Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Marion Deeds


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Somewhere Beyond the Sea: A pleasant escape that didn’t completely satisfy

Somewhere Beyond the Sea by T.J. Klune

2024’s Somewhere Beyond the Sea continues the adventures of Arthur Parnassus and Linus Baker and their six magical children, in a second world similar to ours, with a government kind of like Britain’s. The Amazon blurb for this book says, “This is Arthur’s story.” While I enjoyed the book and found it a much-needed escape from real life current events, this tale left many of Arthur’s issues unaddressed in its rush to show us fun, bantering scenes with the children, and let Arthur and Linus match wits with another government inspector and a government minister,


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Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories: The eerie, the surreal and the beautiful

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

I loved GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot, one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I followed it up with 2024’s story collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. This collection displays the beautiful, the eerie, the surreal, and the terrible, written in Nethercott’s precise, poetic prose that reminds me of the writing of Kelly Link.

The books contains fourteen stories.


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WWWednesday: January 29, 2025

I will read two short fiction works on The Story Hour tonight, at 7 PM Pacific Time. The readings are store on the Facebook page, if you want to catch up later.

The Centers for Disease Control have downloadable data available to the public. Check their site here.

In Reactor’s List of Five column, James Driscoll shares five books about gods causing trouble for humans.

Award Season! Speculative fiction is well represented on the ALA’s Alex award list this year.


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Bringer of Dust: The worlds of the Talents collide

Bringer of Dust by J.M. Miro

2024’s Bringer of Dust, J.M. Miro’s second book in the trilogy of THE TALENTS, finds our survivors from Book One, Ordinary Monsters, scattered across Europe. Maybe “scattered” isn’t the right word, because their locations are purposeful, as they seek to find an orsine they can open, to return to the world of the dead and rescue Marlowe, the Shining Boy.

A quick review of the magic: Clanks can manipulate their own flesh,


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WWWednesday: January 22, 2025

Reactormag shares a couple of forthcoming 2025 releases, among them the latest by Charlie Jane Anders and a dragon book by Cherie Radke.

They also shared an excerpt from T.J Klune’s latest, The Bones Beneath my Skin.

Best Of Lists, Recommended Reading lists, nomination suggestions… it’s that time of year. Nerds of a Feather starts with their recommended list of fiction and visual work categories.

John Scalzi announced completion of The Shattering Peace,


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Ordinary Monsters: A dense, complicated, visual feast of a book

Ordinary Monsters by J.M. Miro

…And the way a child looked at him in the harbor at Alexandria as he climbed down the gangway and into the haze. All this, all this and more, would vanish from the world with his ceasing, all this ineradicable beauty that now lived only inside him would be lost, moments as fragile as coins of light on water, and this more than any other part of it made him feel alone and sorrowful and frail…

2022’s Ordinary Monsters, Book One of THE TALENTS,


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WWWednesday: January 15, 2025

The New York Times profiles Nnedi Okorafor and her forthcoming autobiographical novel. (This article may be behind a paywall.)

Thanks, File770, for introducing me to yet another “—punk” category: Incensepunk. Also, you can click on their submission guidelines if this is a market where your short fiction would fit.

At Reactor, Molly Templeton takes a thoughtful look at the nature of “escapism” in fiction.

Speaking of thing I wish I could escape… because I do cover stories of genre interest, I’m including a link to this week’s Variety article about the allegations about Neil Gaiman.


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The Spite House: First class cursed-house horror

The Spite House by Johnny Compton

Spite houses are real and I went down a shallow rabbit hole preparing for this review. With his 2023 novel, The Spite House, Johnny Compton takes on the concept of a house built solely to irritate and harass nearby landowners, and morphs it into something original and scary.

Eric Ross and his two daughters, Dessa and Stacy, are making their way through Texas, trying to keep under the radar. They have the normal concerns a black family in Texas would have,


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WWWednesday: January 8, 2025

John Scalzi announced some changes at Whatever, his venerable blog site.

Rosalind Franklin provided remarkable and invaluable data in the discovery of DNA, but Watson and Crick didn’t exactly steal her work—they were just clueless sexists. From 2015.

While reading The Spite House, I got interested and found a couple of interesting articles about the residences.  Here’s one.

The BAFTA longlist for 2025 is out, with Emelia Perez and Conclave at the top. Wicked and Dune II also drew nods.


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The Militia House: A cursed house reveals the horror of war

The Militia House by John Milas

2023’s The Militia House is the debut novel of John Milas. Set in Afghanistan in 2010, it follows a team assigned to a Landing Zone as they are drawn into an abandoned Russian-invasion-era “militia” house close to their base. The sense of dread grows as the story continues, veering into a surreal world, but as in real life, the greatest horror may simply be war.

Our first-person narrator is Corporal Loyette, and his team consists of Johnson, Blount and Vargas.


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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  1. If the state of the arts puzzles you, and you wonder why so many novels are "retellings" and formulaic rework,…

  2. Marion Deeds