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The New York Times reports that Meta (the parent company for Facebook, Instagram, and Meta AI, among other concerns) considered purchasing Simon & Schuster last year in order to train their Large Language Model on the company’s books:
Lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings of internal meetings obtained by The Times. They also conferred on gathering ...Read More
SF/Fantasy/Horror ReviewsView All
Colleen Mondor Reviews The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
The Book of Doors, Gareth Brown (William Morrow 979-0-063-35957-4, $30.00, 416pp, hc) February 2024.
Gareth Brown’s debut, The Book of Doors, manages to incorporate some time-travel surprises, (and not the ones readers might expect), into an exciting novel of suspense. Told from multiple points of view, readers initially meet Cassie, a clerk in a New York City bookstore, when she discovers a regular customer has quietly died while ...Read More
Russell Letson Reviews Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds
Machine Vendetta, Alastair Reynolds (Orbit US 978-0316462846, $19.99, 416pp, tp) January 2024.
Synchronicity strikes again with a pair of novels – both parts of long-running future-history series – that show what can be done with a particular set of science-fictional motifs and devices, especially when the series format offers room to stretch out.
Alastair Reynolds’s Machine Vendetta is the third entry in a subseries of his vast Revelation Space ...Read More
Paul Di Filippo Reviews I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
I Cheerfully Refuse, Leif Enger (Grove 978-0802162939, hardcover, 336pp, $28.00) April 2024
Brian Aldiss famously coined the label “cozy catastrophe” to designate such books as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, wherein civilization crumbles, but our protagonist manages to carve out a relatively safe and rewarding existence for himself and his posse, a harbor from the storm. Aldiss characterized the plot and atmosphere of such novels ...Read More
Alexandra Pierce Reviews Kindling by Kathleen Jennings and Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart by GennaRose Nethercott
Kindling, Kathleen Jennings (Small Beer Press 9-781-61873-217-0, $28.00, 288pp, hc) January 2024. Cover by Kathleen Jennings.
In Kindling, the first collection of her short stories, Kathleen Jennings populates wild and fantastical places with folk looking for purpose, getting lost, and finding trouble. Jennings’s stories range from variations on fairy tales (Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty), to high-seas adventure (but in the air); from an epic quest to an intimate ...Read More
Charles Payseur Reviews Short Fiction: Reckoning, F&SF, Strange Horizons and Worlds of Possibility
Reckoning Spring ’24 F&SF 1-2/24 Strange Horizons 1/29/24, 2/5/24, 2/12/24 Worlds of Possibility 2/24
The new year brings a new issue of Reckoning, featuring poetry, fiction, and nonfiction focused on issues of environmental justice. Kelsey Day is among the poets complicating and keenly describing the intersections of ecological and social violation in “50% off Venus Fly Traps”, which finds a person plant shopping and running into the ways ...Read More
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Locus Awards Coming Up in June!
Join MC Henry Lien and special guest Connie Willis at the 2024 Locus Awards, June 19-22, 2024. Get your tickets now. Online or in-person, we can’t wait to see you!
WEDNESDAY – FRIDAY: We’ll kick off the event with a series of online readings in the evenings starting Wednesday, June 19, with several readers each evening and a Q&A, and an online meetup.
SATURDAY: Saturday will have several ...Read More
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Niall Harrison Reviews Kurdistan + 100 edited by Mustafa Gündoğdu & Orsola Casagrande
Kurdistan + 100 , Mustafa Gündoğdu & Orsola Casagrande, eds. (Comma Press 978-1-91269-736-6, £10.99, 237pp, tp). November 2023. Cover by David Eckersall.
When you finish reading the last page of the last story in this strong anthology of strong stories, you are not yet done with the book. There is an afterword by editors Mustafa Gündoğdu and Orsola Casagrande, which probably was not part of the original concept. It is ...Read More
Alexandra Pierce Reviews The Man Who Saw Seconds by Alexander Boldizar
The Man Who Saw Seconds, Alexander Boldizar (Clash 978-1-96098-807-2, $19.95, 325pp, tp) Cover by Joel Amat Güell. May 2024.
A precog, an anarchist, and an assistant director of the NSA walk into a bar….
Preble Jefferson can see five seconds into the future. Fish is an anarchist, lawyer, and Jefferson’s friend. Thad Bigman is an assistant director at the NSA. The action in The Man Who Saw Seconds centres on ...Read More
Paula Guran Reviews The Proper Thing and Other Stories by Seanan McGuire
The Proper Thing and Other Stories, Seanan McGuire (Subterranean ISBN 978-1-64524-192-8, 508pp. $50.00, hc) April 2024. Cover by Carla McNeil.
Probably best-known for her Wayward Children series, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winner Seanan McGuire is also a prolific writer of short fiction. McGuire’s second collection (she has two others writing as Mira Grant) is both massive and enchanting. The two dozen stories tend toward darkness but, more often than not, ...Read More
A.C. Wise Reviews Short Fiction: khōréō
khōréō 3.3
khōréō 3.3 includes two short stories and a novelette in two parts. The one I found to be most effective of the three is “The Blue Glow” by Lisa Hosokawa, which follows a failed suicide pilot as he returns home in search of his family, and finds only destruction. His journey is plagued by ghosts, but he holds onto hope that his mother and baby ...Read More
Niall Harrison Reviews Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang
Jumpnauts, Hao Jingfang (trans. Ken Liu) (Saga 978-1-53442-211-7, 368pp, $18.99). March 2024.
Deep in the bowels of Hao Jingfang’s Jumpnauts, an alien guide reveals to the human protagonists that what defines civilisational progression, from their elevated perspective, is ‘‘the capacity for information exchange.’’ The development of writing, which allows information to be transmitted widely in space and time, was the necessary precondition to reach the ‘‘zeroth rank’’ of ...Read More