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Where the wild things are: a 14th-century artist’s vision of the end of the world.
Feeling a little overwhelmed? Our contributors have reading recommendations to get you through whatever crazy apocalypse comes next this summer.
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The Nightmare. Henry Fuseli, 1781. A very white woman, a very dark nightmare.
What could be more speculative at this moment than a vision of utopia? Utopia’s are hard to write. First, there’s convincing the reader that it’s possible at all. Contributor C.S. Peterson explores the haunting utopian visions of N. K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Aliette de Bodard, and S.L. Huang
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Find meaning and beauty in the midst, and aftermath, of pandemic in Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars.
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A new anthology of dark speculative fiction is out from Undertow Publications. Find out what we think of select stories and dare to dive in yourself! With everything happening this summer, dark spec fic might be just what the doctor ordered.
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In 19th century Malaysia, a young Straits Chinese woman receives a proposal to marry the son of a wealthy family, except he says he’s been murdered.
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Volume five of The Murderbot Diaries, reviewed.
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Cover art for Thin Places by Kay Chronister. Image description: A veiled woman stands alone in a darkening room. Cover art by Stephen Mackey. Cover design by Vince Haig.
You won’t want to miss this haunting debut collection. Thin Places by Kay Chronister available now from Undertow Publications.
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Guest contributor M. Shaw reviews Roupenian’s studies in feminist horror.
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3D illustration of the structure of a coronavirus.
In the crucible of catastrophe, we learn deeper truths about love, loyalty, and compassion.
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Cover art for Honeybones by Georgina Bruce. Cover design by Vince Haig. Image description: baby doll face reflected in a broken mirror with one eye filled with a light blaze, a flower of decayed leaves halo the mirror and there is a suggestion of something with black wings deep in the background.
Reading something dark and fantastic is great for enduring a pandemic.
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What does it mean to have agency when we find ourselves at the mercy of events utterly beyond our control?
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The stories of award-winning author Stephen Graham Jones are brimming with heart, hurt, humor, and gallons and gallons of blood. Fiction Unbound contributor C.S. Peterson talks with Mr. Jones to talk about monsters, his newest novel, and why the dogs never survive.
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Mark Bradford, Realness, 2016. Mixed media on canvas; 108.25 x 168.5 in. Denver Art Museum Collection
For Black History Month, some favorite short stories and novels by new and classic black SF/F writers.
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Nino Cipri’s novella FINNA, reviewed.
Read moreGrab your sweeties and give ‘em a gift of literature! Image — Boston : L. Prang & Co. [Public domain]
Considering ridding yourself of your semi-sweet? Give them a speculative test. Do they love these nuggets as much as you should? If so, consider keeping them around. In whatever form.
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Flocks of red birds haunt a school where girls are shaped by the desires of others. Clare Beams examines the creeping horror of growing up female.
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Cover art for Ninth House (Flatiron Books 2019)
In Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House the unlikely place of New Haven, Connecticut is one of the world’s centers of magical power.
Read moreThe Star Wars saga never fails to ignite passionate debate. Fiction Unbound contributors Corey Dahl and C. S. Peterson talk about the troubled template of Campbell’s hero’s journey and what The Rise of Skywalker says about where we are on our quest.
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Riot Baby by Tochi Onybuchi cover art features a close-up photo of the face of a young black woman with the title jumbled across it. Cover design by Jaya Micele. Cover photo © Getty Images.
Reader be warned: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi, coming out from Tor.com, is not for the faint of heart. That said, you should definitely read it. This book is violent because the lives of the children of Compton in the ‘90s were violent. Whenever a book opens with violence told nonchalantly, you have to know you are in for a lot of it. If you liked HBO’s Watchmen, you will also enjoy Riot Baby. The book opens with a scene on a school bus with the kids inside throwing Crip signs at the Bloods on the street. When a Blood boards the bus and holds a gun to a kid’s head, we see that our narrator, Ella, is an astute observer of her world.
“Ella can see in the gangbanger’s eyes that he’s got no compunctions about it, the guy would meet disrespect with murder.”
