Kingston Cycle News Today

The magazine of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field with news, reviews, and author interviews

About this Series C. L. Polk’s historical fantasy s...

The magazine of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field with news, reviews, and author interviews

The senior lecturer in architecture at Falmouth University and one-time tutor at the University of Greenwich, Carr lost his battle with liver cancer on

The magazine of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror field with news, reviews, and author interviews

Woodcut by unknown artist, 1720. Credit: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0) I like the small things in fantasy, by which I mean I like germs and figuring out if the characters know about them. People in the real world didn’t know about germs for a long time, either (though many people put forth theories about spores, contagions, and small bodies and how to prevent their spread). Our previous theories and treatments made sense given what we could observe, and many fantasies draw from the centurie...

If you want to truly embrace the terror and beauty of winter, a Russian-inflected modern folktale should do the trick. In Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale we meet Vasilisa Petrovna, who has no wish to marry. She grew up on tales of Frost Demons, rusalka, all that is wild and magical in the dark and frozen forests—including the great Bear, who is gathering his power in the darkness beyond the village. Enter the stepmother, who agrees with the village priests that following the...

Everything Miles, Tristan, Grace, and Avia have worked toward comes to a head in Soulstar, the third and final book in C. L. Polk’s thrilling Kingston Cycle trilogy. The witches are free, but the damage has been done, both to Aeland and its people. With the true evil of Queen Constantina’s asylums now revealed, Robin Thorpe steps in to help out—and to rescue her own spouse, Zelind, a nonbinary witch who has been imprisoned for the last two decades. Robin brings Zelind back to Clan Thorpe...

(Tor 978-1-250-17466-6, $25.99, 256pp, formats: hardcover, ebook, audio, Feb 16, 2021) Near-future thriller/SF novel. Scientist Evelyn Caldwell’s husband is having an affair with her own cloned replica. Clones don’t seem quite as popular these days as they were back in the 1970s and ’80s, when we were treated on a fairly regular basis to stories about celebrity clones, spare-parts clones, hazardous-duty clones, doppelganger clones, identity-crisis clones, cheap-labor clones, ominous repla...

The Crash Palace is a book by Andrew Wedderburn.(Coach House Books, Malcolm Overend) The Crash Palace is about a woman named Audrey, who used to work in the oil fields and attend parties at a remote lodge in the wilderness known as the Crash Palace. Audrey has long left that life behind her, and now has a daughter. But one night, she is compelled to return to the now-abandoned Crash Palace — where she must also reckon with her past. When you can read it: Jan. 12, 2021 Andrew Wedderburn is a ...