Black Gate

The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Seven (Night Shade,
September 5, 2023). Cover by Thomas Chamberlain-Keen

It’s been distressing to watch the havoc the pandemic played with many Year’s Best Science Fiction volumes. The 13th volume of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Prime Books, was delayed a year and produced in a digital only edition last year, and now that series seems to be dead. Jonathan Strahan’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction (Saga Press) published its final volume in 2021.

And Neil Clarke’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 (Night Shade Books), covering fiction from 2021, was delayed a year, and finally arrived last month. Volume 8 is still (supposedly) scheduled for release next month, but there’s no word on it from either the publisher or the editor, and I’m very concerned this series may be dead as well.

What does that leave us? The ninth volume of John Joseph Adams’ Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy (Mariner Books, co-edited with R. F Kuang) arrives next month, and seems to be going strong. Allan Kaster produced The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories Volume 7 (Infinivox) in June. And Paula Guran edited two: The Year’s Best Fantasy: Volume Two (Pyr, August 15), and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: Volume 4 (Pyr, coming October 24). So the situation isn’t totally dire. But to lose so many top-notch anthologies in rapid succession is a blow.

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The Spear Cuts Through Water (Del Rey, May 30, 2023). Cover by Simón Prades

I always seem to be late with Simon Jimenez. Last year I found his acclaimed debut novel The Vanished Birds buried in the bottom of my TBR file, and three weeks ago I nabbed his follow up The Spear Cuts Through Water the instant I spotted it. Which turned out to be nearly a year after it was published, in August of last year. Some people arrive just as the party’s getting started, and some of us show up when the hors d’oeuvres are all gone and the cops have already raided the place.

Well, it’s still new to me, I guess. This looks like the last weekend of summer weather we’ll get in Chicago, and this book will keep me company on the porch. The Spear Cuts Through Water is the story of two warriors who must guide a dying goddess across a dangerous land, to bring an end to the rule of a tyrannical family. Paul Di Filippo at Locus compares it to Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (high praise in my book), calling it “utterly individual… A wild chase and odyssey which you must read to believe,” and Polygon included it in their list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2022, calling it “mesmerizing… a love story unlike anything you’ve read before.”

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Dead Water (Redhook, June 13, 2023). Cover design by kid-ethic

C. A. Fletcher is a Scottish writer, and the author of the popular post-apocalyptic novel A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World. I’m unfamiliar with his work, but I decided to pick up his latest when it was released in paperback in June.

Dead Water is described as ‘Folk Horror,’ which I think means it’s a tale of horrible stuff that happens to people who live in the country. As someone who’s tired of all the terrible stories told about my home town of Chicago, this has immediate appeal to me. It’s the story of a waterborne pathogen that afflicts a remote Scottish Isle, and the dark secrets the rapidly-spreading plague uncovers. The Library Ladies calls it “a creeping, dread-filled story,” and Ancillary Review of Books says that “horror fans will enjoy the misty, desolate atmosphere interspersed with moments of genuine fear… individual scenes are paced to perfection.”

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