Ralph Harris

Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

“If that’s our future, it’s already here.”

Interview by Ralph Harris

You’ve finished your first book! How do you feel?
Very relieved, like I’ve finally reached the surface for a sip of air. This isn’t the first novel I’ve started but the first I feel is finished. It went through many revisions, and I’m grateful to have people who’ve been so patient and supportive. 

What did you learn from writing Luminous that you would like to take with you while drafting future novels?
I learned I can’t write in isolation. I like to be in dialogue with a couple books while I’m drafting. It’s like teaching a toddler to talk—can’t let them babble on their own. The books I kept returning to were Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

What drew you to Luminous’ cyberpunk setting?
I confess, this wasn’t a conscious choice so much as a failure of my imagination. I wrote the world I grew up in, and that was Seoul. It’s a crowded city, much denser in population than New York. It’s dizzyingly neon at night; it’s usually smoggy and outrageous and overstimulating. But it’s home.

For me, the real appeal of cyberpunk is the noir element. There’s usually a detective story, which is the spine for Luminous. A mystery or conspiracy that reflects our eroding faith in society. The world is seen as dark, isolating, ravaged by capitalism and war, and people are so plugged in, they’re unable to separate reality from virtuality. That sounds rather familiar. If that’s our future, it’s already here.

” . . . we’ve replaced religion with technology in this pursuit of a solution to death.”

Korean reunification is a central aspect of Luminous’ world. What interested you about that scenario? What resonance did it lend to the story for you?
The setting of Luminous came to me much later. In earlier drafts, I started with sad, mopey people and dropped them into a thinly sketched Pan-Asia. Then it felt too fraught to envision a future like that. Korea was nearly obliterated a couple times throughout history; in the past century or so, there was the Japanese colonization, and then Korea was liberated—brief hooray—before it plunged into civil war and the country has been divided ever since. It seemed cruel to write a future cannibalizing a country that had fought so hard to exist. I wanted to respect its resilience. And it was very difficult to imagine a Korea of the future without the North, without the possibility of reunification in mind.

Growing up in Seoul, you live with a cognitive dissonance, aware of the North’s suffering, just beyond that border. I think, like many in my generation, I’ve had to numb myself to let that reality sit in my chest. With it lives a kind of yearning, not for someone you’ve known, but for someone you should have known.

What was interesting to you about a sentient robot? Was there a specific influence you drew from?
For Luminous, I wanted to explore the paradox of our relationship with robots. By far the uncanniest for me is the child robot. I grew up watching Astro Boy (Space Boy Atom in Korea). Even then, I thought it was creepy-cute to design a robot to look like a child. Now it seems so counterintuitive. A child has to learn everything from scratch. They’re still fumbling shoelaces and dribbling food on themselves. How is a robot supposed to mimic a child when everything about a child is so antithetical to a functioning robot?

But nowadays, we have grieving parents who can take the pictures of their deceased child and use AI to age them, giving themselves a chance to see their child grow up. This was one of the starting points for Luminous, the way we’ve replaced religion with technology in this pursuit of a solution to death.

Read our review of ‘Luminous’ by Silvia Park.

Do you think you’ll see semi- to fully-sentient robots in your lifetime?
I used to think the intelligence of the robots depicted in Luminous was still, perhaps forever, out of reach. But I also cannot underestimate our obsession with AI, especially for profit. In the race between achieving GAI (general artificial intelligence) and hastening climate catastrophe, I’ve no idea which will win. Just look at how crypto mining is casually devastating to the environment, but rarely is this discussed.

Couple this with our capacity for immense loneliness, and I fear for the moment we successfully merge AI programming with a convincing, soft-boiled body. Not too long ago, we had a Google engineer, since fired, insist that a chatbot was sentient. If a software engineer can be convinced by a faceless chatbot, I don’t think us laypersons will stand a chance.

If you had to replace a body part with a robotic replacement, which would you pick? (I would pick my left arm, it’s mostly useless anyway.)
Great pick! I’d choose eyes. I have a genetic quirk that means my sight will degrade early in life. But I’d be scared to lose the skewed, hazy way I see the world, so I might halve it and just replace one eye, like Jun.

“The future is so fluid, I think it’s best to reimagine it constantly.”

