So Mayer Under Review:Alston Moor. Anne Charnock. Goldsmiths, September 2026.Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture. Noelle Catharine Allan. Black Lawrence Press, September 2026. It feels strange to proffer c…

The Hunger of Those Who Built It, Wendy War­ing (Stelliform Press, 978-1-99846-605-4, $21.99, 376pp, tp) September 2026. Cover by Juliane Van Huizen. From a near future that tends towards the abstr…

As the bestselling author Hernan Diaz turns from the competing histories of Trust to the distant future in new novel, Ply , we recommend four other literary takes on America's potential tomorrows.&nbs...

The Hunger of Those Who Built It, Wendy Waring (Stelliform Press, 978-1-99846-605-4, $21.99, 376pp, tp) September 2026. Cover by Juliane Van Huizen. From a near future that tends towards the abstract ...

Traitors' Nest, Frances Hardinge (First Ink UK 978-1-52909-064-2, £16.99, 448pp, hc) August 2026. (Amulet 978-1-4197-9414-8, $19.99, 400pp, hc) September 2026. For the villagers who farm the valley where Frances Hardinge's Traitors' Nest begins, their world is arranged in a straightforward hierarchy. The lord in the castle sends commands through his bailiff, who talks to local leaders like the game warden Joett, who organizes the farmers accordingly, and sends their complaints …Read More

The Ancillary Review of Books is looking to grow our editorial team!  ARB is an online magazine that publishes reviews and critical essays, centered on speculative fiction and related non-fict…

The Infinite State, Richard Swan (Tor, 978-1-25038-622-9, $29.99, 416pp, hc) August 2026. Richard Swan's career to date has been pleasingly catholic in genre terms, and perhaps increasingly typical within our field. After an early self-published military SF trilogy, The Art of War (2015-2016), he was picked up by Orbit for epic fantasy trilogy Empire of the Wolf (2022-2024), and currently has another trilogy in the same setting ongoing, of which …Read More

I love stories about fairies, and about people who live in worlds that intersect with them, the people whose lives have been touched by them for good, and for ill. They are often the stories that b…

When asked in a 2012 interview how he feels about being called a “writer’s writer,” M. John Harrison “describes the ‘practice crag’ found in almost every Peak District town or village”:  “It may no…

Recommend works here for the Otherwise Awards jurors to consider!

The Felicity Complex, August Clarke (Erewhon 978-1-64566-117-7, $28.00, 320pp, hc) July 2026. Specimen 679-b lives in a vat. It swims in a serum of unknown composition and purpose. It has tubes going into its arms and throat. To alleviate boredom, it plays a game in which it stares at a lightbulb until its retinas burn (they get better) or smashes its head against the glass to bring the doctors running. …Read More

A book resistant to many things, among them clarity, simplicity and relatability, and mostly the better for it. "Nothing in memory ever made...

Rachel S. Cordasco, Out of This World: Speculative Fiction in Translation from the Cold War to the New Millennium (University of Illinois Press, 2021) Jean-Paul L. Garnier: What was your initial at…

Arts Council designated status for Europe's largest science fiction collection

We’re especially happy to announce some new appointments at the Reviews Department.

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker (Coffee House Press, 978-1-56689-755-6, $20.00, 240pp, hc) May 2026. Sometimes you wait ages for a story about a group thrown together at a music festival in an extreme location who then embark on a strange and surreal journey-quest as a kind of makeshift family (a term that I picked up from the academic Yue Xie at a …Read More

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker (Coffee House Press, 978-1-56689-755-6, $20.00, 240pp, hc) May 2026. Sometimes you wait ages for a story about a group thrown together at a music festival in an extreme location who then embark on a strange and surreal journey-quest as a kind of makeshift family (a term that I picked up from the academic Yue Xie at a …Read More

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, Mónica Ojeda, tr. Sarah Booker (Coffee House Press, 978-1-56689-755-6, $20.00, 240pp, hc) May 2026. Sometimes you wait ages for a story about a group thrown together at a music festival in an extreme location who then embark on a strange and surreal journey-quest as a kind of makeshift family (a term that I picked up from the academic Yue Xie at a …Read More

In the mid-90s, my family went on a road trip in New England. My mother, eager to reinforce her children’s only-nominal Americanness, started us off in Boston and plotted a course full of historical p...

The winners of the Hugo Awards, the Astounding Award for Best New Writer, and the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book were announced on August 30, 2026 by LAcon V, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention. The winners are: Best Novel WINNER: The Everlasting,Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK) amazon / bookshop A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape) amazon / bookshop …Read More

Author of When There Are Wolves Again

In a little more than a day, the winners of this year's Hugo awards will be announced in Los Angeles . I've toned down my discussion of the...

So, who’s going to win?

The context of this year’s award is acutely political.

It’s incredible that M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything was longlisted for the Booker.* ...

Heaven's Graveyard, Grace Curtis (DAW 978-0-75641-984-4, $22.00, 368pp, tp) June 2026. Cover by Aled Thompson. Grace Curtis's Heaven's Graveyard is a novel whose protagonist is in love with the past. The somewhat whimsically named Coda Canalluny, known familiarly as Cod, first read Ashan Myths for Children when she was just nine years old, and fell in love with the adventures from her world's mythic era, when humans contended with gods …Read More