by Rachel A. Rosen

The release of a new Nick Mamatas book is always cause for celebration in my little corner of the world—his cynical, scathing, and brutally funny works always bring some new genre-bending surprises to the table. Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest is no exception.

A clever cyberpunk reimagining of The Tempest (yes, that one) for our age of oligarchy, Kalivas! leans hard into the anticolonialist interpretation of the play and gives us Caliban as the last human among augmented gods who can’t die. His peaceful, if bleak, existence on an island is shattered with the arrival of the Master, or the Prosperous One, and his daughter M., exiled from what’s left of San Francisco and hellbent on restoring his fortunes—even if it means the subjugation of everyone around him.

Kalivas is a Weird Little Guy, at once repugnant and compelling. The post-disaster world is sketched just enough for the characters to feel grounded in it despite their stylization and otherness.

It ends, naturally, with a play-within-a-play that turned out to be my favourite part because I’m turning into some kind of pomo snob. If you like your sci-fi with interiority and literary flair, this one’s for you.

by Rachel A. Rosen

Shamefully, I had never heard of Charles R. Saunders or the genre of Soul & Sorcery before he was inducted into the CSFFA Hall of Fame last year. This speaks to not just my own ignorance but the fickleness of the publishing industry and the SFFH community.

A legend in his time, Saunders wrote groundbreaking fantasy about an imagined Africa and was a huge influence on many of the authors I’m obsessed with today. He was also a journalist and a fascinating person. And he died poor, obscure, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Tattrie, thanks to their own friendship with Saunders and the many letters that the author sent over the years to friends, fans, and collaborators, does an incredible job of reconstructing his life and works for a compelling, engrossing read.

Regular readers will note that this might be the first biography we’ve featured here; it’s because I don’t normally read them. This one, however, is well worth your time.

by Rachel A. Rosen

I won’t shut up about Notes From a Regicide until everyone I know reads it. Griffon, a teenage trans boy living in a post-apocalyptic, flooded New York, is adopted by an older trans couple, Etoine and Zaffre. Both of them are artists and refugees from a city called Stephensport, which is frozen in time in something vaguely akin to, but not quite, Renaissance Italy. They do their best by Griffon, who has had to flee his transphobic and abusive father, but Etoine and Zaffre are brittle, damaged people, full of secrets, with no idea how to open their strange, private world to a newcomer. In their youth, they were part of a revolutionary movement that left them with both physical and mental scars, and it’s only after their deaths that Griffon reads through Etoine’s journal and learns the truth (or at least Etoine’s truth) of what happened.

I doubt Fellman set out to write something so perfectly tailored to my tastes but he sure did. This novel could have easily been heartwarming glurge about the importance of found family. It’s not. Notes From a Regicide is instead a haunting and elegant story about art, revolution, and the damage it leaves behind.

by Zilla Novikov

A propulsive read that I finished on the same day I started it. No one in this story is a good person, but they’re such fascinating disasters that I couldn’t help rooting for them. Louise and her matter-of-fact delusions. Cat and her selfishness, Henry and his possessiveness. Of course this can’t end well. The flame that burns twice as bright and all that.

The heart of this book is about loneliness. What we’ll suffer, what we’ll put other people through, to survive it. The masks we’ll wear and the lies we’ll tell, our clothes off in an instant but so rarely naked, so rarely vulnerable. It’s better to be liked for someone you’re not, for something you can do for them, than to risk being alone.

Up to a point.

by Rachel A. Rosen

In the preface that opens this collection of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror from Palestinian writers in the diaspora, editor and contributor Sonia Sulaiman writes, “Someone once said that all Palestinian fiction is speculative; we are always grappling with the past and living in expectation of the future.” These stories are those of writers violently unmoored from home and belonging. What is more speculative than dreaming of the future, despite a past of dispossession?