Were there any key influences that molded Ruijie, Jun and Morgan?
I decided to split Luminous into four perspectives: two adults (Jun and Morgan) and two children (Ruijie and Taewon). That choice was inspired by a line from Louise Gluck’s poem, “Nostos”: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”

I’m fascinated by memory. The older we get, the more we seem tempted to hold on to one version of a story and lovingly polish it until it gleams. This lends itself to a kind of myopia in adults that feels different from the solipsism of children who, for all their lack of experience, remain malleable, clear-eyed and hopeful.

With Jun and Morgan, I wanted to explore these siblings who have clashing accounts of their childhood, casting different people in the roles of villain and victim, and how this has shaped them as adults.

Ruijie, as I think I wrote in the first chapter, is a “child beloved.” What struck me about Ruijie, going beyond her very human moments of pettiness, jealousy and anger, was this capacity for immense tenderness. Many very ill children end up reversing roles with their parents, and have to be strong for them. I think that’s why hers is a love story. She falls in love with a robot in the way only she can.

Would you consider writing more novels in this same setting?
Oh, I hope not. I’d rather not stick around in a world for too long or it grows stale like a day-old scone. The future is so fluid, I think it’s best to reimagine it constantly.

What’s next for you?
My fingers are crossed for a much slimmer book than the last. I’m working on a novel about mermaids. Beautiful, bloodthirsty and matriarchal.

Photo of Silvia Park © Han Jeongseon.

Silvia Park’s debut novel, Luminous, takes place in a near-future, reunified Korea where robots bear the weight of human emotions.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Luminous

Review by Ralph Harris

In a reunified Korea, sometime in the indeterminate future, robots have altered the world on a smartphone-style scale. And in particular, a robot named Yoyo has altered the lives of police officer Jun; his sister, roboticist Morgan; and an 11-year-old girl named Ruijie. A prototype of Morgan and Jun’s father, a famous scientist and inventor, Yoyo lived with their family for years as a near-facsimile of a brother, without aging and seemingly without limits to his abilities. Yoyo abruptly disappeared from Jun and Morgan’s lives before they were adults. Years later, when Luminous begins, Ruijie finds him in a scrapyard. She’s dealing with a debilitating, degenerative disease, and Yoyo is the exact companion she could use to brighten her bleak days.

In their debut novel, author Silvia Park patiently drip-feeds world building details and backstory, such as the “Bloodless War” that reunited the two halves of Korea and the subsequent tensions between South Koreans and North Korean refugees. The reader first learns of Yoyo from Ruijie’s perspective, and only ascertains the details of Jun’s and Morgan’s relationships with him over time. This creates a slight haze, similar to the one that descends while you’re attempting to remember a long-forgotten childhood memory. As Park reminds us, the human mind is fallible, but robots never forget.

Silvia Park thinks the future they describe in ‘Luminous’ may already be here.

Characters live in their internal monologues just as often as they speak to other characters, whether it is Jun brooding about his relationships with other officers while searching for a lost robot, or Morgan struggling to relate to the boyfriend-bot she has made for herself while working toward the release of a new model from her megacorporation. The constantly shifting perspectives keep the story engaging and the reader on alert for vital clues to Luminous’ various mysteries, but can also be overwhelming at times.

A refreshing take on what it means to be a robot, Luminous characterizes androids and bots as expressions of human weakness. Morgan creates a robot to love her in a way she has never been loved. Ruijie wants a sibling and friend who will last forever, because she will not. Each robot exists as a reflection of the world around them, for better or for worse.

A refreshing take on what it means to be a robot, Silvia Park’s Luminous characterizes androids and bots as expressions of human weakness and desire.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Hammajang Luck

Review by Ralph Harris

Set in the remote Kepler system, far from Earth, Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto follows a thief named Edie as they try to make a life for themself after an eight-year stint in prison. Edie is released early thanks to their old friend and former partner in crime, Angel, who gives them the opportunity of a lifetime: a heist targeting Joyce Atlas, the CEO of their space station home. There’s one huge problem—Angel once betrayed Edie, which was what sent them to prison in the first place.

Trusting Angel is a difficult prospect, but Edie doesn’t have many options. They’ve been blacklisted by the mega-corp that controls the space station, so they can’t get any respectable work. Andie, Edie’s sister, works two jobs to keep her two kids fed, and has a third on the way. Edie reluctantly joins Angel’s crew, despite having built up eight years of resentment and hurt. However, even when the pair’s emotions explode, Yamamoto makes it clear that they still care for each other: Angel will surprise Edie with a joke or concern for their safety, while Edie burns with sympathy for Angel’s struggles.

