It’s an intriguing mix that Guran has put together here.

It is clear what this book wishes to satirize and critique, but what does it support?

Strange Horizons has now been 22 years in existence.

This collection deeply interrogates the act of storytelling, exploring what it means to imagine something into existence.

In Screams from the Dark argues that monster stories exist as warnings, as well as to show us that which we are afraid we might in fact become.

This is a readable but rigorous confrontation with what the Fantastic means today.

Throughout, the death-drive of regional colonial history is counterpoised against the speculative work of the impossible.

This novella seems to call to attention the importance of a story and its reception by others, how others perceive it, how it changes over time, and more importantly, how it may be altered depending on shifting culture, traditions, and beliefs.

When literary historians look back on this era, I know they’re going to say that Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh described a lot of how it was, and that the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Pixar described how we wanted things to be. But I hope they know that Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series describes how it feels. To be alive right now feels brutal, insane, complicated, tragic, and hilarious, and we are all of us so acutely aware of everything falling to pieces around us. I can think of few better expressions than Gideon (2019), Harrow (2020), and now Nona the Ninth, all of which are love letters to Millennial culture, paeans to shitposting and being perpetually online.

Four Strange Horizons reviewers discussed the first season of Amazon's The Rings of Power.

Destroying an empire has never been straightforward.

What do we want out of speculative fiction?

Manindra Gupta’s anthropomorphising turns an object of inquiry into a subject, then situates him amidst a dying but still-lively world.

In conclusion, I argue that SF fanzines in China mostly played a transitional role. That is, when no professional platforms were available to publish articles and stories, fanzines stepped in. Though most of those fanzines did not last very long, they played the important role of compiling and delivering information. The key reason why I identify those magazines as fanzines is because all the contributors joined out of their interest in SF and worked for free.

I wanted to ask francophone African speculative authors how they feel, how non-Black francophone African authors relate to the controversy, but also how they position themselves either as Afrofuturists or Africanfuturists, or as neither.

The new idea is to have the sixth sensors oversee the end of humanity.

Campbell does not make the common mistake to equate femininity with feminism or femaleness with feminism.

If there is any consistent theme to this volume, it is the importance of empathy.

Billed as a queer Joan of Arc in space, The Genesis of Misery is a bold, startling, and ambitious start to a planned trilogy.

And, it’s true, everything about these stories and about our history is painful. When Noor speaks to this desire to just stop listening, it is painful but also validating.

The First Binding is fundamentally and obviously invested in fantasy as a genre

Neom truly is written for die-hard fans of the speculative genre.

Stephanie Burt’s poetry collection We Are Mermaids explores existences between realities, or rather existing in more than one.

Bowen seamlessly blends the worlds of the natural and supernatural in a manner that reflects and uniquely represents the dual status of diasporic descendants.

Mirror joins the many contemporary fairy-tale retellings that make the older female antagonist a figure of tragic sympathy.

Those who write about music or incorporate musicality in their words often have an innate sense of that, whether or not they’re able to describe it in academic terms. And with this sense, writers often, possibly unknowingly, incorporate a few techniques from composition and songwriting into their prose.

There is a strain of speculative fiction that is particularly concerned with technical details; the Dirty Computer oeuvre does not belong to that strain.

We should try to write about music, dance about architecture, and make opera about economics too. 

There is more at work here than a few songs written on the page.

In a world in which consensus is breaking apart, and communication growing more fragmented, a resurgence of SF’s interest in translation would be no surprise; and it is this idea that binds together the six seemingly disparate novels on the shortlist of the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

The many excellent volumes in this well-crafted first shortlist bode well for the work of this prize in the years ahead.

There was perhaps no small irony to the creation of the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction.

Abdullah truly uses the setting and the inspiration from One Thousand and One Nights to the fullest, enriching the plot and the characters and the world she’s created.

The enduring impression these films leave on the viewer is one of profound cynicism about the ability of humanity to improve its lot.