There are many standout stories in this collection, which is the first of its kind to be published in Canada. From the unsettling horror of Ziyad Saadi’s “The Third Or Fourth Casualty,” in which a group of boys die while swimming as we are reminded of the insignificance of their deaths, to the triumphant DIY space project of Samah Serour Fadil’s “Gaza Luna,” to the heartfelt queer longing of Nadia Afifi’s “The Generation Chip,” this diverse and imaginative collection is at once a cry of rage and a flickering of hope in the darkness. It’s a must-read.

by Zilla Novikov

I finished this book at the end of 2025, and the question of the year is “What does it mean to be human versus machine?” This anthology tackles the question in the most human way imaginable–through science fiction. We see humans fight self-aware machines, or become them. We see the good and evil in the artificial, and in the humanity that programmed it. And we see robots replicate the best and worst of us.

This anthology isn’t a philosophy textbook. Most of the stories are packed with action, showing dynamic fights with lethal consequences. There’s love here too–doomed romance and deep friendship. My favourite was The Lore of Seven, where the stories we tell about where we come from are what make us who we are–even for a gang enforcer.

by Tucker Lieberman

Some time ago, I discovered Cascade by Rachel A. Rosen.

The sequel, Blight, has awakened.

In the first book, the Earth’s climate has begun to break down, and magic bursts from the planet, entering people. Will the world end? “The world is always ending, for someone,” a wise eco-activist says.

The sequel Blight, has got more demons.

These are the things that, according to Blythe’s experience, kept away a demon: absolutely fucking nothing, if it really wanted to get at you. It would unhinge its jaws and swallow you before you could reach for your gun. It would have claimed your mind long before that. You would walk, smiling, into its rotting arms as it sang your name.

The world collapses by fire, by ice, by violence, by spellcasting, and if it — whatever “it” is — doesn’t get you, it’ll get someone you cared for.

“The first deaths had names, faces, memories attached to them,” but the ones that came after were “cumulative damage, termites in the wood unnoticed until the house collapses,” and then “whole neighbourhoods, small towns, entire ecosystems, tragedy writ too large to enumerate, let alone mourn…other people were shadows, sliding away too fast to register.”

But then, some of us are still alive.

Read the rest on Medium.

by Rachel A Rosen

As you might guess from my latest book, I love sea creatures and hate capitalism. Which makes Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs the perfect sort of book for me. (I mean, my favourite part of Moby-Dick was the whale facts, even when they were wrong. This one won’t take you nearly as long to read.)

Undrowned book is a stunning, poetic tribute to Blackness, queerness, femmeness, fatness, resistance, solidarity, and love, told through the lens of marine biology. It brings together two of my great loves: activism and whale facts. This is a book that’s all activism and whale facts, in the best possible way. What a joyful read.

by Rachel A Rosen

If you’re in education or academia in the age of austerity, you’ve likely had a moment or two where you’ve wondered what you’re doing there, and whether or not you’re doing more harm than good. I know that I’ve had more than a few of those moments. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar’s wonderfully strange and dreamy novella about education, class divisions, and the carceral state on a mining ship, gets this contradiction.

In the Hold, generations of workers are Chained, never seeing anything other than their miserable conditions. But a boy who is good at drawing is plucked from the Hold and brought up to the ship’s university, where he joins the bluelegs, people like his professor, who get an electronic ankle bracelet instead of a chain. Some people even have no fetters, and get names instead. As the boy adjusts to his new circumstances and the professor navigates the boundaries of hers, they become embroiled in a struggle for freedom—not just for themselves, but for their entire society.

This novella manages to be at once intensely relatable and transcendent: a story of the power and the limits of academia, the compromises of political action, the relationship between labour and the state, and the promise of breaking free.

by Zilla Novikov

The Audacity Gambit by B. Zedan is a gentle fairy tale, though the underlying themes are as uncompromising as any Fae could demand. Emily is the Chosen One, the one who can restore her people to the Fae Kingdom–but this is no accident of fate. Her life has been manipulated since the moment of her birth to fulfil the esoteric needs of prophecy, and the trusted adults of her life have been concerned only with preparing the way. But, while the world can put a person in a box long enough that she assumes its shape, she can still choose who she becomes when she steps outside.

The fantastical world is a character in its own right, full of whimsy in the style of Frank L Baum or Cat Valente, where Polaroid cameras reveal hidden mysteries and trees may–or may not–be trustworthy. While I never feared for Emily’s life, I wondered what she would hold onto when everything changed.