Angel’s small team is composed of lovable miscreants, like 17-year-old hacker Malia, who jabbers incessantly, and naive dancer Sara, who is just as excited to take her first steps into a life of crime as she is to buy Malia a present. While the different crew members do not always get along perfectly, there is never really a sense they would betray each other. Yamamoto focuses on their supportive natures: When Sara runs her first grift and has to dodge a mark’s attempt to drug her drink, the crew burns to defend her even while they stay on task. As soon as she escapes the harrowing situation, each member comforts and supports Sara while her adrenaline cools off.

Each step in the crew’s methodical scheme is practical, contributing to the verisimilitude of Yamamoto’s world building as ID cards are cloned, fingerprints taken and escape routes secured. This is not the master plan of a super-genius, perfectly executed the night before the heist. It is more akin to the work of a skilled craftsperson: Watching Angel’s plan slowly come together feels like watching an experienced painter, with the precision on display inspiring muted awe.

The novel’s final act builds on all the momentum of two-act rising action, wrapping things up with an ultimately satisfying, if somewhat predictable, ending. Like an Ocean’s movie set in space, Hammajang Luck will charm readers looking for a smooth ride with a lovable cast.

Like an Ocean’s movie set in space, Hammajang Luck will charm readers looking for a smooth ride with a lovable cast.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Run

Review by Ralph Harris

Run by Blake Crouch is a thriller that dips its toe just far enough into the world of science fiction to be deeply unsettling. In the lower 48 states of America, an aurora borealis has beamed brainwashing light into the eyes of unwitting citizens, turning them into homicidal, cultish maniacs.

Crouch’s story follows a single family, the Colcloughs. After a narrow escape from several people of murderous intent, they head north from their home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking for anywhere that could provide shelter. For the entirety of Run, Crouch focuses on the beat-to-beat action of their journey, providing a ground-level view of the world going to hell, through the eyes of one family in a greater apocalypse.

Those affected by the aurora can spot others affected, but the unaffected are none the wiser, which makes every encounter with humans outside the family a chance encounter with death. The various antagonists in Run are psychopathic and brutal: Those affected by the aurora enjoy killing those who are not. They hack their victims with knives, burn them at the stake or crucify them, and there is no hesitation or regret during their assault—they even go so far as to joke with one another while slaughtering their victims. They also instinctively work together, forming bands of roving vehicles that round up the unaffected for mass execution. All of this sets the tone for the Colcloughs (and the reader) early on: There is no negotiating or appealing with these aggressors. The result is a sense of absolute, uncompromising fight-or-flight.

In the midst of this extreme and violent world, our protagonists are incongruously human, grounding the story in realism. Patriarch Jack is struggling to reconnect with his wife, Dee. Their daughter, Naomi, is an angsty teen who hasn’t felt close to her father in years. Their son, Cole, is a child, too young to really understand what is going on but too old to forget the images he will most likely carry forever. Each of the characters feels realistic: Naomi never wanders into “You just don’t understand me” tropes, nor do Jack and Dee devolve into petty, drama-for-drama’s-sake arguments.

Taut and sparsely written, Blake Crouch’s Run is an unnerving thriller set in the early days of the apocalypse.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Alien Clay

Review by Ralph Harris

Humans are walking petri dishes in Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The dystopian cyberpunk future is here, and the Mandate, humanity’s fascist government, punts its criminals and political opposition to alien worlds. Those who survive the journey (punctuated by an airdrop from space as their disposable shuttle falls apart) face a lifetime sentence in an off-world labor camp. While there are other camps on other planets, Tchaikovsky focuses on just one for this story: Kiln.