To Catch a Moon stands somewhere at the intersection of fantasy, myth, and historical fiction, but in truth such a description fails to capture its essential strangeness.

The Chosen and the Beautiful is a short novel, but it invites slow readings and re-readings.

These stories, which share themes, plot elements, and characters, are all set in a near future where things are a little—or a lot—off.

Get ready to feel hungry, because the theme for this quarterly roundup is food.

The events described in this near-future SF are bleak. And yet, there’s a surprising level of optimism.

The novel's body-snatching is a versatile metaphor for sexual violence, colonialism, capitalism, and the intersection between the three.

The detail included in these panels and pages (as they are often full spread pages) requests the reader’s time, drawing the eye in, mimicking the slow shots of horizons and sunsets.

So we’re talking about a violence that supplants the histories of people and things, scrubbing them clean so that they can fuel the oppressive and unequal status quo it sustains.

Waste is profoundly shaping and changing our society and our way of living. Our daily mundane world always treats waste as a hidden structure, together with its whole ecosystem, and places it beyond our sight, to maintain the glories of contemporary life. But unfortunately, some are advantaged by this, while others suffer.

If we are to accept that the extractive unconscious is latent, is everywhere, part of everything, but unseen and unspoken, and killing us in our waking lives, then science fiction constitutes its dreams.

Science fiction is a genre that continues to struggle with its own colonialist history, of which many of its portrayals of extractivism are a part. Science fiction is also a genre that has a history of being socially progressive and conscious – these are both truths.

I propose that The Expanse and its ilk present us with a similar sentiment, in reverse—a warning that for all the promise of futurism and technological advancement, plenty of new, and perhaps much worse futures are right before us. In the course of outrunning la vieux monde, we may find that we are awaited not simply by new worlds to win, but also many more which may yet be lost.

Would a Teixcalaanli aristocrat look up at the sky, think of Lsel Station, and wonder—with Auden—"what doubtful act allows/ Our freedom in this English house/ our picnics in the sun"?

At the philosophical heart of the book is the question of how humans might protect the planet most effectively: by abandoning or employing technology?

Both these novels are powerful in giving voice to marginalized or dispossessed characters without being flat, formulaic, or overly discursive.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest novel is chimeric.

“Fanfiction-esque” original stories have to create both the story and the space for characters to react and grow within it. The Hourglass Throne shows Edwards juggling those elements to excellent effect.

There is little more inspirational than a writer who devotes her talents to the work of others.

It is an existential but natural crisis that presents itself in The Junction.

The stories in Memories of Tomorrow explore a future Basque region and beyond, along with destructive multinational corporations, mysterious alien entities, busy spaceports, and brave individuals.

Addison's inspiration seems to lie outside the fantasy genre.

In Just Like Mother, Anne Heltzel explores a survivor’s life.

Driggers wants to demonstrate—and succeeds in doing so—that the theories overlap, arise out of common impulses, and remain in constant conversation with one another.

The Dark Between the Trees also participates in an overlaying of narratives beyond the text—by adding to the entanglements between myth, history, and place that have been created when English and British fantasy narratives send hubristic researchers off in pursuit of timeslips in ancient woods.

Chupeco creates a hypnotic and cinematic atmosphere in their narrative, employing lyrical prose and sharp dialogue to blend society ballrooms with scientific research, eerie woods and winding caves with castles and courts.

The larger question looms: where does this all end, if not even in the afterlife?

Food is never just food. It’s memory, it’s love, it’s loss, it’s sadness and it’s nourishment

We are amazed, awed, delighted and have wept (in a good way) at the sheer talent represented in the stories, poems and essays. In fact, we are saddened that we couldn’t represent all of Southeast Asia. We have so much talent. 

Makapatag speaks of razor-edged demons, hands raised in a glorious call, and spider lilies that bloom in the darkness as if they are both fantastical and commonplace—mythologies that sit side-by-side with mankind rather than being distant from it.

