Reviews

• Reviews

BY Jonathan Crowe

The publication last year of Suzanne Church’s Elements, her first collection of short stories, brought a measure of attention to a writer whose work had appeared mainly in Canadian small-press and semi-professional anthologies and magazines. Church, a Kitchener-based writer who attended the Clarion South workshop in 2005, is perhaps best known for “The Needle’s Eye,” a story from the Chilling Tales anthology that won the Aurora for Best Short Story in 2012, and “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop,” which appeared in Clarkesworld.

• Reviews

BY J.J.S. Boyce

• Reviews

BY Jonathan Crowe

One of the best ways to understand where a writer is coming from is to read all their stories in one go: You can see more clearly what it is they’re up to — their obsessions, their shibboleths, their literary tricks. This can be a challenge when the writer has a considerable body of work behind them. But even young-ish and emerging writers have patterns to their work that can be subject to examination.

• Reviews

BY J.J.S. Boyce

Brent Hayward’s Head Full of Mountains is hardly a beach book. As demanding as it is sometimes meandering, the tightly limited third-person perspective and the author’s utter banishment of exposition force the reader to connect the dots slowly and painstakingly.

• Reviews

BY Jonathan Crowe

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being has managed the rare feat of winning acclaim on both sides of the genre divide: It not only won the Kitchies’ Red Tentacle Prize, a genre award, it was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. (Something similar happened this year with Karen Joy Fowler’s We Were All Completely Beside Ourselves, which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Nebula.) It’s what genre readers would call (and possibly dismiss as) a mainstream novel, but it’s unquestionably a work of what John Clute calls fantastika: It incorporates both fantasy and science fictional elements — on one level you could say that this a novel in which Zen Buddhism meets quantum mechanics — but those elements are put to use in decidedly non-genre ways.

• Reviews

BY J.J.S. Boyce

• Editorial
• Reviews

BY The Editors

With each story individually introduced by Ellison and then played off with an afterword by their authors, the Dangerous Visions books stand as an incomparable monument in the history of science fiction. I am not the only one to lament the fact that the planned third volume The Last Dangerous Visions never saw the light of day.

• Reviews

BY D.F. McCourt

... she noticed me reading the Constance Garnett translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. She admonished me. There were so many good novels written in English, she said, that it was a shame to waste my time reading books in translation. But even she made an allowance for Stanislaw Lem.

• Reviews

BY D.F. McCourt

For the last fifteen years, Munroe has self-published, and helped and encouraged others to do the same. A veteran of the zine years, Munroe has latched on to the DIY ethic and embraced the fringe culture of indie publishing, proving, to everyone’s surprise but his, that from that freedom and chaos can come some of the most beautiful, polished, and moving works of art.

• Reviews

BY Editors

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the kind of first novel any aspiring writer would be proud of. Doctorow’s first sentence exudes confidence; he draws the reader into his vision of the future by running down a rapid-fire checklist of its attributes like so many bullet points. He wastes no time in revealing the broad arc of the story he’s about to tell, and throughout the book he manages a delicate balance of teasing new ideas with one hand and fleshing them out with the other.