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2 months ago | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |Paul Kincaid
Chanlee Luu’s The Machine Autocorrects Code to I is an ambitious new entry into a larger field of feminist Asian American speculative poetics. This includes Margaret Rhee’s Love Robot (2017)—which placed third in the 2018 Elgin Award for Best Full-Length Book—Franny Choi’s Death by Sex Machine (2017) and Soft Science (2019), and Lo Kwa Mei-en’s (also publishing fiction as Lois Mei-en Kwa) The Bees Make Money in the Lion (2016).
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |LeeAnn Perry |Jennifer Mace |Marisca Pichette
Maressa Voss’s first novel, When Shadows Grow Tall, charts the intellectual sea changes of the Renaissance and Enlightenment and the origins of the security state. It ties together the questions of what might be asked of knowledge and what people are willing to endure for the impression of safety. These questions also feel salient and valuable in the modern world, and the novel asks them with deftness and style—even if it does not manage to follow through to possible answers.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |Steven Archer |Leyla Guirand |Mary Lee
“What is a witch?” asks prolific and award-winning editor Jonathan Strahan in the introduction to The Book of Witches. Ultimately, he declares “a witch could be anyone” (p. xix) and thus be written by anyone, closing the introduction with his interest in representing a wide variety of different voices in the collection. The star-studded contributors list includes writers from several countries and a wide variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Toby MacNutt |Audrey Zhou |Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi |Tristan Beiter
It is yours, after allin so far as any creatureowns another.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Audrey Zhou |Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi |Toby MacNutt |Tristan Beiter
When Li built her first body, she didn’t know for a while what, exactly, she had done. She was too young to understand at the time. The corpse she found at the end of market day, curled at the foot of a fisherman’s stall; she didn’t notice the spirit until it had followed her inside. Li hadn’t met Granny Yuan yet, but perhaps some of her influence had found Li anyway: Li knew to bury the cat and wanted instinctively to find a jar to capture the spirit with, its light blinking like fireflies.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi |Toby MacNutt |Audrey Zhou
Tea Leaves by Jacob Budenz is a delightful take on queer speculative fiction. The collection includes sixteen short stories that cover a wide range of contemporary matters through a set of fantastical possibilities. The stories are largely set in a world just a hair off from our own, bridging urban fantasy and fabulism and with only a single story (“Ah Well”) that can be easily classed as secondary world.
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Mar 11, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Adamu Yahuza Abdullahi |Audrey Zhou |Toby MacNutt |Tristan Beiter
Nigeria has launched one of the world’s most advanced earth observation satellites. —British Surrey Space Technology Limited. Initiation:scientist: catastrophic failure: NigeriaSat-1crashes & dissolves like molten magma intothe earth’s lungs. we need sonic waves to slow the movement causing cooling. cyborg: activate kill codes usingcoordinates of the nearest location—Zamfara. N12°11’ & E6°44’. strip it of its breath. insert distemper cords into its memory. erase all memories of existence.
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Feb 2, 2024 | 
strangehorizons.com | Tristan Beiter |Aishwarya Subramanian |Dan Hartland |William Shaw
Violently Dancing Portraits by Arvo Villars, recently published by selva oscura press, is a gorgeously intertextual, experimental Caribbean-American lyric fantasia in two parts. Each section, titled only by number, is carefully constructed to fit together as closely as implied by the table of contents—which is carefully formatted as a dense block of text, marking the separation of the two parts only by putting the numbers “one” and “two” in bold.
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Jan 31, 2024 | 
chicagoreview.org | Tristan Beiter
Ada Smailbegović’s The Cloud Notebook constructs its own world through shifting and relational juxtapositions. The book is built in two parts: the titular notebook, presented as an included secondary volume, and the surrounding text, a series of prose fragments shot through with the narration of the notebook’s writing.
