Page 28 - Ellen Weil News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

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 replacement clones, survivalist clones, posthu­man clones, tabula-rasa clones, and, inevitably, murder-mystery clones. Sarah Gailey touches upon that last in some ingenious ways in The Echo Wife, a solidly written novel that gains more of its strength from the voice and conflicted character of its narrator...

With its long and shady history, poker seems to have a natural affinity for fantasy writers, ranging from Edward Whittemore ( Jerusalem Poker) to Tim Powers ( Last Call). It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the ever-eclectic Lavie Tidhar turns his attention to it with The Big Blind, which is peppered with cardsharp lingo and informed descriptions of high-stakes games. There’s not actually a shred of SF or fantasy in the novella, so the obvious question is, why mention it at all here? Well, Tidhar has long taken a kind of perverse glee in his own unpredictability, sometimes blurring the ...

I’ve always distrusted the notion of “comfort reading,” especially as it applies to our little corner of the swamp. After all, the very idea of horror fiction involves discomfort, and SF characteristically challenges our sense of the stability of everything from nations to our bod­ies to the planet itself. I suppose fantasy does leave room for endless retellings of familiar tales with familiar heroes, but the most memorable fantasies are those which subvert and question that very familiarity, like Lavie Tidhar’s recent deconstruction of Arthuriana in By Force Alone. But there’s a...

It’s always seemed to me that John Joseph Ad­ams’s Best American Science Fiction and Fan­tasy series, now in its sixth volume, has served a somewhat different if equally important purpose than the more traditional year’s best volumes which have been a staple of SF publishing for more than 70 years. While those volumes have historically been SF’s way of presenting itself to itself (always with the hopes of drawing a broader readership among those who simply want to check in on SF from time to time), Adams’s annual volumes are part of the “Best American” series of focused anth...

Like a number of writers who have arrived with a splash in the last decade or two, Alaya Dawn Johnson seems to have written nearly as many novels as short stories. That’s not actually the case, of course – her website lists seven novels, and her first collection, Reconstruction, contains ten stories – but it’s probably fair to say that John­son’s rapidly rising reputation derives mostly from those novels, and from a few stories reprinted in “year’s best” anthologies and one quite distinc­tive Nebula winner. I have no idea if Johnson has felt more comfortable with longer for...