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

Although it only marginally features any fantastic elements (mainly a rather ingratiating spirit), E. Lily Yu’s luminous first novel On Fragile Waves has a lot to say about both the power of story and the limits of what stories can do. We first meet Firuzeh, the central point-of-view character, as a ten-year-old trying to escape with her family from a war-ravaged Afghani­stan in which her earliest memories – rendered in a kind of impressionistic child-cenetered prose-poetry that oddly reminded me of the opening of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – are punctuated by ...

It goes without saying that I’m not exactly the tar­get audience for Charlie Jane Anders’s new YA trilogy, which begins with Victories Greater Than Death. But, as I’ve argued before, there’s a huge overlap between YA and SF readers. A good deal of classic SF works perfectly well as YA, and some tropes are essentially the same in both genres: geek valorization, children with secret powers, nonconformist outsiders and conformist bullies, clueless teachers and dim authority figures. All a successful YA novel really needs to do, then, is turn its adult readers willingly into YA readers,...

Aliette de Bodard seems fascinated by relationships with huge power differentials – angels and mortals, giant mindships and modest students, dragons and young teachers, etc. Thanh, the protagonist of Fireheart Tiger, is a princess of Bình Hải, a small Vietnam-like country seeking to gain protection from the more powerful neighbor Ephteria, and Thanh is assigned by her rather too-critical mother to lead the diplomatic negotiations. Those negotiations quickly grow more complicated and personal when Thanh discovers that the delegation from Ephteria includes the princess Eldris, Thanh’s f...

It’s not too uncommon for an SF story to split itself between different time frames separated by centuries, with the causal links between frames only gradually made apparent – M. John Harrison’s Light is a well-known example – but the odd structure of Adam Rob­erts’s Purgatory Mount still seems pretty bold, as does the novel’s shifting tone from Clarkean far-future SF to gritty dystopian naturalism to earnest moral debates about responsibility and atonement. We begin in that far-future on the kilometer-long starship The Forward, whose five crew members, all named after Greek g...