Xeno-ecologist (someone who studies the environments of alien worlds) Arton Daghdev is shipped to Kiln after finding himself on the wrong side of the Mandate. Once there, he’s shocked to learn that the planet is home to actual, extraterrestrial life, a secret that’s been kept hidden from the people of Earth. Monolithic white structures dot the surface of Kiln, and were apparently crafted by some type of intelligent life. While whatever species made the monoliths is not readily present, horrific beings of another sort roam the surface of Kiln. Each of these “beings” is made up of multiple, independent creatures that act as their organs, like stomachs or lungs. (Imagine that your lungs are little dudes with their own brains, hanging out in your body. One day, you pass a dying person on the road; they’re mostly dead, but their lung-dudes are crawling away looking for a new body. The dying person’s lung-dudes are shinier and cooler than your lung-dudes, so your body rejects your old lung-dudes and picks up the newer models instead. This is how all life on Kiln works.) Arton and his fellow humans are stuck on a planet crawling with lung-dudes and stomach-dudes and heart-dudes, all ready and eager to replace the organs in their bodies, no matter what the humans themselves have to say about it.

This frightening biology contributes to Alien Clay’s thesis: Science cannot be contained, no matter how much humanity may cling to our arbitrary, artificially restricted “reality.” Commandant Teloran, the director of the camp, relentlessly pushes his staff and the imprisoned scientists to find explanations for the life on Kiln that conform to the Mandate’s established rules of science, despite all the evidence that doesn’t fit within those parameters. Tchaikovsky draws a clear contrast between the hyper-adaptive, ever-changing environment of Kiln and the harsh world of the labor camp, where prisoners slave away at various tasks from toilet cleaning to analysis of alien artifacts. 

Arton is fascinated with the planet and waxes philosophical often, creating a moody, introspective atmosphere. Kiln, Commandant Teloran’s regime and the disgruntled prisoners increasingly find themselves at odds, and as life within the walls of the camp becomes more and more hostile, Arton’s options become less and less appealing. Eventually, he must choose between the safety of the science he knows and understands, or the new understanding that Kiln can teach him. Tchaikovsky is just as laser-focused on the life of Kiln as his protagonist, which may disappoint some readers interested in a broader exploration of the characters or the greater universe they inhabit. But those willing to abandon all else in pursuit of uncovering Kiln’s mysteries will be continually fascinated—and often horrified—by Alien Clay.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay presents a vision of extraterrestrial life that’s as fascinating as it is horrifying.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

Blackheart Man

Review by Ralph Harris

Veycosi, the narrator of Nalo Hopkinson’s Caribbean-inspired fantasy novel, Blackheart Man, is not a good person. He is a near-constant failure with few redeeming qualities; this is a character you may be supposed to hate (and boy did I). We are introduced to Veycosi mid-escapade: attempting to unclog the aqueducts of Carenage Town, a city on the island of Chynchin, with a phosphorus bomb. Despite the fact that he partially floods a whole neighborhood, Veycosi still believes he should receive nothing but praise. At the same time, 15 ships from Ymisen, a country that once conquered Chynchin, appear in the harbor. The rest of Hopkinson’s story features further Veycosi failures and a couple of singular successes as he stumbles through major events in a city wreathed in magic.

Chynchin’s unique culture is one of the most interesting aspects of Blackheart Man. The island’s society is matriarchal after a fashion, with family units typically consisting of one wife and two co-husbands. Only women are allowed to be sailors; men tend to take on supporting tasks such as caring for children. Science (like Veycosi’s phosphorus bomb) mixes easily with obeah, a Caribbean magic tradition that, among other things, can create people like Kaira, a “twinning child” born with no biological father, just a mother. Chynchin is populated by various groups of formerly enslaved people who banded together to defeat their conquerors. Despite that, there are certainly still lower classes, chief among them the Mirmeki, former enslaved soldiers of the Ymisen, who are relegated to physical labor. Hopkinson riffs on French-Caribbean dialect and slang, in addition to including various fictional languages, and readers who enjoy imagining different voices for characters will appreciate Blackheart Man’s plethora of distinct accents and tones.

As the political situation escalates to a breaking point and Veycosi continues on his picaresque adventures, Hopkinson reveals the shrouded, mystical history of Chynchin and its people.  However, as the entire story is told through the lens of the incredibly unreliable and frequently intoxicated Veycosi, readers are basically learning this story from the perspective of the town fool. Time skips forward without warning, and incongruities in the narrative are part of the charm; Hopkinson even includes a passage where the book halts to point out its inconsistencies. By the end of the tale, some secrets have been uncovered, but many remain mysteries. Readers ready for a wild, chaotic series of unfortunate events will enjoy seeing how badly Veycosi ruins everything.