Thus, here, on the landless soil of the online journal, I imagine a garden. Here, seeds of spice have already been planted by generations past and present; here, I call others to plant varietals of their own, not alone but in concert; to cross-pollinate and cross-fertilise;to till and to harvest; to feed readers of many tribes; to flourish as a collective.

Jennings has written a novel as a testament to that belief, that music and art and cultural expression keep the world turning, vitalize people to something greater than themselves, create communities of synthesis and contrast, spiritual and physical experiences.

Loss and grief are catalysts that spur them to take action and become active in their communities.

Did I mention there was a village?

I chose the photo where I’m with Dad outside the Hugo Losers Party, with my bright blue jacket and my squidgy-handled cane—Dad’s injured hand is in his pocket, not visible, but I know.  So there it was on the web, forever, Google keywords Ada Palmer disability.

I’ve been missing this kind of fantasy: the kind that meanders a bit, delighting in character rather than whipping the plot into a headlong charge.

"I am prone to enthusiastic delight—maybe that's how I do my Neurodivergence!"

It's a basic fact about this appliance that nobody really knows how it works.

As the Braking Day of the novel's title approaches, its characters begin contemplating the power structures governing their own society.

Chambers welcomes the reader into this place, sits with us our discomforts, our doubts, our grief, and then whispers to us that we can also take our time.

I spent a lot of time considering style in Garden of Earthly Bodies.

Mohamed never goes easy on her characters, and even when they’re on the verge of a breakthrough, it’s obvious that another setback is lurking just around the corner. Possibly with tentacles.

Abad is acutely aware that the estranging power of speculation can provide a chance to bridge the alienation that it seems to produce.

I had such a fun time reading this novel.

Although I can see the similarities to vampires, the deep gender divides in book eater society and the unique way that the book eaters operate put them in an inventive literary class of their own.

“You are right. I understood this myself when I read your novel The Time Machine. All Human conceptions are on the scale of our planet. They are based on the pretension that the technical potential, though it will develop, will never exceed the terrestrial limit. If we succeed in establishing interplanetary communications, all our philosophies, moral and social views, will have to be revised. In this case the technical potential, become limitless, will impose the end of the role of violence as a means and method of progress.” (Vladimir Ilych Lenin, in conversation with H. G. Wells at the Kremlin, Moscow, 1920) “We have internal enemies.

Strange Horizons will be open to fiction submissions in October!

Maps, like any other form of communication, are subjective: they tell a story, they have a point of view, they can lie or simply be wrong.

The problem with Hainak is that there’s so little incentive to fix it among those who might do so.

Book of Night is a fun, atmospheric, and engaging romp that will surely bewitch fantasy lovers—but it has some problems.

We welcome Lisa M. Bradley, Ian Finch, and Vanessa Jae to the masthead, and say a fond farewell to departing editors Sydney Hilton and Vajra Chandrasekera.

This planet might be a home, but it’s not one that coddles life, and living can come at a price.

A sense of the capacity of the weird, even the whimsical, to open windows onto the dark and messy world of adulthood is present in Ma’s stories.

None of this is helped by the Moffat of it all.

Whether we want to admit it or not, all humans (and, indeed, all sentient creatures) need connection.

Redundant suggests not an imminent arrival of dystopia, but highlights something that is embedded within us.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a Chinese-American kung fu science fiction movie that pays homage to iconic works from Hollywood and Hong Kong cinema while creating a new kind of action movie, one in which empathy wins.

Strange Horizons is on the hunt for new volunteer first readers to join our fiction team.

Vo shows us a world—surely nobody living in the now times can relate!—that offers very few good choices, and the characters must choose what parts of themselves they’re willing to give up. Having it all was never an option.

The stories in How to Get to Apocalypse and Other Disasters play with that older definition of apocalypse as an unveiling or revealing.

Swirsky disclaims interest in the implementation or administration of Universal Basic Income as a policy, instead being “curious about other questions.”

The term ‘Kalpavigyan’ is an amalgamation of ‘Kalpa’ (imagination) and ‘Vigyan’ (Science).

