It’s very easy to like Ken Liu—to eagerly anticipate his e-mails, to smile knowingly while reading his fiction, to gasp in surprise, to feel your own view of the world twist and bend, loop and wrap around his in some wonderful flowering knot that both binds and opens outward.
“I tend to be an optimist when [...]

Holly Black wrote a vampire novel, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and she had a whole lot of fun doing it.
It’s hard to pinpoint what Black is best known for or what she does best. Her first novel, Tithe, is a modern fairy tale. Her Spiderwick books tell the story of three children, a magic [...]

The main character of Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders is a gasbag gremlin, a balloon goose, and an air dog. Cap’n Buckle and his crew live in a post-apocalyptic world of devastation, steam power, and snow—constant snow.
Indeed, Richard Ellis Preston’s debut novel is powered by “red hot furnaces and boilers,” sizzling and [...]

Never Knew Another, the first novel in J. M. McDermott’s Dogsland Trilogy, opens with a husband and wife placing a head on a rock face high on a hill so that the half-demon blood won’t poison the earth. The novel and its sequel, When We Were Executioners, get progressively and deliciously weirder from there.
Both novels [...]

In the opening moments of Susan Palwick’s Mending the Moon, four-year-old Melinda Soto looks up at the moon and notices the “pits and shadows” for the first time. The moon doesn’t look like she was told it should look. It is not “purely white, as spotless and serene as a newly peeled egg.”
She wants to [...]

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 [...]