Nalo Hopkinson’s Blackheart Man is a picaresque fantasy adventure following a hilariously unreliable narrator as he stumbles through a series of important political events.
Science Fiction & FantasyHistorical FantasyFantasy

The Bright Sword

Review by Ralph Harris

Arthur is dead and the Round Table lies shattered in The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman, author of the bestselling Magicians trilogy. The story begins with Collum of the Isle of Mull, a character who does not appear in Arthurian legend, embroiled in a duel with an unnamed knight. The knight spits uncouth insults about Collum’s mother, and at the end of their brawl, Collum makes his first (extremely messy) kill of the book. This resolution to a duel outlines how most plot points are resolved in The Bright Sword: Someone inevitably dies, and no one is happy.

Once Collum gets to Camelot, none of the remaining knights are particularly happy either. After a few chapters about Collum, a new knight of the Round Table is introduced, and, as if remembering the reader may not know anything about this person, Grossman suspends the main story to relate how the knight arrived at Camelot. These consistently shifting perspectives, combined with an extremely loose approach to time and distance, creates a dreamlike vibe, suggestive of a story told around a campfire by a narrator who keeps getting distracted. Those with little patience will likely find The Bright Sword frustrating, but readers willing to savor the book over many nights will find each chapter a neatly arranged, miniature adventure of its own.

Traditionally minimal side characters in the story of Arthur—like Sir Bedivere, Sir Palomides and even Dagonet the Fool—receive intricate, deep backstories that erase the mythological buildup around each figure, viewing them instead in a far more human and often more modern light. In many older tales, Palomides is a Middle Eastern stereotype, used entirely as a foil to elevate Sir Tristan’s status as an honorable and just knight. But in Grossman’s story, Palomides is a prince and explorer who is wildly misunderstood by his knightly peers, with his own journey of self-discovery and growth.

At once full of desperate hope and grievous loss, The Bright Sword is a moody reflection on Arthur’s tale. This saga is not marked by optimism, but instead a dignified cynicism. Collum and his endearing band of Round Table Rejects (album out soon) simply live and persevere, knowing that if they do not try to bring peace to the now-fractured Britain, no one else will.

At once full of desperate hope and grievous loss, Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword is a moody reflection on the tales of King Arthur and the Round Table.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

More giggles, less grimdark: Two gleefully funny fantasies

Feature by Nicole Brinkley & Ralph Harris

Running Close to the Wind

Avra Helvaçi is lucky, perhaps supernaturally so, but he refuses to believe that. Luck can’t be proven, after all. Did he test the limits of his luck by drunkenly traipsing into a highly protected vault of the Arasti government and stealing the most powerful secret of the empire without getting caught? Well, yes, but that could just be coincidence.

With copies of Arasti intelligence hidden on him, Avra flees to the high seas and back into the arms of his on-again, off-again partner, the intimidating pirate captain Teveri az-Haffar. Tev wants nothing more to do with the spy-turned-poet-turned-traitor, but selling Avra’s secret could solve his ship’s financial problems. Can they get to the Isles of Lost Souls to fence what Avra stole before the Arasti government finds them, the hot monk on the ship drives them mad or before the isles’ infamous cake competition concludes?

A standalone novel set in the world of author Alexandra Rowland’s A Taste of Gold and Iron, Running Close to the Wind and its self-proclaimed “silly little slut” of a narrator will have readers laughing on every page. Despite the book’s zany, breezy to a fault tone, the Isle of Souls and the many political machinations of background characters are refreshingly complex, and Avra’s “Is it blessed?” luck is a fascinating story element. Yet it is the characters that make this story shine. Though some readers are sure to find Avra’s gremlin-esque behavior aggravating, as Tev often does, the rest of the cast makes up for it. Standouts include the flustered yet noble Tev, knowledge-driven and rebellious monk Julian, secretly softhearted fence Black Garda and friendly sex worker Cat.

Though Avra thinks—and speaks—constantly of sex and how hot Julian and Tev both are, there are few actual romantic moments, and Rowland cuts away from any on-page love scenes. Fantasy romance aficionados will find themselves as blue-balled as Avra often claims to feel. However, “Our Flag Means Death” devotees looking for a lighthearted solace after the show’s unfortunate cancellation and fans of whimsical main characters a la Alexis Hall’s Mortal Follies will enjoy Running Close to the Wind.

