August 29, 2023
Book two in a series, The Crooked Forest: Cloud Crazed continues the meandering story of Willow, a fairylike being who undertakes a journey to find her mother, who was forcibly separated from Willow in the first book.
The story begins after the last chapter of The Crooked Forest: Legacy of the Holey Stone but doesn’t […]
August 23, 2023
In his fantasy novel Beginning of Arrogance, Bryan Cole offers a standard mix of familiar elements—from fantastical creatures to epic quests to mystical settings—yet weaves them all together in dynamic ways.
Krell is a young paladin who is embued with special powers by ReckNor, the god of sea and sky. He joins a band of […]
August 22, 2023
In the dystopian world David H. Maring creates in Darkness to Light, the United States has been replaced by the Nation of Paradise, and civil rights are completely abolished.
After a nuclear war, the old world has disintegrated, and this new world controls all its inhabitants. Women are now called “wo.” Men, or sperm donors, […]
August 22, 2023
A superhero story blending science fiction and fantasy, Paul Ellison’s novel chronicles the crime-fighting adventures of Paul Flammia.
Flammia is a not-quite-human crown prince born on Earth but living on the planet Consistorium. After his warrior mermaid wife, children and entire family (and the planet) are destroyed by invaders, he is sent back to Earth, […]
August 22, 2023
Subjugation, the third novel in Erik A. Otto’s Detonation series, is a sprawling, immersive, dystopian science-fiction epic.
In this volume, Otto returns to a conflict that was first introduced in book one, Detonation. Once again, the U.S. mainland is described as a post-apocalyptic hinterland, populated by disparate factions, some of which—the Essentialists and the Spokes—are […]
August 15, 2023
This novel from Delas Heras uses a well-trod science fiction trope—first contact with aliens—as the foundation for a light-hearted romp through lower Manhattan as a man searches for his lost cat.
Set in 1995, the story starts when an alien spaceship lands on the roof of an East Village apartment building, disguised as an unobtrusive […]
August 14, 2023
This collection of short stories quietly muses on the construct of time and how we cope with what’s lost.
Each story deals in some way with the past and how it intrudes, sometimes literally, on the present. In some stories, traveling across eras is a way for a narrator to learn more about a loved […]
August 8, 2023
Mark Lavine’s dystopian science fiction novel delivers a common premise: Elite members of society live in closed-off, luxurious enclaves, while the poor live “outside” in abject poverty and squalor.
Here, crime has become so rampant that there aren’t enough prisons to house the criminals, so rich folks live in “Hives” such as the one in […]
July 25, 2023
To Make the World Beautiful For You is a fantasy-romance about an orphan named Martia, set in the make-believe Kingdom of Absyleous.
Martia has been trained “as a lethal assassin” by anti-royalist rebel-leader Promanthae, head of the dissident village Promapple, which stands in direct opposition to Absyleous’s ruling monarchy, favoring a more egalitarian approach to […]
July 18, 2023
Author P.A. Vasey’s latest is a science fiction thriller revolving around a man’s missing wife and her connection with a meteorite that’s far more than it seems.
The novel begins in 2017 when an interstellar object—assumed to be a massive meteor— is detected speeding through the solar system. Interest in the passing object soon abates, […]