Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Bill Capossere


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Clytemnestra: A worthy entry

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

Clytemnestra (2023), as the style makes clear, is another entry in the ever-growing genre of Greek myth retellings. Casati does a nice job here of creating tension even within a well-known tale, and has several quite moving scenes, though the book’s somewhat flat style and — for me at least — odd choice of where to end, places it more in the middle tier of similar works.

After some a welcome family tree and large cast of characters that also serves to refresh a few details (who raped whom,


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The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi: The start of a promising new series

The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

Shannon Chakraborty, author of the recommended THE DAEVAVAD TRILOGY, is back with the start of a new series, and if the first book, The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi, is any measure, it’s sure to be as fun and magic filled as the first (sharp-eyed readers will at one point note it’s actually set in the same universe as the first as well, albeit much earlier).

Some years ago Amina Al-Sirafi was a famed smuggler and pirate before going into retirement to care for her daughter,


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The Crane Husband: A movingly dark and vividly written fable for contemporary times

The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Kelly Barnhill’s novella The Crane Husband is a darkly grim reimagining of and response to the Crane Wife folktale. A tough read thanks to its bleak near-future setting and dark focus on abuse and family dysfunction, and at times quite blunt in fable fashion, it’s also a rewarding read thanks to its lovely sparse language and strongly voiced narrator.

The story is set in the run-down and nearly abandoned rural Midwest, a few steps into the future where farmland is owned by a single far-away large conglomerate that raises monocultured,


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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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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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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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Fugitive Telemetry: Pitch-perfect narrative voice

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Martha Wells continues her popular and highly-acclaimed MURDERBOT DIARIES series with another novella, Fugitive Telemetry (2021), which actually takes place before the only novel in the series so far, Network Effect. (So you could read this one before that novel, but you do need to read books 1-4 first.) At this point in time Murderbot, the introverted and snarky cyborg who is the narrator and the heart of this series, is a fairly new resident on Preservation,


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Network Effect: Complex connections

Network Effect by Martha Wells

Martha Wells’ Murderbot has been gathering enthusiastic fans (which would be certain to have Murderbot hiding behind its opaque armored faceplate), along with multiple Nebula, Hugo and other awards and nominations, as each of the first four novellas in the MURDERBOT DIARIES series has been published over the last three years. In Network Effect (2020), the first full-length novel in this series, Wells is able to explore a more complex plot and to more fully develop Murderbot’s character and its relationships with others.


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The Lost Metal: Brings this series to a solid, if not wholly inspired, close

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

The Lost Metal brings to an end Brandon Sanderson’s MISTBORN ERA TWO series, and does so I’d say in semi-satisfying fashion, bringing some plots lines and character stories to a close and opening up the world of the Sanderson’s expanded universe (the Cosmere) more fully.

Waxillium returns here in his Senator role, along with his partner Wayne, Wayne’s new partner constable Marasi, and Wax’s wife Steris as they continue to battle against the secret society (The Set), which has amongst its high-ranking members Wax’s own sister,


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City of Last Chances: An intellectual pleasure

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky

City of Last Chances (2022), by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is one of those novels that I completely admired all the way through but had a hard time connecting to many of the characters, so that while the reading experience was enjoyable, it was more an intellectual pleasure than an immersive, emotional one.

The novel is set in the titular city of Ilmar, suffering under the heavy boot of an occupation force left over from the city’s conquest three years earlier by the Palleseen,


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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