

I first learned of Kameron Hurley’s work when Jeff VanderMeer wrote about God’s War as one of his top books from 2011 in a piece for Locus. He referred to the novel’s “fascinating insect-based tech” and “unique cultural underpinnings,” which pretty much sold me right there. He also noted that Hurley’s prose was “muscular,” which [...]

Jo Walton has published ten novels, three poetry collections and an essay collection, with another two novels due out in 2015. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, the World Fantasy Award in 2004 for Tooth and Claw, and the Hugo and Nebula awards in 2012 for Among Others. [...]

Robert Reed was born at the height of the Eisenhower administration, in Omaha, Nebraska. Growing up a few miles from the Strategic Air Command, he realized early and often that the world balances on a razor. His fiction mirrors that sense of bleak amazement. Hundreds of stories and more than a dozen novels have led [...]

Ann Leckie is the author of Ancillary Justice (2013) and Ancillary Sword (forthcoming, October 2014). She has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis Missouri.
I was fortunate enough to interview Ann in London, just two days before she won the 2014 [...]

Deep sea, deep space, and deep dark corners of the human mind—these are some of the domains in which Peter Watts truly excels. His Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight opens with the main character trapped in a shuttle, reminiscing, escaping . . . from what? As we dive into the story, we encounter one question after another, all of them [...]

Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, comprised of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance was optioned by Paramount Pictures and foreign language rights have sold in sixteen countries. The series has been featured on the front page of the New York Times as an example of an accelerated publishing schedule, also known as “binge reading” and spotlighted by [...]

Chuck Wendig is the author of the published novels Blackbirds, Mockingbird, The Cormorant, Under the Empyrean Sky, Blue Blazes, Double Dead, Bait Dog, Dinocalypse Now, Beyond Dinocalypse and Gods & Monsters: Unclean Spirits.
He is co-writer of the short film Pandemic, the feature film HiM, and the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus. Wendig has contributed over two million words to [...]

Cyador’s Heirs, a novel of five hundred and twelve pages, begins with a boy and a girl sitting in awkward silence. Two guards watch them and two more guards watch those guards. The detail is fine and the prose discreet:
The boy and the girl sit on a carved wooden bench in the shade beside the [...]

Orphans by Ben Tanzer opens with Norrin Radd staring in a mirror. Tanzer isn’t soft-peddling a fiction workshop cliche, here. Pock-marked and shadow-boxing, Radd is pure Willie Loman from Death of a Salesman-meets-Rick Deckard of Bladerunner.
“Always be closing!”
Radd’s working himself up. Or he’s trying to, at least.
“Always be closing!”
He needs work. He needs this [...]