Publishers Weekly - File 770 file770.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from file770.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Jonathan Strahan (by Francesca Myman)
I started the year with good intentions. I intended to read every piece of short fiction that I could lay my hands on, every major novel, every exciting debut or anthology or short story collection and more. I would read
all the things. This is the story of how I did not read all the things. I did not even read most of the things.
Way back in January, everything seemed simple. I hadn’t heard of a growing problem in China; I’d just delivered my
Year’s Best SF anthology to the publisher and finished my part in
Architects of Memory, Karen Osborne (Tor 978-1-250-21547-5, $17.99, 352pp, tp) September 2020. Cover by Mike Heath.
Of late, my desire and ability to read fiction has been at a low ebb. In every professional reviewer’s career, there comes a point – or perhaps more than one – where much that is purported to be fresh and new seems to be tired, quotidian, even overdone; or worse, can’t hold a candle to something you saw several years ago, and suffers greatly by comparison.
Architects of Memory, Karen Osborne’s debut novel, is the first piece of SFF I’ve enjoyed reading for over a month. I read it in one sitting, in two hours of an afternoon, and it compelled my attention until I was done.