What I loved about The X-Files (while it was still airing; not the reboot garbage) was its commitment to showing all the weird little subcultures and sub-subcultures of American life. The media and the internet was already making America smaller, but The X-Files made it seem so big. Witches and monsters and aliens and mutants …

Do you like action? What about romance? And how about apocalyptic magic that literally turns people inside out? I hope it’s all three, but even if you’re not so sure, Charlie N. Holmberg’s Smoke and Summons will convince you. It’s a wild, breathless dash through a grim urban environment, with mobsters and demons around every …

The holidays are over, the snow is frozen into grayish piles by the corners, and going outside is just not a very good idea. Here are three books to tide you over until temperatures improve, and hopefully make the winter a little warmer. Outside the Gates (Molly Gloss) – This is a re-release and re-formatting …

I admit that I’m not a big fan of short story collections. I’m thrown off by the wild jumps in setting, narrative voice, and theme, so I tend to only read three or four stories before getting distracted by a novel. My exception is for collections of interlocking stories, set in the same world, dealing …

Sylvain Neuvel really doesn’t like conventional narrative formats. His debut trilogy, the Themis Files (Sleeping Giants, Waking Gods, and Only Human) was written entirely as “found” documents, everything from transcribed interrogations to diary entries. Now he’s back with a Tor.com novella, which is told in the form of a 25-question test. But of course, even …

Thank you so much for agreeing to answer some questions for Geekly, Inc.! I loved The City in the Middle of the Night, and I know that our readers are eager to learn more about January and your processes in creating it. To start with, let’s talk about January, a planet locked between boiling sun …

“‘We measure the freedom of human beings by their ability to change with their environment. The only truly alien influence is the dead grasping fingers of our own past.’” (296) Charlie Jane Anders wrote the cypher for her own The City in the Middle of the Night, an inventive work of science fiction interested in …

This book begins with a young man in a prison cell, chatting with his torturer. It also begins with a young man being sold as a slave at auction. And then it begins a third time with a young man casing an empty house, finding far more than a simple burglar should find. They’re all …

I’ve been a fan of Django Wexler since his first book, Memories of Empire, came out in 2005. He impressed me then with his atypical characters and understated wit, and that has remained a reassuring constant in this cruel, chaotic world. Isoka, our heroine for Ship of Smoke and Steel, is another great leading lady …

Please note that this review contains spoilers for the His Fair Assassin trilogy by Robin LaFevers. Courting Darkness is an immediate followup to the trilogy, beginning only a few days after the end of Mortal Heart. Sybella was my favorite of the three protagonists from the His Fair Assassin trilogy, and I’m thrilled to see …