There’s beauty in the imagery. There’s hope in it, even. But it’s inspiration, not application.

Many of Fu's stories revolve around real and imagined technologies’ effects on how people connect with each other.

I know I said romcomantasy.

When fantasy combines wit, humour, and magic as The Inescapable March does, while refusing the quick fix of happy ever after, it allows us to imagine worlds where life is not just a tedious linear repetition of nasty, brutish and short days until we die.

Longing is woven through these stories.

This is not comfortable reading. It is not intended to be.

In “What Inspires Me,” Patricia A. McKillip’s WisCon 2004 Guest of Honor speech, and penultimate entry in The Essential Patricia A. McKillip, the award-winning fantasy writer said: “What I set out to do about fifteen years ago was to write a series of novels that were like paintings in a gallery by the same artist. Each work is different, but they are all related to one another by two things: they are all fantasy, and they are all by the same person” (p. 298). That’s the best possible summary of what this new career retrospective is, I think, though of course it’s made of short stories and not novels.

Slow Gods is a high-concept effort full of delight and invention.

The original Black Company trilogy has been followed by pairs of sequels in which the first volume is largely passage work, setting up situations to be largely resolved in the second. With Lies Weeping, this technique runs the risk of diminishing returns

How did this accident occur? No idea. Is there anything we can do to stop it? No.