—Nicole Brinkley

★ Dreadful

Dread Lord Gavrax has somehow lost his memory, and is unable to recall why he decided to become a Dread Lord in the first place. Gav, as he now calls himself, decides to change his life for the better by vanquishing his rage and toxic masculinity. Complicating matters is the presence of Princess Eliasha, whom Gavrax kidnapped before his hard cognitive reset. Eliasha is determined not to trust her captor’s sudden change of heart, and understandably so: Dread Lord Gavrax has committed a great many crimes. The princess is also a key ingredient in a mysterious ritual of great power. Dread Lord Gavrax is one of four Dark Wizards that are collaborating to do something very important . . . if only Gav could remember what that something is.

Throughout Caitlin Rozakis’ Dreadful, Gav faces several simple yet charming challenges, such as finding a way to save a starving village and undoing years of fear he instilled in his goblin staff. While Gav grows and learns from his and his former self’s mistakes, a series of sitcom-esque events nudge him onto the path of righteousness. His goblin cook, Orla, is thrilled to don an apron and cook truly good food—but she only knows how to cook steaks, bake bread and shove whole (occasionally alive) animals into pie crust. The village decides to throw a garlic festival to make up for the fact that all of their other crops failed. Heroes run in by the hundreds, tripping over each other in an effort to rescue the princess. Dreadful never takes itself too seriously, so moments that could induce secondhand cringe become hilarious escapades instead.

However, Rozakis’ story is not all jokes and gags. Gavrax had serious issues with his own masculinity alongside his relationship with women, and Gav is not immune to his former self’s impulses. Violence is still a reflex, and he must resist incinerating anyone who annoys him. He also must learn to choose other people and his dawning sense of morality over his own self-preservation. Rozakis unobtrusively guides the reader through Gav’s evolution via his inner monologue, never allowing the lessons to get preachy.

With its charming cast and unique mixture of slapstick and sincerity, Dreadful is a heartwarmingly earnest story about how to grow into a better person.

—Ralph Harris

Two tales of swords and sorcery from Alexandra Rowland and Caitlin Rozakis look on the brighter side of life.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Two tales of found family that might just make you cry

Feature by Ralph Harris

Found family is a special weakness of mine: From Lord of the Rings to “Stargate SG-1,” I often find myself tearing up as brothers- and sisters-in-arms share their lives and hurts with one another. Cascade Failure by L.M. Sagas and Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis are both about struggling, scrappy people making their way through a sci-fi world—and both have enough emotional heft to move even less susceptible readers. Cascade Failure makes a deep, rich investment in five characters and their adventure to save the galaxy. Floating Hotel, on the other hand, drifts from one perspective to another, almost never repeating the same viewpoint, to paint a beautiful portrait of a community.

In Cascade Failure, debut author Sagas kicks off a new sci-fi series with aplomb. A disgraced himbo of a soldier named Jal finds himself captured by the crew of the Ambit, which consists of his old lieutenant, an AI ship captain and a foulmouthed engineer. They try to take Jal in to be court-martialed, but are distracted by a distress signal that leads to a chattery, terrified programmer and a conspiracy that threatens millions across the galaxy. From there, the crew of the Ambit go on a rollicking journey, but the real draw is how the relationships between the characters unfold. Each person has a long history rife with post-traumatic stress disorder, abuse and abandonment. Sagas avoids making the party’s communication difficulties frustrating for the reader, using their inner monologues to illustrate the complicated emotions and memories that stand in the way of healing. At first, the five people aboard the Ambit are tense and uncomfortable around one another. By the end, they are inseparable.

A beautiful luxury ship that travels the galaxy, the Grand Abeona Hotel is slowly falling into disrepair. Its manager, Carl, has a penchant for taking in strays and finding them jobs. The staff is thus a group of people who happened upon one another, rather than actively chose one another. As a result, their familial relationships encompass both long-suffering irritations and radical, immediate support when needed. More than anything else, they each have a special affection for the Grand Abeona Hotel and the safety, unity and new start it provided each of them. A political mystery provides a spine of sorts—a rebellious writer has been criticizing the emperor, and various figures are hunting for the satirist—but Curtis focuses on small redemptions and triumphs. The musician finds her song, the stuttering aide finds her confidence and the bonds between a group of broken people shift from necessary tolerance into something like love (which should be familiar to anyone who has worked in the service industry for any amount of time). Melancholic and nostalgic, Floating Hotel is an ode to circumstantial companions that left this reviewer pondering old friends who now live miles away, off in their own stories.

