Shrike Fantasy

So hard to choose! So many of these entries were superb. But these two are my favorites: Tesh’s The Incandescent is bursting with color and fascinating characters and amazing landscapes and tons of magic. Tchaikovsky’s Shroud is tense, driven, completely absorbing–and it asks some big questions. They are very, very different novels. One is fantasy, the other is SF. I loved them both, and for…

Here’s my last post reviewing the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The award will be presented on Aug. 30 2026 at LaCon, Anaheim, California. The list of finalists: A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape)–reviewed HERE The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK)–reviewed HERE The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson (Orbit US; Hodderscape)–reviewed…

Here’s my fourth post documenting my quest to read and review all six finalists for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Novel, to be announced on August 30, 2026, in Anaheim, California, at LAcon: The finalists: A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape)–reviewed HERE The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK)–reviewed HERE The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson (Orbit US;…

Here’s my third post reviewing the finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The award will be presented on Aug. 30 2026 at LaCon, Anaheim, California. The list of finalists: A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape)–reviewed HERE The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK)–reviewed in this post The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson (Orbit US;…

Here’s my next post in my quest to read and review all six finalists for the 2026 Hugo Award for Best Novel, to be announced on August 30, 2026, in Anaheim, California, at LAcon: Again, the list of the finalists: A Drop of Corruption, Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey; Hodderscape)–reviewed in this post The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow (Tor US; Tor UK) The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson (Orbit…

Thanks to Amy from Pixabay for this image. License: royalty-free, free for commercial use The longest-running major awards in speculative fiction are the Hugos. The World Science Fiction Society presents awards for Best Novel and many other works in other categories at the World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”), and has done so since 1953. The voters’ decision for this year’s awards (HERE…

The winner for Best Novel! Great choice for the Best Novel award, Nebula voters! See my review HERE. (I keep calling these awards the 2026 Nebula Awards, when they’re actually the 2025 awards, because they are given to works published or produced in 2025.) The cover of this amazing novel tells you a lot. Look at the old-timey type used for most of the title. Except that second “Hunter”–written…

Find out more HERE. I was not planning to add anything more to my posts about Nebula Awards finalists, but I just realized something important about this book, nominated for Best Novella, and I had to post about it. How did I miss this, when I scanned the list of novellas? Most of my posts are about novels, only occasionally about works in the other categories. And now I find I can’t resist…

Accessed from Wikipedia, published here under the fair use doctrine. Of movie posters: may be used when the primary reason is not illustration but commentary on the film or the artistry of the poster. My grandson and I agree on this–oh, and so does Jubjub, our cat, who finds it fascinating. Flow is the best animated movie ever. Maybe the best movie ever, period. Am I exaggerating? Maybe. . .but…

By Heritage Auctions, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9301761 The whole reason for these movie posts? After I read The Last Unicorn, I became intrigued by the animated film. That’s when I realized that of course there are other interesting films exploring the animal-human bond. Beyond the three I’m writing about, there are many, many more, both animated and live action. But…

Poster art for Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) In this part of the series on the human-animal bond in speculative fiction, I’ll review three animated films, one from the ’40s, one from the ’80s, one recently released. Notice I didn’t label this post “the human-animal bond.” In one of these movies, there isn’t one IN the movie, just in what the movie accomplishes for us. In one, there’s a bond, but…

In the last post, I gave mini-reviews of a number of speculative fiction novels exploring the tight bonds humans have with the usual suspects: cats, dogs, horses. In this post, I take a look at novels about more unusual animals. And that includes mythical beasts! ANIMALS A BIT MORE UNUSUAL It’s not all cats, dogs, and horses. Here are four novels that reach beyond the usual cozy human-animal…

The human-animal connection stretches back millennia. The earliest domesticated animal, the dog, probably evolved from wild canines around 15,000 years ago. The horse came much later, around 5,500 years ago. As for the cat–wait–is a cat ever domesticated? Or does the relationship go the other way around? There’s some evidence of human-feline companionship going back 9,500 years, but cat…

You know about Trekkies, right? My kid and his whole family are that, only not Trek. Wars. They don’t cosplay at cons–oh, maybe at Halloween–but they know every bit of lore and quiz each other constantly. My seven-year-old grandson knows all of it. In an era where some people in my city have erected flags in their yards for some weird or maybe evil cause of theirs, my son erected a…

Did Frank Zappa really say this? Or is it one of those fake quotes, like the many attributed to Mark Twain? Apparently F.Z. really did say it. And how appropriate it is to today’s post. This is the last post in my series about the 2026 Nebula Awards finalists. I reviewed all seven of the 2026 Nebula Awards short-listed works in the Best Novel category. On June 6, at its 61st annual conference in…

Now that I’ve read and reviewed the seven finalists for Best Novel, I’ve found time to explore some of the other Nebula Awards categories. On June 6, the Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) will be announcing all the winners at the SFWA 61st annual conference in Chicago. To see the entire list of finalists in all the categories, go HERE. I don’t have time to read all the…

Here’s the seventh and last in a series of posts reviewing the 2026 Nebula Awards short-listed works in the Best Novel category. To see the complete list, go HERE. Now I’ve read all seven of these novels, and in plenty of time before the Science Fiction And Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) announces the winner at the Nebula awards ceremony on June 6, 2026. It will take place at the SFWA 61st…