It’s the first Thursday of the month. Time to report! What’s the best book you read in April 2024 and why did you love it?  It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. We just want to share some great reading material. Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome. And don’t forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our 5-Star SFF page. One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes: a FanLit T-shir ..read more

Alan Brown reviews the collected short stories of Vernor Vinge. Coincidence time: I’d never heard of From, but I’m currently re-watching an old ABC show called Lost which featured Harold Perrineau, and so does From, which includes staff talent from Lost…  which means it could go any number of ways. Since I have been watching Lost, I wondered where Matthew Fox got to, and here’s the answer. I didn’t know The Lazarus Project was still on, but it is and it’s getting a second season. Ellen Datlow revealed the Table of Contents for this year’s Year’s Best Horror. Just how many Planet of the Ap ..read more

The Book That Broke the World by Mark Lawrence It’s funny that as I was reading Mark Lawrence’s The Book That Broke the World (2024), I kept thinking how it was much more action/plot oriented than its predecessor, The Book That Wouldn’t Burn, which in my head I recalled as far more character and theme-driven. Then, in preparation for writing this review, I went back and read my review of book one and saw that I’d noted how the action “quickens at a relentlessly breathless rate.” So maybe it’s a balance thing? With the first book being more split between character, theme, and action while its s ..read more

Giants In The Dust by Chad Oliver At this late date, the authors who have penned works in the fields of science fiction and fantasy must number well into the multiple thousands, but the ones with an actual background in science, who have used their education and scientific training to both inform and add veracity to their stories … ah, they are indeed amongst a much more limited crew. Let’s see … Isaac Asimov was, of course, an associate professor of biochemistry. Hal Clement had degrees in both chemistry and astronomy, and the British author Fred Hoyle was also an astronomer. Joe Haldeman has ..read more

In this column, I feature comic book reviews written by my students at Oxford College of Emory University. Oxford College is a small liberal arts school just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I challenge students to read and interpret comics because I believe sequential art and visual literacy are essential parts of education at any level (see my Manifesto!). I post the best of my students’ reviews in this column. Today, I am proud to present a review by Mandy Sun. Mandy Sun is a first-year student at Emory Oxford University and is considering majoring in Computer Scie ..read more

Utterly Dark and the Heart of the Wild by Philip Reeve In his review for Skye McKenna’s Hedgewitch, Reeve said: “there are only two sorts of fantasy story: the ones that feel fake and the ones that feel real. It’s hard to explain the difference but you know the real ones when you read them.” I know exactly what he’s talking about, because he writes the real ones too. His depiction of Faerie – that ancient place where all the fairy tales come from – captures its mystery and danger and uncanny beauty as it also exists in books like Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s ..read more

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett The first book in the EMILY WILDE series is a lively, lovely romp through an alternate Europe, with faeries, magic, lost kingdoms, irascible scholars and their irritating colleagues. Though completely different in tone and subject matter, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries (2023), by Heather Fawcett, reminded me a bit of Marie Brennan’s LADY TRENT series. Both series feature a woman scientist and a story transmitted via reports or journal entries. There the similarities end, except for my enjoyment. It’s the turn of the 20th century ..read more

Primary endosymbiosis is rare, but it’s happening right now with an algae and a cyanobacterium, which are merging to form an organelle that can fix nitrogen directly from the air. Among other events, BaltiCon will feature an SFF-themed short film festival. (Thanks to File 770.) Fallout has been renewed for another season on Amazon. Nerds of a Feather interview Cheryl Ntumy about Mothersound, a science-fantasy anthology based on African folklore, and the Sauutiverse collective. Reactor offers an excerpt of James Logan’s new epic fantasy novel The Silverblood Promise. This is old news, but I hea ..read more

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell Relationships are hard. They may be even harder when one person’s definition of love is implanting their eggs in the beloved, so that the hatchlings eat their way out of their parent. For Shesheshen, the protagonist of John Wiswell’s Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024), this is how her species defines it. Now that she’s fallen in love with Homily, a human woman, the egg-implantation issue isn’t the only obstacle on their road to happiness. Shesheshen is a protoplasmic creature, a monster, at least in the early, fourteenth-century definition of ..read more

The Flying Eyes by J. Hunter Holly It sports one of the most famous covers in sci-fi paperback history; a piece of art so iconic that I have seen it reproduced in the form of refrigerator magnets! I am referring here to the first edition of J. Hunter Holly’s The Flying Eyes, the cover of which depicts a man and a woman fleeing in abject terror from the onslaught of several dozen – you guessed it – self-propelled, levitating eyeballs! Yes, I know that you just cannot judge a book by its cover alone, and the same surely goes for its title, but really, who could not be intrigued by that double-pu ..read more