PodCastle 1/27/26, 2/10/26
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/5/26
One of the January stories at PodCastle is Last Word by Toshiya Kamei, part of a flash fiction extravaganza on the theme things left unsaid. It’s the story of Lira and Maeve, two friends who are now the only remaining speakers of Kaelan, a language of sea spray and mountain shadow. It’s a language that captures things that cannot be said in …Read More
Your Behavior Will Be Monitored, Justin Feinstein (Tachyon 978-1616964542, trade paperback, 256pp, $17.95) April 2026.
Justin Feinstein’s captivating, topical debut novel is centered around artificial intelligence: the practicalities, the ethics, the implications, the sentience problem. He puts a fresh spin on these matters, and we’ll look at this motivating technological engine of action in a second. But the book also has a not-so-secret identity: it’s part of a relatively small …Read More
The Weathering, Artem Chapeye, tr. Daisy Gibbons (Seven Stories 978-1-64421-546-3, $18.95, 212pp, tp) April 2026.
Exhausted by two-and-a-half jobs each, a demanding landlord, and the Sisyphean struggle towards their own apartment, the narrator of Artem Chapeye’s The Weathering and his wife Zoïa decide to get away to the mountains. On their way up to a rustic cabin in a barely functional car named Raquel, the narrator notes the erosion of …Read More
Sister Svangerd and the Devil You Know, K.J. Parker (Orbit 978-0316567008, $19.99, 336pp, tp) May 2026.
If Vo’s cleric-and-hoopoe team seems like one of the more charming odd couples in recent fantasy, K. J. Parker’s Brother Desiderius and Sister Svangerd may be even odder – although their testy relationship often suggested to me Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles more than any traditional adventurers. We first met them in Sister …Read More
Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore, Diana Peterfreund (Running Press Teens 979-8-894-14168-8, $12.99, 304pp, tp) April 2026. Cover by ???.
In Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore, Baltimore teen Ellen Poe Reynolds is the latest member of her family to carry the famous poet’s name and an uncertain legacy as a direct descendant. As the story goes, Edgar Allan Poe had an affair with Ellen’s five-times-great-grandmother shortly before his death, resulting in …Read More
We Dance Upon Demons, Vaishnavi Patel (Saga 978-1-66806-859-5, $28.00, 304pp, hc) May 2026.
In Vaishnavi Patel’s We Dance Upon Demons, a burned-out reproductive health care worker named Nisha fights demons at her health care clinic and in her personal life.
Before I say anything else, I want to explicitly state that this blurb contains the most unique and exciting premise for a story that I have read in the past …Read More
A Long and Speaking Silence, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom 978-1250386427, $24.99, 144pp, hc) May 2026.
One of the charms of Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills cycle of novellas, which chronicle the adventures of the Cleric Chih and their companion hoopoe Almost Brilliant set in a secondary world influenced by Southeast Asian history (there are still mammoths around), is that they give us a growing sense of the weight of history, even though …Read More
Rabbit Test, Samantha Mills (Tachyon 978-1-61696-451-1, $17.95, 256pp, tp) April 2026.
As Samantha Mills notes in the endnotes to her first collection, her story Rabbit Test – winner of the Locus, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards, nominated for several others, viral sensation, and think piece fodder – was written in the white-hot rage of anticipating, in 2022, the American supreme court stripping women of their bodily autonomy. Fusing fiction and reportage, …Read More
The Subtle Art of Folding Space, John Chu (Tor 978-1-25042-540-9, $26.99, 223pp, hc) April 2026. Cover by Katie Klimowicz.
John Chu’s The Subtle Art of Folding Space is the third notable first novel I’ve read this year. Unlike Jasmin Kirkbride’s The Forest on the Edge of Time (reviewed in February) or Albertine Clarke’s The Body Builders (reviewed in March), I went into it with expectations – Chu has published a …Read More
Year of the Mer, L.D. Lewis (Saga 978-1-66806-095-7, $30.00, 400pp, hc). April 2026. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.
What if… Arielle, the Little Mermaid, became queen, then had a daughter, and a granddaughter? What if Ursula was something like a god, and accustomed to being worshipped, and thoroughly devious? What if merfolk had a taste for flesh? What if Arielle’s granddaughter had a very, very bad temper, and arrogance worthy of …Read More
Transmentation | Transgression, Darkly Lem (Blackstone Publishing 979-8-21218-595-0, $29.99, 404pp, hc) March 2026.
