The killings of protesters (Renee Good and Alex Pretti) and arrests of journalists (Don Lemon and Georgia Fort) in Minnesota is alarming. Having been born and raised in Minnesota, it’s affected me personally. I’m proud of my people standing up for the Constitution and trying to return Freedom to my...
This morning, after weeks of Elon Musk tweets that drove up the price of cryptocurrencies, and the inclusion of the hashtag #bitcoin to his Twitter bio, Tesla announced that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, and that it would begin allowing car buyers to use cryptocurrency to buy...
Welcome to the Bitch Bubble—Lauren Dixon’s debut short story collection—danced, stalked, frolicked, and spirited through my imagination like a burning yeti streaking through a forest. These sixteen stories gripped me with their kinetic energy and emotional range. Sheela-na-gig in a convent, a yeti wrestling with luchadors, an NFL running back with a...
The City We Became by N.K. Jemisen is an urban fantasy thrill-ride with big social justice heart and a plot that symbolically resonates with current events—the current occupant of the White House, alt-right, and Black Lives Matter. The City We Became is a wonderfully plotted, edge-of-your-seat page-turner. Brooklyn, Bronca, Padmini, and...
When I was 15, I walked into my therapist’s office to find a gun aimed at my chest. I’d been seeing Dick regularly for a couple years, since the death of my parents, and had seen him prior to that at a much younger age. He worked from an...
Many of you are likely gearing up to begin the fourth season of Gotham on FOX tonight, but I’ve been stalled on the first two seasons. Something, it seems, is wrong in Gotham, something disturbing me on a deep and even subconscious and personal level, making it hard for me...
The Devourers by Indra Das engages on many levels and resists easy definition. You might read several different synopses of The Devourers and wonder if the reviewers hadn’t mistakenly read different novels; there’s good reason for this—Das’s novel is intricate, unpredictable, and complex. Layers of narrative peel back like an...
Nearly six months ago, I embarked on the most fantastic journey of my life: Clarion West—the intensive speculative writing program in Seattle. After six weeks of living with my fellow students and our instructors, I came home and began writing a blog about it. My first attempt was a summary...
WARNING: Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones is not just a novel about werewolves, it is an actual werewolf. You will see it resting placidly on a shelf at your local book pound. Sure it has sharp teeth, but they are smiling, no? The teeth are red, but you tell yourself...
Diversity panels at genre conventions have on occasion become flashpoints or provided fodder for later controversy, and I regret to say that I’ve read of more bad experiences at these panels than good ones. However, I believe this stems from our inherent nature not to comment on things when...
Medusa’s Web by Tim Powers is an intricately woven and intriguing tale in which Powers revisits time travel—a plot device he’d explored in The Anubis Gates. The time travel in this newer work, however, has no similarities to his previous novel. In fact, the time travel in Medusa’s Web is...