This is the reality of Ella’s world. Ella’s not only a keen observer; her powers are supernatural and continually unfold throughout the book. When we first meet her, we see that she can perceive the future for herself and for others. This ability comes at a cost—she not only experiences the emotional trauma of seeing people dying around her but also feels it physically. Coming from a neighborhood where violence is quotidian, this is a heavy burden for Ella to bear.
Onyebuchi’s language is spare but there is poetry in the beauty of his observations and in the way he renders relationships.
“Brother Harvey says a prayer for all of them; then he sends them back out to their parents or grandparents or people who act like their parents because they need to.”
The absence of family stability is clear but so too is the way the community comes together to take care of each other. There is love in this hard place. Ella’s family is no exception: her biggest source of stability is a woman she calls grandmother, though they are not related, and the love between them is big. She has an unreliable extremely religious pregnant mother. She does not have a father. She has some friends and connections, but she is a lonely character because of her powers, which her family demands she keep secret, and the foreknowledge that she will always be leaving.
The story is set against the backdrop of violence perpetrated against black communities in America. The first time marker is the police beating of Rodney King in 1991, which set off the L.A. Riots. Ella’s brother, Kev, a.k.a. Riot Baby, is born as the chaos begins. When the family emerges from the hospital, they see their city burned to the ground. Other markers include the police murder of Sean Bell, Oscar Grant III, Walter Scott and the Charleston Church shooting. He also seems to allude to the shooting of Tyrone Harris Jr. at the Michael Brown anniversary protest, though I wasn’t sure. (I’d be interested to hear from anyone more well versed in the topic as not all events are given names.) Riot Baby moves through Compton, Harlem, Rikers and Watts, and the violent incidents carry us from 1991 to 2015 through the terrifying America we know and then moves into a speculative future of the America we might get.
This book touches on a theme I have been curious about for a long time and that is the notion of freedom. How much do we actually have? What makes a person feel free? Something that I love about genre literature is the capacity it has for tackling big questions and for dealing with villainy at the systemic level. This book does both beautifully.
“Prison’s weird like that. All types of absurd shit happens here, and you just need the patience to step back and watch it happen. Maybe that comes with time. Maybe not. Maybe you spend your entire sentence here getting the shit kicked outta you. Maybe they kill you in here. But maybe you make it out. Not from behind bars, but out of wherever it is they try to put you when they put you behind bars.”
This book is great for readers who are looking to learn about the modern oppression of Black Americans while reading an entertaining story about siblings, power and freedom and whether the right course of action is just to burn it all down.
Riot Baby is available now for pre-order. Get it from your local bookstore in person or online. Or, if you must, the evil empire will certainly have it too.
Victorians liked to tell ghost stories around the hearth at Christmas. Here’s an old-but-timely one you can share around yours, even if it involves Zoom and/or the Yule Log channel.
We’re almost done with this, um, interesting year. That in itself is cause to celebrate. (photo credit:Patrick A. Mackie)
In this final novel of The Daevabad Trilogy, Ali, Nahri, and Dara are morally challenged beyond endurance by the rise of death magic in their beloved kingdom. How they respond changes everything.
We’ve had enough tricks already in 2020, so here’s a treat instead.
Craig Laurance Gidney’s Marsh-bell Queen is half muse, half greedy ghost, and all fascinating.
There is so much out there to read, and until you get your turn in a time loop, you don’t have time to read it all to find the highlights.
Butterfly Lampshade is Aimee Bender’s first novel in a decade and the follow-up book to her incredible short story collection The Color Master (2013). A book about memory and isolation that we didn’t know we needed.
Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel Daisy Jones & The Six is an exhilarating take on 1970s rock ‘n’ roll told in a fun and unique way. Reid pulls back the curtain on “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” to get to the heart of the experience of female artists in this entertaining “behind-the-scenes rock documentary” about a (fictional) rock ‘n’ roll legend.
A welcome entry into the non-Western fantasy field set in the ancient Mayan underworld, Xibalba, and the Mexican Jazz Age.
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Cadwell Turnbull's new novel — the first in a trilogy — imagines the hard, uncertain work of a fantastical justice.