Darkly Lem’s Transmentation novels are an exuberant reworking of a huge set of generic tropes and ideas. There’s so much going on in this series that it feels misleading to say that the first novel, Transmentation | Transience, was setting up a sequel: one of the series’ strengths is that there are so many storylines, so many …Read More
Celestial Lights, Cecile Pin (Henry Holt 978-1-250-86349-2, $26.99, 256pp, hc) March 2026.
In the beautifully written and achingly realistic Celestial Lights, author Cecile Pin takes readers along on astronaut Oliver Ines’s deep space mission. Oliver is a man who has been governed by a powerful personal ambition his entire life. He reaches the pinnacle of his career when a billionaire offers him a position to lead a trip to Europa, …Read More
And Side by Side They Wander, Molly Tanzer (Tordotcom 978-1-250-38205-4, $24.99, 112pp, hc) May 2026.
Those alarmed at the paucity of myth-based art-history heist-caper invasive-fungi alien-overlord space operas will be relieved to learn that Molly Tanzer is here to fix things for us. And Side by Side They Wander not only manages to bundle all this (and more!) into a fairly modest-in-length novella, but does so without sacrificing brisk pacing …Read More
The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts, Kim Fu (Tin House 978-1-96310-869-9, $17.99, 240pp, tp) March 2026. Cover by Beth Steidle.
Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts might be the weirdest haunted house novel I’ve read in years. No, wait. Scratch that. It’s actually a great literary fiction novel about a psychologist haunted by her mother’s ghost and struggling to cope with adulthood on her own. That…works, but it’s also more …Read More
The Dead Man’s Empire, W.P. Wiles (Angry Robot 978-1-91599-828-6, £9.99, 212pp, tp) March 2026.
The first thing that must be said about W.P. Wiles’s The Dead Man’s Empire is that it is a middle volume in a sequence, and reads that way. Though Wiles does a good job of organically acquainting (or re-acquainting) readers with events that took place in the previous volume, The Last Blade Priest (2022), he can’t …Read More
The Many, Sylvain Neuvel (Solaris 978-1-83786-689-2, $16.99, 304pp, tp) April 2026. Cover by Sam Gretton.
The Many by Sylvain Neuvel is the sort of pacy, high-concept read that might pass the time on your next flight, although I think the first half is better than the second.
On 4 October 2014, a fragment of a meteorite lands in the woods near Marquette, Michigan, and the small cluster of amino acids …Read More
Deep Black, Miles Cameron (Saga 978-1-66821-018-5, $21.00, 464pp, tp). March 2026.
Deep Black was first published in Great Britain in 2024 and now comes to American audiences thanks to Saga Press. It’s the second in the Arcana Imperii series (after Artifact Space), and Deep Black picks up mere days after the conclusion of that first book. A human-crewed greatship has just been involved in a massive space battle; the existence …Read More
River of Bones, Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga 978-1-98215-3816, $28.00, 243pp, hc) March 2026.
Rebecca Roanhorse returns to her short speculative fiction roots with River of Bones and Other Stories. The collection opens with Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ . Published by Apex Magazine in 2017, it tells the story of Jesse Turnblatt, an Indigenous person working for a VR company that provides virtual experiences of Native life to rich white …Read More
The Beheading Game, Rebecca Lehmann (Crown 979-8-217-08648-1, $29.00, 300pp, hc) March 2026.
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was executed in 1536, the first of Henry’s wives to die at his order. In Rebecca Lehmann’s brilliant novel The Beheading Game, Anne wakes up hours after her head was cut off by an executioner’s sword, gets out of the wooden box where her remains have been unceremoniously dumped, steals …Read More
Cabaret in Flames, Hache Pueyo (Tordotcom 978-1-25037-045-7, $24.99, 160pp, hc) March 2026.
An earlier version of Hache Pueyo’s new novella, Cabaret in Flames, was first published in Brazilian Portuguese in the magazine Mafagafo. Six years later, the English version – translated by the author – is twice as long as the original story. I wasn’t aware of this publication history when I picked up the novella, but at no point …Read More
Lightspeed 2/26
Flash Fiction Online 1/26
Lightspeed‘s February issue opens with Death Echoes Overlapping by Megan Chee, a story that reaches across vast tracts of space and time. It begins in the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system where the death echoes of the dying were once harvested as a form of energy. Chee’s story follows the inhabitants of three planets, located in different galaxies, that …Read More
Centroeuropa, Vicente Luis Mora, tr. Rahul Bery (Bellevue Literary Press 978-1-95427-652-9, $17.99, 192pp, tp) March 2026.
