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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: February 2023

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Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse (Volume 1): Birds, Bees, Blood and Beer: Beautifully illustrated slapstick horror

Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse (Volume 1): Birds, Bees, Blood and Beer by Ben Templesmith

Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse (Volume 1): Birds, Bees, Blood and Beer is first notable because of the identifiable art of Ben Templesmith, who both wrote and drew this first of three volumes. Ben Templesmith is known for his work on 30 Days of Night. The art in Wormwood is haunting, with shifting lights marking the seedy backdrop of a creepy cityscape and “The Dark Alley,” a stripper bar that the Gentleman Corpse seems to like to hang out in with Mr.


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February 25th, 2023. ´s rating: | , | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

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WWWednesday: February 22, 2023

Shortly after Neil Clarke, editor and publisher of Clarkesworld, posted this, the magazine closed its submission portal. Clarkesworld is one of the higher paying SFF short fiction markets; let’s hope this is temporary.

Nerds of a Feather reviews Malka Older’s latest book, The Mimicking of Known Successes.

 This is from last year, but the book, The Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand, is due out soon, so I thought I’d share this interview.


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February 22nd, 2023. | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

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Arch-Conspirator: Roth pretty much nails it

Arch-Conspirator by Veronica Roth

Arch-Conspirator (2023), by Veronica Roth, is a tautly written reimagining of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. While some will probably wish for a bit more world-building detail and deeper development of some themes, fans of the novella form will find a lot to like here.

Set in a post-apocalyptic, far-future refuge where the land outside the story’s locale is uninhabitable, it’s a world whose population rests on a knife’s edge of survival and so has chosen to lessen the chance of extinction by mandating births (“It didn’t matter if a person wanted a child or not … If they were viable … they were required to carry a child,


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February 21st, 2023. ´s rating: | | , | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

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The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life

The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma)

The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma) is a solidly informative book that raises some serious questions and challenges us to think differently about how we might live our lives, though it suffers somewhat from its structure.

Eklöf is an ecologist who specializes in bats, so one can see where he might get his fondness for the darkness of night.


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February 17th, 2023. ´s rating: | | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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The Secret Skin: So many scares!

The Secret Skin by Wendy N. Wagner

There are so many scary things in Wendy N. Wagner’s short 2021 novella, The Secret Skin. There is the nasty housekeeper who gives the nasty housekeeper in Rebecca a run for her money. There is the leering, unpleasant overseer of the Vogel family sawmill. There is Abigail, a deeply disturbed little girl who may be telekinetic. There is the “community meeting” of the white men in the nearby town of Coos Bay, Oregon, and their white robes and hoods.


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February 16th, 2023. ´s rating: | | , , | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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WWWednesday: February 15, 2023

Giveaway: One commenter chosen as random will get a hardcopy of C.L. Polk’s Even Though I Knew the End.

Here’s an inspiring if not very medical update on the condition of Jeremy Renner, who sustained many broken bones and other injuries in a snow plow accident earlier this winter.

Those objects in the sky we keep shooting down; could they be… ETs? Ars Technica thinks not and explains why. (Actually, this article discusses the history of the US government’s exploration of these and other airborne objects.) From a few days earlier,


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February 15th, 2023. | Giveaway!, World Wide Wednesday | 8 comments |

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Beyond the Barrier: The pieces just don’t add up

Beyond the Barrier by Damon Knight

In Damon Knight’s 1953 novel entitled The Rithian Terror, the author presented his readers with a vaguely octopuslike menace, the titular Rithian; a spy with the ability to hide itself inside the body of any Earthling. But this was not the last time that the Oregon-born writer would give us a tale featuring a hideous, nonhumanoid alien hiding in plain sight! More than a decade later, Knight, in his novel Beyond the Barrier,


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February 15th, 2023. ´s rating: | | | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women

Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women edited by Lee Murray & Angela Yuriko

In Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women, edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, twenty-one Asian writers (all women as one might have guessed from the title) offer up a single personal essay each that both explores their heritage of ghost stories/folklore and charts their own experiences navigating the in-between world of shared cultures. Like many collections, it’s a mixed bag. For me, the collection as a whole didn’t wholly succeed, though it contains several strong essays.


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February 14th, 2023. ´s rating: | | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

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The Necessity of Stars: A lyrical first contact story with teeth

The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler

I continued my Neon Hemlock novella-reading binge with E. Catherine Tobler’s The Necessity of Stars, published in 2021. I always approach a Tobler story preparing to be bowled over by strange and stunning language, and this story did not disappoint. I was surprised to be reading a story that slots more comfortably into the “science fiction” category than “fantasy,” because this is about first contact.

Bréone Hemmerli is a highly placed United Nations official, in a world increasingly submerged by rising oceans or devoured by desertification,


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February 13th, 2023. ´s rating: | | , | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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Sunday Status Update: February 12, 2023

Marion: After The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler, I read Laird Barron’s Blood Standard, Book One in his action/crime series featuring Isiah Coleridge. It’s filled with quirky characters, gore, violence and the weird, breath-taking scenic descriptions I expect from Barron. It didn’t resonate with me but I always appreciate his writer’s eye and his prose.

Bill: Since our last status I read:

  • The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty — a very fun middle-aged mom-as-pirate tale
  • Dead Country by Max Gladstone: a welcome return to the highly recommended Craft series
  • Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati: a solid retelling of (most of) the Greek story with a strongly realized titular character at its center
  • Fields of Light and Shadow by David Young and The Last Two Seconds  by Mary Jo Bang:  pair of poetry collections that just weren’t for me,

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February 12th, 2023. | Status Update | 1 comment |

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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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