Earlier this year, when rioters stormed the Capitol with a broad impulse of insurrection, it struck many how gestural it all was. Despite costing the lives of five people and injuring several dozen more, the riot on January 6, 2021 played out like a romance of revolution—with more costumes, slogans, and symbolic vandalism than any real path to achieving a political objective. And thank goodness for that, I’m sure. But it brought to mind how patchwork and starved our revolutionary imagination is: despite how heavily rebellion features in some of our most iconic sci-fi and fantasy stories, from ..read more

Welcome 2021 ..read more

Every year, it’s the same: come November, the plastic pumpkins and the fake bats go back up to the attic, and the plastic garlands and fake mistletoe come out. We start referring to post-dead people as angels instead of ghosts. We stop fearing that a strange man will sneak into the house late at night and instead leave cookies out to entice and reward him. Yet despite the seasonal shift in décor, semantics, and views on light B&E, Christmas can be just as spooky as Halloween. According to Celtic mythology, the Winter Solstice and the weeks surrounding it are all about death and rebirth, st ..read more

Photo credit: Patrick A. Mackie We’re almost done with this, um, interesting year. That in itself is cause to celebrate. We’ve weathered wild fires, more named hurricanes than ever, floods, the virus, quarantines, murder hornets. The list is endless. You name it, it has happened in 2020. Even though there’s one dark month ahead, we’ve got some books that would be good to give to friends and family. Strange things happen in books of speculative fiction. Strange things are happening in 2020. Forewarned is forearmed. And didn’t someone just find a monolith in Utah? Amanda Baldeneaux recommends ..read more

Let’s face it. We all need some escapism right now, and Fiction Unbound continues to celebrate non-Western fantasies—that is, stories whose settings and magical systems are rooted in traditions other than the well-worn, Anglo-European histories and mythologies—that are providing welcome relief from the problems of a very Western moment. The Daevabad trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty draws you into an intricately crafted fictional world replete with layers of palace intrigue, surprise reveals of progenitors and their secret powers (of course), gruesome, godless murders, genocidal wars, and a cast o ..read more

We’ve had enough tricks already in 2020 to last a lifetime, so here’s a treat instead ..read more

Northern salt-marsh orchid The centerpiece of Craig Laurance Gidney’s 2019 novel, A Spectral Hue, is a colony of African-American outsider artists in Shimmer, a small marsh-town in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Hazel Whitby, a slave girl, sewed frenzied quilts shot through with clashing colors, hidden shapes, and pink-purple thread. Shadrach Grayson, a drifter and one-time circus sideshow, painted bleak marsh landscapes filled with luminous will-o’-the-wisps in that same pink-purple. Other Shimmer artists made dolls, or broken glass sculptures, but all of them work obsessively around that same fu ..read more

I have owned a couple of copies of Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. It’s one of my favorite books, though I don’t suppose I’ll ever read it. When I plucked it from a library shelf and flipped through its chapters one Saturday morning in my late teens, the idea of 500 hard cover pages listening to King expound on the horror genre did not appeal to me. But before I snapped it shut for good, I landed on the appendices. A few days later I was back with a pocket full of change. Thanks to the copier in corner, now those appendices were mine for 5 cents a page. They were just the treasure I was hungry ..read more

Memory, it must be said, is for shit. If you took me to the north side of Chicago, I could bring you to the restaurant where I first ate Indian-style curry as a kid. I don’t know the name of this restaurant, or the name of the street it’s on, or even have a clear picture in my mind of what it looks like; I just remember where it is. I can retrace my steps there from the Belmont El station more surely than I can recount my first kiss, occluded behind a mental wall of trauma. I remember barely anything of my high school graduation, where, according to my classmates, I famously refused to shake ..read more

At Fiction Unbound, we love reviewing speculative fiction novels with a musical twist - whether that be punk rock, space opera, or something in between. In this post, we tackle the decade where rock ‘n’ roll developed its distinct identity. There is a crazy mythos surrounding the era of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1970s. The saying “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” was practically defined by this time period of pop-rock ballads, legendary singers, and badass bands. Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, Daisy Jones & The Six, takes this romanticized time period and pulls back the curtain in a clever and wil ..read more