“Men find it easier to believe they have been swindled by a witch than outwitted by a woman.” From the grand storytelling tradition of Sinbad the Sailor comes Shannon Chakraborty’s Medieval-era tale of Amina al-Sirafi. Sailor, adventurer, pirate, witch. Famous and infamous (depending on who you talk to) for her ability to fight, explore, steal,
“I’m going home to the Singing Hills abbey…” Nghi Vo’s latest installment in the Singing Hills Cycle is a bit of a departure from the previous novellas. Cleric Chih isn’t travelling to an exotic location to collect new stories. Instead, they’re returning to the Singing Hills abbey to be reunited with their old friend Cleric
…she didn’t know what had happened to the stranger either, but she found her inclination was that he hadn’t dropped off the edge of the settlement into the featureless and crushing gasses of the planet. Or at least, if he had, it hadn’t been by choice. Humanity has been transplanted to space in Malka Older’s
The last three of the 2024 Hugo-nominated novelettes go from dystopian to near-utopian (with a lot of work from devoted neighbors), to a fantasy set in the outskirts of the jazz area. I AM AI – Ai Jiang My hands shake at the prospect of finally getting rid of the one thing outside of my
John Scalzi’s Hugo-nominated novel Starter Villain is a surprisingly light-hearted look at the section of the population with the kind of power and money that can make changes on a global scale and not bother with pesky little things like rules. And we see all of this through the eyes of former business journalist and
It’s the end of April, there’s less than fifteen weeks until this year’s Hugo Award ceremony, and I’ve got nineteen entries in the main fiction categories to read. So what the heck, we’re doing two novellas this week instead of one. And I swear, I didn’t deliberately pick these two based on similar themes in
Ann Leckie expands the universe of the Imperial Radch series (first introduced in the best-selling and Hugo-Award winning Ancillary Justice) in her latest novel Translation State. Three entirely separate lives intersect in a story about finding purpose, finding family, and finding out what it means to be human. We start with Enae Athtur; the book-jacket
This year, the first two of the Hugo Novelettes I read consisted of cozy and light-hearted ways of looking at how society can treat its vulnerable members versus how it actually does. I followed those up with a story in the form of a scientific treatise that illustrates how one piece of technology can change
“Your father abandoned us. We were unchosen, cast out of his eschatology. We are going to destroy your father’s cult and salt the earth where it falls.” Fetter’s mother rips off his shadow immediately after birth, and almost as immediately starts his training. He commits his first killing at age eleven (a grand-uncle on his