Vicente Luis Mora’s Centroeuropa has one of the most charismatic unreliable narrators I’ve encountered in some time, and weds a wonderfully character-centric perspective to big, unexplained speculative elements. For such a tidy little book, it is packed full of interesting asides and odd details, beguiling and voice-forward in a way that makes it feel …Read More
Nobody’s Baby, Olivia Waite (Tordotcom 978-1-25034-226-3, $24.99, 114pp, hc) March 2026. Cover by Marcos Chin.
Olivia Waite’s Nobody’s Baby is another second instalment in a series. In this case, the novella sequel to the short and – mostly – elegant Murder by Memory. Murder by Memory introduced us to Dorothy Gentleman, and to the starship Fairweather, journeying across the stars to settle a new home. Fairweather‘s passengers are, in the …Read More
My Dear You: Stories, Rachel Khong (Knopf 978-0593803691, hardcover, 240pp, $29.00) April 2026.
Women surrealists have been working at the cutting edge of that mode ever since the word surrealism was coined-and possibly before then too. Visual artists such as Méret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington; word-wranglers like Mina Loy and Anna Kavan and Kit Reed. Contemporary voices such as Karin Tidbeck and Johanna Sinisalo. And just a couple of months …Read More
On the Calculation of Volume IV, Solvej Balle, tr. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell (New Directions 978–0-81123-841-0, $15.95, 176pp, tp) April 2026. Cover by Matt Dorfman.
I turned the last page of the latest installment of Solvej Balle’s rich and resonant On the Calculation of Volume and thought to myself, Tara Selter, you should meet Fitz Wahram. Selter is the protagonist and narrator of Balle’s series, a woman stuck …Read More
The Rainseekers, Matthew Kressel (Tordotcom 978-1-25039-243-5, $18.99, 160pp, tp). February 2026. Cover by Shreya Gupta.
In his poignant, character-driven novella The Rainseekers, Matthew Kressel takes a disparate group of Martian adventurers and uses it as an opportunity to meditate on humanity, community, and the meaning of life. Stories about terraforming Mars are nothing new, and while Kressel does mention some of the science – an ancestor who developed solar mirrors, …Read More
After the Fall, Edward Ashton (St. Martin’s Press 978-1-25037-565-0, $30.00, 288pp, hc) February 2026.
I’m sure Mickey7 and the movie it was turned into made Edward Ashton a household name, but After the Fall, his latest novel, gives his best-known work a run for its money in terms of adventure, humor, and creativity.
John lives in a world where humans are no longer the rulers. In fact, they haven’t ruled …Read More
Rabbit Test and Other Stories, Samantha Mills (Tachyon 978-1616964511, trade paperback, 256pp, $17.95) April 2026.
Although her first short story appeared in 2012, it is only within the last two years or so that Samantha Mills seems to have attained a true liftoff into the stratosphere. Her novel from 2024, The Wings Upon Her Back, won a major award and much praise, as did the title story in this debut …Read More
Clarkesworld 2/26
Sarah Pauling‘s Remember Me in the Meat in February’s Clarkesworld delves into the workings of memory. Iris volunteers to become a martyr, erasing herself from the collective memory of the world so she can carry out an assassination. Since memory almost entirely relies on the Mesh now – perfect memories uploaded to the cloud – rather than imperfect human recall, Iris essentially ceases to exist. Except someone unexpected …Read More
The Rainseekers, Matthew Kressel (Tordotcom 978-1-25039-243-5, $18.99, 160pp, tp) February 2026. Cover by Shreya Gupta.
We could all do with a bit of hope, a bit of wonder, a bit of joy. Matthew Kressel’s The Rainseekers delivers exactly that. The novella isn’t twee or sentimental, or even especially cosy; Kressel doesn’t shy away from our many and varied flaws as a species. But he does foreground our yearning to tell …Read More
The Poet Empress, Shen Tao (Bramble, 978-1-250-40681-1, $32.99, 386pp, hc) January 2026. Cover by Kelly Chong.
The Poet Empress is an astonishingly accomplished debut. I’m a very jaded reader. At this point in my life – and at this point in the cyclical trends of the publishing industry – I don’t have high hopes for a fantasy novel where a peasant girl becomes concubine to a cruel prince. Shen Tao’s …Read More
She Is Here, Nicola Griffith (PM Press 979-8-88744-149-8, $16.00, 152pp, tp) February 2026.
Regular readers of this column are aware of my admiration for PM Press’s Outspoken Authors series, founded by the late Terry Bisson in 2009 and now under the capable editorial hands of Nisi Shawl and Nick Mamatas. Nicola Griffith’s She Is Here is the 34th volume in the series (five more are already announced), and as with …Read More
