Science Fiction & Fantasy

I met Fran Wilde years ago through a mutual friend and fantasy author. In the time that I’ve known her, she’s published brilliant short fiction and incisive articles on the art of fiction. Her debut novel Updraft, was released from Tor Books this past September.
Updraft is the story of Kirit Densira and her attempt to [...]

Sometimes a short story can contain an entire solar system. Catherine M. Valente’s “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” is one such story. Published in the August 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, it served as the spark for her latest novel.
Radiance, out from Tor Books on October 20th, is a wildly ambitious novel that not only [...]

The first story I ever read by Seth Dickinson was published right here in Clarkesworld. With “Morrigan in the Sunglare,” I was introduced to an author concerned with complexities and subtleties, power, and hate. His stories dive deep under the emotional and societal surface to explore the more challenging parts of being human.
The Traitor Baru [...]

Contemporary video games with science fiction and fantasy settings, such as last year’s Destiny, are often conceived on grand production scales and have movie-sized budgets. They attract prime Hollywood voice talent, are accompanied by full original orchestral scores, and so on. We thought it would be fun to catch up with some of the writers [...]

When I arrived in China I spent a lot of time trying to find local examples of my two passions: comics and science fiction. Although everyone I met seemed far too busy learning English, preparing for their college entrance exams, hanging out in internet cafes, or (the most popular option in Harbin, where a typical [...]

The first Kim Stanley Robinson novel I read was Icehenge (1984), back in the pre-Google days of 1997, when I had yet to graduate high school. The novel consists of three distinct first-person narrations, each structured as a diary or memoir, which must have seemed to my then self a far cry from the more [...]

I discovered Robert Charles Wilson’s work in February of 2009, with the slender and elegant novel Bios. Though I was in the middle of reading three or four other books at the time, once I started it I couldn’t stop. Compelling characters, interesting politics, an unnerving but wholly plausible science fictional set-up, and nothing extraneous—I [...]

I first discovered Cat Rambo’s work with the tightly coiled “Worm Within,” which got under my skin in a serious way. Ever since then I’ve kept an eye out for her remarkable stories, and I’m sure that over the years—my reality-bound ophthalmologist to the contrary—this has enhanced if not my vision then at the very [...]

Though I spent my first decade or so in Madrid, where I was born, I didn’t discover science fiction until I was a teen, by which time I was living in Germany, where the available supply was all in German or English. As a result, it wasn’t until I returned to Spain in my twenties [...]

There aren’t that many similarities between Randy Henderson’s Finn Fancy Necromancy and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Signal to Noise. But the elements they share are intriguing. Both are debut novels; both were published on February 10th (by Tor and Solaris, respectively); and both are urban fantasies in which music mingles with magic. In Finn Fancy Necromancy, a [...]