One of the most important facets of good hard SF is also the easiest to lose sight of.

There are plenty of reasons to love epistolary storytelling. Personally, I love the way various epistolary formats can shape a story in interesting and innovative ways, and I also love how the choice of format can hone the voice of a story.

By this work Aldiss has been given a thorough assessment, and almost all of his work has been found lacking.

Face as a whole doesn’t quite know if it wants to frighten you or fascinate you.

In the children’s minds, the chasm between childhood and adulthood is wide enough that not even the wings would be enough to open the adults’ eyes.

We're a week and a half into this year's fund drive. And we're looking to add a Poetry Editor and an Assistant Poetry Podcast Editor.

All the authors in this collection advocate for change concerning our environment, a change that they do not hesitate on in their analyses.

If we each have an ability to recognize the expression of beauty that lies in each of us, then through patience and understanding we might exercise it more readily.

Other schema are available.

At its best Girl One is an exciting mystery/thriller, with an underlay of science-fantasy. The novel’s science-fictional aspirations, however, are not as successful or as compelling as its portrayal of the strength of female relationships, be they mother/daughter, friends, “sisters,” or lesbian lovers.

Spoilers for Croggon’s Books of Pellinor, Bardugo’s Grishaverse, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Pierce’s Tortall universe, and Jemisin’s Broken Earth novels. Note: The Bardugo and Jemisin maps are from the author's websites (grishaverse.com and Jemisin's website), the Tolkien map is from a wallpaper website (wallpaperaccess.com), both Croggon maps are from Pinterest, the Martin map is from the A Song of Ice and Fire wiki, and the Pierce map is from a fansite last updated in the early 2000s. They are accurate maps from the books, but from different sources. No copyright infringement was intended.

For all the remarked upon “prescience” of most of her novels, Egan’s timeline is ordered and linear, set consummately in the immediate now.

By trying to remake herself without the burden of her familial traumas, Nadia breaks time itself.

The richly symbolic imagery and confusingly absent context work to decenter readers from the “familiar” or assumed role/s for black mothers in fiction, and the blend of terror and horror accentuate the goal of showing this woman as a beautifully flawed human being.

There are many elements that set Saint Death’s Daughter apart.

It is within this grid that the monologue and the soliloquy, which occur in both Macbeth and pro wrestling generally, are replicated.

The future is coming, faster than we want it to, and we can and should decide which direction it goes.

The large-scale sweep of history and counter-history inevitably raises questions which detract from this novel's central theme.

The lens of science fiction often works by making reality look unbelievable.

Upstairs, the prime minister is meeting with all the party members because they are worried about how to save themselves. As in, just themselves and no one else.  Because they are selfish fucks.

Let’s strive to make the best art we can, but never from the starting point of fear, but of personal honesty.

There is an oddity to this anthology’s overall structure, which is where its issues start to creep in.

"When I can't move, I write, and those two things are deeply connected."

In the Middle Ages, Arthurian literature quickly became a kind of early global literature itself, traveling across wide waterways and continents, and Griffith reminds us that the Roman Empire with its own tremendous reach made its British extension a more cosmopolitan place than most modern Arthurian adaptations imagine.

It’s rare for me to feel so sympathetic for a book that I believe is profoundly wrong.

Goliath’s anger is apparent, as well as its learning, its mourning, its love. 

Sometimes clarity is the last thing we need in a world filled with chaos.

This is a novel concerned to such a degree with interiority, both physical and mental, that it's sometimes difficult to tell what's going on outside of the characters.

This might sound dramatically dystopian, but it doesn’t come across as such.

Khaw has constructed a weirdly unreal atmosphere.

[ . . . ] uses its speculative setting to capture a unique perspective on transformation and becoming

At first glance, She Who Became the Sun seems like it would sit comfortably on the shelf beside the tremendous flowering of twenty-first century epic fantasy.

Creatures of Passage has a deep, powerful connection between the living and dead and the in-between.

