Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Rating: 4.5

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The Ferryman: Recommended for everyone

The Ferryman by Justin Cronin

Justin Cronin burst onto the big scene with his apocalyptic vampire doorstopper The Passage (first of a trilogy), a fantastically harrowing blockbuster of a novel that still maintained amidst its action/thriller/horror aspects the quietly intimate elements of his earlier literary novels. His newest, The Ferryman, while not quite as strong and despite having a few more noticeable issues, shares some of the same strengths that made The Passage so successful, as I imagine this one will be.

The story takes place on an archipelago isolated from the rest of the world by something known as The Veil,


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Revival (Volume One): You’re Among Friends: A rural noir horror story

Revival (Volume One): You’re Among Friends by Tim Seeley (writer) and Mike Norton (artist)

Revival is marketed as “rural noir,” but it is horror, too. Tim Seeley and Mike Norton have created an eight-volume story, and volume one, “You’re Among Friends,” starts off, after an introduction by Jeff Lemire, with a shocking event: Ms. Tao, a reporter given the worst columns to write, is forced to write one on unusual jobs. In the opening scene, she is making a video recording as she interviews the town’s crematorium technician at one in the morning.


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The Joy Makers: “If It Makes You Happy…”

The Joy Makers by James Gunn

Shortly before being taken over by Random House in 1988, Crown Publishers had a wonderful thing going with its Classics of Modern Science Fiction series; a nicely curated group of books in cute little hardcover volumes that the imprint released during the mid-‘80s. Previously, I had enjoyed (and, in some cases, written about here) such terrific titles in this series as Charles L. Harness’ The Paradox Men (1953), Murray Leinster’s The Forgotten Planet (1954),


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The Mimicking of Known Successes: A great Holmesian adventure on Jupiter

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

Malka Older’s 2023 novella, The Mimicking of Known Successes, gives us a Sherlock-Holmes-like mystery-adventure set on Jupiter. The extraterrestrial locale is more than merely a setting; it’s part of the plot of this charming SF mystery romp.

When humans finally rendered Earth uninhabitable, they moved to other planets in the solar system; at least to Jupiter, which is called Giant. The surface of Giant is also uninhabitable, but engineered bands encircle the planet at the point where atmosphere and gravity allow for human life (with obvious adjustments).


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Stumptown (volume one): Comic book hardboiled female private investigator

Stumptown (Vol. One): Stumptown Vol. 1: The Case of the Girl Who Took Her Shampoo by Greg Rucka (writer) & Matthew Southworth (artist)

Stumptown volume one collects the first four issues of Greg Rucka’s excellent comic book series about P.I. Dex Parios. Clearly influenced by Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald, and Parker, Rucka takes the tradition of the hardboiled P.I. and puts a female in the lead. With excellent art by Matthew Southworth, this is a series to seek out.

The comic starts out with Dex’s trying not to get shot by men who have taken her out for disposal by a lake at dusk.


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Shadows in the Sun: Oliver’s story

Shadows in the Sun by Chad Oliver

Although it’s been almost seven years since I read Chad Oliver’s masterful fourth novel, Unearthly Neighbors (1960), such are the evocative atmosphere and compelling alien depictions in that book that I still manage to remember it quite well. And indeed, Unearthly Neighbors just might be the most convincingly realistic description of “first contact” on another world that a reader could ever hope to encounter.


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White Cat, Black Dog: Link bats nearly a thousand

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

The vast majority of story collections by their nature vary in relative strength from piece to piece. I’m always happy when I fully enjoy more than half of the stories and thrilled if that hits three-quarters. Well, there are seven stories total in White Cat, Black Dog (2023), Kelly Link’s newest collection in which she brings her trademark style to a series of retold fairy tales, and of the seven I only disliked one, while the others ranged from really good to great.


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The Atlantic Abomination: There goes Jacksonville!

The Atlantic Abomination by John Brunner

In his 1953 novel The Kraken Wakes, English author John Wyndham gave his readers a tale concerning aliens who land on Earth and proceed to terrorize the planet from their bases on the ocean floor. But this, of course, was not the last time that a British writer would regale his readers with a story about malevolent space visitors living beneath the seas. Thus, in John Brunner’s novel of seven years later,


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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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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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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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    How can cats not have an official Patron Saint? I call foul! This must be fixed at once.

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    "Renegade Nell" looks interesting! Reminds me a bit of both Queen of Swords and The Nevers.

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