…It was January 8, 2064. His last recorded memory was from July 31st, 2063.. Waking up from a deep sleep to find yourself in a restaurant that’s about to be flooded by an apocalyptic storm is disorienting enough. Much worse when you and your coworkers are robots, your employers have left town ahead of their
Fans of Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes (deliciously cozy fantasy) and Bookshops & Bonedust (also cozy fantasy, but with more zombies) will find a lot to like about Brigands & Breadknives, even though it’s the least cozy of the trilogy. On purpose! Setting up a coffee shop or rescuing a struggling bookstore were fun ideas
Two of the remaining three novelettes this year could be considered dystopian (depending on how negatively you view the universe of Martha Wells’s Murderbot series), and the third takes place in America in what could be called the Golden Age, just not for everyone. “Never Eaten Vegetables” – H.H. Pak She glides through the night
How does a house, lacking flesh, feel fury? I went into Freya Marske’s novella completely cold, and I thought maybe this was going to be a humorous retelling of Cinderella. Ha ha, a poor house that has to slave away for its evil stepmother and two evil stepsisters, how droll. Nope. This particular retelling is
Let’s take a break from hard-hitting topics for a while and bring in some frikkin’ whimsy. The novellas by Amal El-Mohtar and Olvia Waite have wildly different settings: a small town on the border of Fae and the banks of a river where the water is highly-concentrated magic, versus a detective story in space. But
Catherynne Valente, Scott Lynch, and Cameron Reed all have novelettes up for a Hugo Award this year, and the scope of the conflict in each of them is wildly different. The first three novelettes I’m reviewing range from a dystopian story of generational wealth-hoarding running smack into one girl’s complicated relationship with her own body,
I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife… It’s one hell of an opening line in T. Kingfisher’s latest reinterpreted fairytale. The king in this case is still grieving a horrific betrayal, and what he had to do in response to that betrayal, and now
It’s Hugo nomination time! (Actually the nominees for 2026 were announced almost three weeks ago, but y’know, vacation…) I’ve read one novel and two of the novellas already this year. Check out the full list below with links to the Pixelated Geek reviews (which will be updated on a regular basis as I get around
Cambridge, Michaelmas Term, October. The wind bit, the sun hid, and on the first day of class, when she ought to have been lecturing undergraduates about the dangers of using the Cartesian severance spell to revise without pee breaks, Alice Law set out to rescue her advisor’s soul from the Eight Courts of Hell. I