Speculative Fiction from Around the World
Illegal Mingling: Karin Tidbeck’s Jagannath: Stories Reviewed by Sofia Samatar In a long twilight, the sound of tiny bells hangs in the air: a young woman’s mother is coming for her from the forest. Elsewhere, by the side of a lake, a family reunion is in progress, merry aunts and cousins hatching from cocoons. And... Continue Reading →
Turbulence by Samit Basu Reviewed by Anil Menon The opening scene in Turbulence captures perfectly what reading Samit Basu’s work is like. Determined to give his son Vir Singh his first taste of flight, fighter-pilot Balwant Singh dangles and swings his three-year old from the uppermost tier of the Eiffel Tower. To read Basu is... Continue Reading →
This week Charles Tan reviews Three Messages and A Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic, edited by Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris N. Brown and published by Small Beer Press. We'll have more material on the book this week, so stay tuned! Three Messages and A Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic edited... Continue Reading →
The Mall By S.L. Grey Reviewed by Harry Markov The Mall by S.L. Grey is horror on steroids with a PhD in psychology. It’s the smart answer to the SAW series as far as torture challenges are concerned and I estimate that even Hannibal Lector would worry entering this alternate reality. Writers Sarah Lotz and... Continue Reading →
The Lord of the Sands of Time Ogawa Issui Reviewed by Brittain Barber I am going to go ahead and assume that no readers out there are currently wondering what would happen if aliens invaded ancient Japan, or how time traveling cyborgs would fight them off. Even if the cyborgs had been skipping through time... Continue Reading →
Strange Horizons review French author Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud's collection, A Life on Paper, published by Small Beer Press: I first came across Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud in the pages of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet #25. The story, "A City of Museums," concerns a group of "rats": homeless youths living secretly in public museums. From the first sentence, I felt I'd stepped... Continue Reading →
WANDERING STARS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF JEWISH FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. Edited by Jack Dann. Introduction by Isaac Asimov. Jewish Lights publishing, Woodstock, Vermont, 1998. MORE WANDERING STARS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF OUTSTANDING STORIES OF JEWISH FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION. Edited by Jack Dann. Introduction by Isaac Asimov. Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, Vermont, 1999. Reviewed by Carl... Continue Reading →
Aliette de Bodard reviews J. Damask (Joyce Chng)'s first novel, Wolf at the Door - the world's first Singaporean werewolf novel! So, I finally got a chance to read J. Damask’s Wolf at the Door (published by Lyrical Press)–and really, really liked it. It’s a urban fantasy set in Singapore: Jan Xu is part of the lang, the... Continue Reading →
Over at the SF Portal, René Walling reviews Solaris #175, "one of the oldest ongoing genre magazines", and the premier French-Canadian SF magazine: Like most issues of Solaris, this one offers many mixes: fantasy and SF, literary explorations and pulpy adventure, Canadian, French and American writers, yet somehow the editorial team manages to bring it all together... Continue Reading →
Responding in part to Jetse de Vries "Should SF Die?" essay, Val's Random Comments Blog responds, including a long review of The Apex Book of World SF - calling Nir Yaniv's Cinderers "the collection's most disturbing story by far" and Kristin Mandigma's Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang "absolutely hilarious". One argument in... Continue Reading →
The World SF Blog 