For epicures of early twentieth-century fiction, there may be much to delight here.

James’s kind of meaning is to be sure fragile, temporary, and hard-won—but that is precisely why it means anything at all.

The Bone Shard Emperor improves on The Bone Shard Daughter, which was already an engaging read, in several welcome respects.

Between the covers of Wild and Wicked Things is a narrative of trauma and recovery.

It may sound glib to trot out the Firefly or Mandalorian or comparisons, but the text itself invites these parallel readings.

Nettle and Bone is a book about abuse. It is also funny and heartfelt.

A Country of Ghosts is a utopian novel intended to offer the “argument that freedom is possible.”

The City of Dusk's structure creates a story that feels very intimate and narrowly focused while also showcasing a rich, sprawling world.

Ni often defends the fact that the writers in this collection are deploying tropes that might seem old-hat to those who grew up with English-language SF.

Sometimes as I lie in bed, more-than-half asleep, I take a step that seems to be toward wakefulness—but I go astray. This feeling reminds me of circling a tree with one big stride. Just for a moment, I guess the dark woods disguise me from myself. When I find myself, I find myself restored: it wouldn’t be surprising if these absences were signs of some specific activity of neurochemical maintenance and repair. I feel sifted, like the leafy canopy sifts the sun into spangles.[1] Yet such moments are also glitches. They are slippages to do with memory and duration. I am pretty sure this “lostness” has lasted just a second, but … it may have been more like two.[2]

In Marske’s romantic fantasy, the protagonists spend their nights in a country home, are victims of magical sports, quibble in the library and get lost in a neatly-manicured but murderous hedge-maze.

In Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders weaves the words of her own short stories like an ancient sorcerer

In many of these stories, it’s into these miasmas of masculine anxieties that the speculative elements intrude, and offer a path out—whether emotionally or literally.

Despite all its introspection, the narrative is almost relentlessly fast-paced.

Hudson’s intellectual project here is an intriguing one.

Due to the high volume of submissions we received during our November 2021 open call, we are taking longer than average to review all of the stories. Rest assured we are doing everything we can to work our way through each of your stories with care and attention. Though we try to respond within 90 days, that is not the case currently with the state of the world and impacts on our staff. Our goal is to finish reading through all submissions by May 2022.

Goddess of Limbo’s greatest strength is its author’s obvious care and respect for her characters in their diverse range of identities and experiences. Other characters and the structures of this fictional society might disregard and dismiss trauma, queerness, or dissent, but the book itself never does.

Initially it can appear disparate, but look a little closer and there’s a clear, incisive intelligence quietly constructing parallels, reflections, a small collection of mirrors.

Art “Artist Interview: Juliana Pinho's Making-Of” by Juliana Pinho (01/18/21) “Artist Interview: Aya Ghanameh” by Dante Luiz (03/29/21) “Artist Interview: Sunmi” by Dante Luiz (05/31/21) “Artist Interview: Palloma Barreto” by Dante Luiz (07/05/21) Articles and Columns “The Waters Of This Place: Aotearoa New Zealand Speculative Fiction” by AJ Fitzwater (01/25/21) “New Horizons: A Conversation with the Editors of Rikka Zine, khōréō mag, and Constelación” by Gautam Bhatia, Terrie Hashimoto, Coral Alejandra Moore, Lian Xia Rose, Rowan Morrison, and Alexandra Hill (02/22/21) “Taking Care: The Humane Heart of Science Fiction” by Judith Tarr (03/22/21) “Roundtable: The palestinian speculative” by Fargo Tbakhi, N.

This novel suggests that our lives are both lived in a moment, but also expressions of underlying and universal themes.

This novel about freedom and determination is itself a study in skillful manipulation of the reader.

Hardaker has structured her novel so that the key revelation, which one might expect to come near the beginning so the implications can be explored, comes at the end. Canny readers may guess what it is, but that’s not the point.

The majority of The Blue-Spangled Blue's more interesting plot threads simply vanish midway through the book.