The crews of a galactic hotel and a shambly spaceship bond in spite of themselves in these emotional sci-fi novels.
Science Fiction & FantasyUrban FantasyFantasy

Three Kinds of Lucky

Review by Ralph Harris

In Three Kinds of Lucky by Kim Harrison, author of the bestselling Hollows series, magic has its own specialized sanitation service: Sweepers, who pick up a byproduct of magic called dross. If left unattended, dross can attract shadow, a dangerous, somewhat intelligent life-form that can easily kill mages, sweepers and normal humans alike.

Harrison wastes little time getting down to business; the story kicks off in St. Unoc, a fictional city set east of Tucson, Arizona, where mages congregate to learn, research and test their skills at St. Unoc University. While tackling a messy dross cleanup, our narrator and protagonist, sweeper Petra Grady, discovers she has the rare ability to manipulate shadow itself. Petra is soon drafted into a research project on dross that could upend everything she thought she knew about St. Unoc. 

Three Kinds of Lucky revolves around its distinct class system: The magical equivalent of janitors, sweepers cannot use magic, and most mages ignore or sneer at them. However, unlike mages, the sweepers can directly handle dross with no ill effects. Harrison uses Grady to personify this complicated interplay. Her struggle to balance her pride in her work with the fact that some people would rather spit on her than acknowledge her is a key pillar of the story. What’s more, jealousy over the mages’ ability to craft and manipulate magic has always burned in Grady’s heart, despite her sense of duty as a sweeper. As her role in St. Unoc evolves, she learns more about the origin of the two separate classes, discovering sins so old that the mages don’t remember their existence.

Three Kinds of Lucky will immediately pull readers in with its fast pace and efficient storytelling; the entirety of its nearly city-shattering events all happen within a few days. Sometimes, however, the character development fails to keep time with the speed of the plot, resulting in frustrating moments where one wishes that Grady and her companions would adapt more quickly to what’s happening around them. However, the mechanically intricate magic system and complex world Harrison has created makes this series opener well worth the read.

Kim Harrison’s Three Kinds of Lucky is an immediately compelling urban fantasy with an intricate magic system and complex world.
Science Fiction & FantasyFantasy

The Queen of Days

Review by Ralph Harris

The leader of a family of thieves, Balthazar Valdaren is about to attempt the most challenging heist of his career: pilfering a jade idol right out from under the nose of its owner, on the day of its consecration. From that description, a reader might expect this story to be about a crew of con men in the early 21st century. Instead, Greta Kelly’s The Queen of Days takes readers to the island of Cothis, in a fantasy realm resembling the 17th century. The swagger and the cons are still here, but instead of casinos and 21st-century technology, Balthazar and his crew are tangling with gods and demigods.

Kelly begins by introducing the book’s other primary protagonist: the Queen of Days, Tassiel. Tassiel, who will be joining Bal on the job, is one of the Septiniri: half-human, half-Ankaari, a god that can manipulate time. Bal and his crew—his bastard brother, Kai; his cousin Zee and her husband, Edik; and Bal’s young sister, Mira—quickly discover just how powerful a Septinri can be. Tass, as the Queen of Days prefers to be called, charges each crew member a month of their life to help them with the heist.

After that less-than-happy revelation, the action begins and does not let up. Balthazar, Tass and their scrappy crew run from planning to fighting to hiding to heisting with a ferocity that makes the book difficult to put down. Kelly efficiently relays the crew’s history and relationships through their interactions: Kai makes an off-color comment, Edik admonishes him, Zee rolls her eyes, then Bal keeps the plan moving. These quick moments of characterization allow Kelly to focus on the beat-to-beat action without pausing for exposition. As the outcast in more ways than one, Tass is the only exception. The chapters from her point of view are far more introspective as she learns new things about herself and the humans she is helping.

By the end of the book, some amount of heisting has completed, Tass has grown and evolved as a result of her time with the crew, and the stage is set for this motley team’s next adventure. The Queen of Days is a fantastic piece of escapist fantasy for readers looking to leave planet Earth for a few hundred pages.

