Urban Fantastic by Allen Ashley

The author's work inhabits territory that the fantasy genre could usefully exploit/explore in the years ahead. If the first stage in the development of modern fantasy was ambiguity (is the fantastic element in the story real or not?), and the second stage was stories in which the fantasy is acknowledged to be real; then the logical next step is to put the fantasy to work -- and this is what Ashley does in his stories...

Continue reading at SF Site.

Further links:
Allen Ashley
Crowswing

Macrolife by George Zebrowski

Living on planets is a precarious business. You never know when some quirk of geology or a stray rock falling from the sky will put paid to your species; not forgetting evolutionary pressures pushing you who-knows-where, and sundry other ravages. So it's pretty much inevitable that a civilization wishing to survive in the long term (for the sake of argument, ours) must become space-faring. But what then?...

Continue reading at SF Site.

Further links:
Pyr

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

A new book by Neil Gaiman is always welcome but a short fiction collection is perhaps especially so, because it lets us experience a wide range of his work. Certainly, Gaiman’s remarkable talents are showcased to brilliant effect in Fragile Things. There are twenty-seven (or should that be twenty-eight?) pieces of fiction in the volume; let’s examine some of them.

Continue reading at Laura Hird's New Review.

Further links:
Neil Gaiman
Hodder Headline

Dusk by Tim Lebbon

A man wearing a red robe enters the village of Trengborne and proceeds to slaughter everyone there -- all except two people, that is: Rafe Baburn, the young boy he's looking for; and Kosar, a former thief who hid when he saw the man approaching the village. Leaving Trengborne, Rafe falls in with the witch Hope and Kosar with his ex-lover, a warrior named A'Meer from the mysterious Shantasi people. The truth about the red-robed man becomes clear...

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
Tim Lebbon
The world of Noreela
Bantam Spectra

52 Projects by Jeffrey Yamaguchi

Looking through the list of books available for review on Laura Hird’s website, I notice one called 52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity. Sounds interesting and different, but is it the right kind of book for me? I normally stick to reviewing fiction, and have never really thought of myself as much of a creative person, so I’m wary... but then again, why not? Nothing ventured, nothing gained...

Continue reading at Laura Hird's New Review.

Further links:
52 Projects
Perigee

Triquorum One, ed. Christopher Teague

This book grew organically, beginning life as a single novella, before gaining one and then two companions as Chris Teague received submissions that, he felt, worked well alongside each other. So, in Triquorum One, we have three tales which are all distinctive, yet are linked by the games they play with our notions of reality...

Continue reading at Laura Hird's New Review.

Further links:
Allen Ashley
John Grant
Lavie Tidhar
Christopher Teague
Pendragon Press

Rabid Transit: Long Voyages, Great Lies

Rabid Transit is a series of short anthologies published by a group of writers who call themselves the ‘Ratbastards’. It began as an outlet for their own work, then began to feature other writers; and has now reached this, its fifth instalment. The six stories in Long Voyages, Great Lies are loosely connected by themes of travel and escape. Let’s take a closer look at them...

Continue reading at Laura Hird's New Review.

Further links:
David J. Schwartz
F. Brett Cox
Heather Shaw
Meghan McCarron
Geoffrey H. Goodwin
Christopher Barzak
Alan DeNiro
Kristin Livdahl
Velocity Press

DH Interviews... Sean Wright

My first interview is now online...

On mapping Jaarfindor:
"The stories that come from Jaarfindor can't be mapped out as a whole, perfect picture. Why? Because I'm in the process of discovering what lurks in the cities and countryside, in the deserts and oceans, meeting new characters in exciting and challenging situations. I'm an artist, and as such I'm obsessed to explore the weird space of my imagination, writing down what I find there, making numerous pen and ink sketches as aide-memoirs. I constantly surprise and worry myself. Every time I venture there I find myself asking a simple yet for me a profound question: are you certain you witnessed that? Much of what I write isn't easy to quantify or label."

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
Sean Wright

Jaarfindor Remade by Sean Wright

Reality's walls have been breached, and the worlds of Earth and Jaarfindor have become fused. Life in the capital of New Jaarfindor, Queen's Lynn (formerly present-day King's Lynn in Norfolk), presents several challenges: humans rub shoulders with insectiants, and you never know if the person next to you is an android; the mysterious shamutants, living beneath the city, may (it is said) erase your memories if you're not careful; the air is so polluted that decontamination is compulsory whenever you enter a building; and nobody knows what's "Out There" beyond the fog...

Read more at SF Site.

Further links:
Sean Wright
Crowswing

Vellum by Hal Duncan

'A burning map. Every epic... should start with a burning map,' says a character at the start of Hal Duncan's Vellum. Perhaps I'm reading too much into that comment, but it's tempting to see it as a call for the destruction of that most familiar epic-fantasy accessory. Certainly it serves as a warning that this unmapped and perhaps unmappable (in the conventional sense) fantasy does not play by the rules (at least, not by those rules)...

Continue reading at The Zone.

Further links:
Hal Duncan
Macmillan