This novel is infused with the bizarre.

What makes a science fiction novel true space opera, in the best sense?

This show is considered to be the first science fiction radio show, and at its best, it encapsulated much of what I love about golden age sci-fi.

We would like stories that are joyous, horrific, hopeful, despondent, powerful and subtle. Write something that will take our breath away, make us yell and cry. Write unapologetically in your local patois and basilects in space; make references to local events and memes to your heart’s content. Write something that makes you laugh and cry. Indulge in all the hallmarks of your heritage that you find yourself yearning for in speculative literature, but know that we will not judge you based on your authenticity as a Southeast Asian. 

"In some of my poetry, I feel like I’m freeing words of their boundaries and letting them absorb new meanings and new possibilities."

Grievers is written into the real-life history of organizing and activism, of Black freedom and white supremacy, of gentrification and bureaucracy, of racism and capitalism, and of outsiders claiming to know what’s best.

Not all post-apocalypses are created equal.

It pulls the covers off the fact that it’s usually clear in superhero movies that the heroes do absolutely kill people, but that we just accept the violence as cartoonish and pretend everyone who falls from a third-storey window gets off with a sprained ankle.

Payseur repeatedly demonstrates that his strength lies in efficiency.

While the world seems to be teetering on the edge of totalitarian dystopia, Cyber Mage gives you the feeling that there remains too much complexity and heterogeneity for it to ever come entirely within that form of homogenous control.

The Storm creates an effective mosaic of a deeply uncomfortable future

But it is important to recognise that Summer Fun’s vision of an America in which it is still possible to have hope is, explicitly, a counterfactual, a speculation, a “what if?”

Brenchley tackles the complicated overlap between love (platonic, romantic, and sexual) and loss (physical, emotional, and spiritual), in stories that are at once intimate and universal.

Like most Edwardian SFF novels, A World of Women begins in London and expands outwards.

To bear witness to something like climate crisis is a political act.

Soto injects realism into science fiction and its tropes—instead of the other way around.

If you’ve ever had to read primary source documents and contend with the liberties they take with regard to fact, to read them as a historian does, then Civilizations is something of a marvel; a real history of no history at all. It’s simultaneously fascinating and tedious.

Wagner’s skill as a poet comes from her meditative quality, her quietude, her tenderness and kindness in her language.

it’s almost impossible not to view Vern’s story through a historical lens, and this is a quality of Solomon’s novel that repeats regularly as the plot develops

We tend to come to book reviews a-wondering: will this resonate with my current needs and interests? Does it contain signs and portents that might carry me fruitfully through the current fray? Does its existence tell me anything about where others can now be found in their own cultural landscapes, and which of their own needs and interests it might be answering?

Reading Garner is, for some people, like a treasure hunt. But to trace out all those connections is not in itself an act of critical writing; it’s a process of annotation. Criticism is about asking questions—and perhaps answering them, too.

The binary is a complex construct, but for the purposes of this essay the following aspects are important: (1) It is coercive; (2) it is totalizing; (3) it is essentializing.

A tribute to the power of stories, songs, and art in general, this is a deceptively simple tale about love that belies an underlying complexity, and which holds the reader spellbound right from its opening lines.

In this roundtable discussion, Gautam Bhatia, Nic Clarke, and Abigail Nussbaum discuss the Amazon Prime Video adaptation of Robert Jordan's novels, and how to approach both the production—and its relationship to the source—material critically.

So I think both analysis and the personal are showing up in both forms, but the “argument,” insomuch as there is one, comes through in different ways.

Christopher Priest and Paul Kincaid discuss an involvement in fiction and reviewing that dates back to at least the early 1970s, as well as the present and possible futures of SFF criticism.

All in all, this collection packs a punch.