A fantasy following a crew of thieves and con men on an increasingly dangerous heist, The Queen of Days is a fantastic piece of escapism.
Science Fiction & FantasyHorror

Our Share of Night

Review by Ralph Harris

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez is a dark, twisted tale of a cult in Argentina called the Order that sacrifices humans to an occult entity known as the Darkness. Mediums possess a natural ability to channel this figure into reality. Juan has served the Order as a medium for his entire life, but as the story begins, he attempts to sever ties with the cult to protect his son, Gaspar, from its clutches.

Our Share of Night follows Juan’s first-person viewpoint for several hundred pages, then jumps to Gaspar’s perspective, then goes 30 years into the past to tell the story of Juan’s wife, Rosario. Enriquez creates a sense of mystery with every aspect of her prose, even down to the way speech is written. Dialogue is sometimes in quotes, sometimes not; sometimes it necessitates the start of a new paragraph, sometimes it doesn’t. Enriquez uses these structural elements to reveal details when the reader least expects it. When Juan channels the Darkness for the first time, his hands lengthen and his nails turn into golden claws, but the explanation for why mediums are affected by channeling in this way is not revealed until another storyteller has taken over.

Even with such an unpredictable writing style, Enriquez perfectly paces solutions to the novel’s various mysteries, enticing readers through her chaotic dreamscape with answers that are as intriguing as they are frightening. Spooky and atmospheric, Our Share of Night is a constantly surprising and bloody ride.

Spooky and atmospheric, Our Share of Night is a constantly surprising and bloody ride.
Science Fiction & FantasyScience Fiction

Some Desperate Glory

Review by Ralph Harris

People love an underdog story: A hero or scrappy gang of misfits prevailing against nearly insurmountable odds. But in Some Desperate Glory, author Emily Tesh takes this trope in a dark direction, illustrating how single-minded zealotry can spiral into overt fascism.

Some Desperate Glory follows Kyr, a girl born into an extremist human sect living on the fringes of known space. In Tesh’s universe, humanity accomplished interstellar travel and encountered the majoda, an alien confederacy ruled by an interdimensional, reality-warping artificial intelligence known as the Wisdom. Earth tore through the majoda’s military, and in response, the Wisdom had the majoda deploy a weapon that destroyed the planet. Completely broken and scattered, most of the remaining humans submitted to majoda rule.

But the people who live on Gaea Station, where Kyr was born, have dubbed themselves the saviors of humanity. Children and adults alike hone their bodies and minds in order to become the avenging angels of their destroyed planet. Joy and relaxation are luxuries, as the admirals ruling Gaea Station demand their people give everything to keep the cause alive. In their mid-teens, people are assigned to permanent roles, which can be anything from combat service, to maintenance to keep the station afloat, to bearing sons in the Nursery to keep the community supplied with soldiers. It’s as abhorrent as it is absolute, but Kyr thinks this system is righteous, a necessity of the ongoing war against the majoda.

Emily Tesh’s new protagonist is anything but likable—and that’s the point.

Tesh describes Gaea Station in impressively revolting detail without losing focus on Kyr’s growth as a character. A talented and devoted warrior, Kyr finds herself at odds with her cultural programming when she is assigned to the Nursery. And after her brother leaves the station under mysterious circumstances, she defies her orders and takes off after him, a quest that thrusts her into the wider universe. She meets an alien for the first time and starts a grueling journey to peel back years of programming. As she learns more about the rest of the universe, Kyr realizes she must confront the sinister underbelly of the shiny, nationalistic Gaea Station, which is beginning to look more and more like a cult.

While heavily invested in Kyr’s personal struggle to find meaning and purpose, Some Desperate Glory is also rife with rich settings and history. The majoda are fascinatingly inhuman, composed of refreshingly distinct alien species. (Don’t worry, there aren’t any “They’re basically humans but their skin is blue” races in this story.) Tesh takes readers on a wild tour through her universe, defying any expectations they may have based on the setting and characters in surprising and unique ways.

An examination of the dangers of unchecked nationalism, Some Desperate Glory will resonate with readers looking for messy morality and antihero redemption arcs.

Rife with rich settings and refreshingly distinct alien species, Some Desperate Glory will resonate with readers looking for messy morality and antihero redemption arcs.

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