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“History is a fairy tale”, a subtitle in Veronica Schanoes’s story “Emma Goldman Takes Tea with the Baba Yaga”, could almost serve as an epigram for the whole of her first collection, Burning Girls and Other Stories. Schanoes, who is a scholar of fairy tales, feminism, and Jewish literature and history, brings all of her considerable resources to bear in these 14 sto­ries, which include most of the short fiction she published since 2003. And while there is an oc­casional tendency to embed snippets of historical lectures as a kind of ballast for her more visceral nightmares – �...

The selections in The Neil Gaiman Reader were chosen neither by an outside editor nor by Gaiman himself, as he did with his earlier collections. Instead, apparently, the book was edited by the internet. In 2019, Gaiman invited his readers to name their three favorite Gaiman sto­ries, and the result – from nearly 6,000 responses, we are told – was this selection of 52 short pieces, ranging from short sketches to major novellas, supplemented by five excerpts from novels. It prob­ably says something about Gaiman’s popularity that so many readers would be familiar with his short fiction...

The Big Score sounds like a title from the golden age of sleazy paperbacks, or maybe a high-octane, low-budget action flick. In fact, it was both, and I suspect K.J. Parker either knew this or didn’t care in choosing it for the latest novella set in his hilari­ously corrupt version of Renaissance Europe, which has shown a remarkable consistency over the years, with its endless cast of scurrilous alchemists, rogues, scoundrels, liars, cowards, and double-crossers. We’ve grown familiar with the Studium, a univer­sity packed with self-important professors, with the religion of the Invincib...

Privacy is a luxury in Cory Doctorow’s Attack Surface , a political technothriller that follows the questionable choices of former spy, gov­ernment operative, and traitor, Masha Maximow, as she builds cyberweapons for authoritarian govern­ments, greedy cyber firms, and progressive activists alike. Taking place a few years after the events of Little Brother and Homeland , this standalone novel yanks readers through Masha’s turbulent life in a series of alternating flashbacks and present-day dilemmas. Masha serves as a slightly unreliable nar­rator. Her snarky and (sometimes) cringey ...

The Wall: Being the First Book of the Chron­icles of Sumer, Gautam Bhatia (HarperCollins India 978-93-5357-835-0, INR399, 386pp, tp) August 2020. The tale of a society long trapped in enforced stasis but finally destabilized by curious and rebellious youth is one of SF’s core narratives; think of Clarke’s The City and the Stars, Heinlein’s “Uni­verse”, or even Collins’s The Hunger Games. The Wall, Gautam Bhatia’s first venture into fiction (he’s apparently a respected constitutional lawyer in India, as well as a contributor to Strange Horizons), at first seems intent on ...