When we were first asked to take on the Strange Horizons Reviews department, in the summer of 2014, we said yes for two main reasons: the first was that we knew each other already in various ways, and thought we would enjoy working together (in the years since, this intuition has proven more correct than we knew); and, secondly and even more importantly, because we thought reviews were important. That’s why, since our appointment and barring a week or so here and there, we have done our utmost to deliver three long-form reviews in every single issue of this brilliant magazine (we really have no idea how our successive predecessors in Reviews, Niall Harrison and Abigail Nussbaum, possibly achieved this alone).

When I first told Maureen Kincaid Speller that A Closed and Common Orbit was among my favourite current works of science fiction she did not agree with me. Five years later, I'm trying to work out how I came to that perspective myself.

Tachyon has put together a collection of stories that will appeal to anyone who has walked beneath the shadow of trees and felt those shadows heavy with intent.

Lindqvist has a talent for making his novels read like a film reel running through your brain.

I love flash fiction for a lot of reasons. There’s the instant gratification of reading a complete work of fiction in just a few minutes. And there’s the way flash lends itself to playful, inventive experimentation with form, prose, style, voice, and subject. I also love the way a flash story can be honed and sharpened as everything extraneous is eliminated, and the way it can capture and convey the essence of something—an emotion, a world, a situation, a possibility, an idea, even a joke!—in brilliant brevity.

The titular character of Mebet is unpleasant. That I could live with. The problem is I don’t find him compelling either.

Hope without action behind it is only a recipe for deeper heartache.

I found myself drawn into the narration’s exploration of philosophical concepts, all done in an approachable, whimsical tone, but I felt far less pull when it came to the plot.

We have all brushed against the limits of communication. We have all wished we could somehow share our inner experiences without having them polluted by the space between our minds and the minds of others. Unity enters the space of that frustration and moves beyond it. What if, the novel asks, we could merge with others?

The feelings Jade Legacy created in me were like watching a sports team I support as they play through a nail-biting, extended final.

There is an argument to be made that this novella should either have been a novel, to give all of its storyline elements more depth, or else markedly reduced in both size and scope, to zero in on the most vital components. And yet, I’m inclined to think that “novella” was the correct size for this piece, despite all its moving parts.

Schanoes isn’t just retelling, or remixing, or reinterpreting—she’s doing a lot more than simply giving us Grimm, Lang, or d’Aulnoy in modern dress.

It’s refreshing and enriching to think of war in space, or just war in general, not as an eventuality but as something we could all just choose to avoid.

Marisa Mercurio: Over the past few years, I’ve devoted my evenings to catching up on classic horror movies. Or, more accurately, classics and schlocky forgotten flicks with lots of flesh and unrealistic gore. Though I don’t feel any of the nostalgia for the 1980s that makes Stranger Things so popular, I confess that the decade’s colorful and brazen take on horror appeals to me more than any other era. So, even though I’m dreadful at keeping up with new movies, I made sure to sit down to watch Prano Bailey-Bond’s debut film Censor as soon as it was released this year.

Prashanth Gopalan: As though to demonstrate that time is an arbitrary concept conceived to give order and meaning to an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable world, the broad themes of 2021 felt like a continuation of those of 2020: more economic uncertainty, more political turbulence, more teetering on the edge of a slow-motion ecological collapse. My response was to seek refuge in other worlds—contemporary, historical, real, fantastical—that I cannot (yet) travel to. I started off with Julia von Lucadou’s The High-Rise Diver, a novel set in a dreary, corporate, digital surveillance society remarkably like our own, where a star psychiatrist and a celebrity athlete square off in a battle of wills.

Strange Horizons calls for applications to the post of Fundraising Editor. 

As long-time readers will recall, it is our habit to begin a new reviewing year by asking the Strange Horizons reviewers to talk about the other things they read, watched, and played during the previous year. Last year, I said: "During 2020 most of us have leaned harder than ever on books, TV, and games of one sort or another to fill our time," and that has been true, too, of 2021, the second year of the pandemic. This year, however, many of us, myself included, have struggled at times to read or watch anything at all, and when we did, we often turned to comfort reading/viewing of one sort or another.