The Reference Library

The Reference Library

by Rosemary Claire Smith

By the time you are reading this column, in late spring of 2026, the science fiction genre will have marked its 100th anniversary. 

Though preceded by individual authors ranging from Mary Shelley to Edgar Rice Burroughs, it was on March 10, 1926 that the first issue of Amazing Stories hit the newsstands—the birthing cry of modern science fiction, if not as a genre, certainly as an industry and a fandom. Every magazine, every book, every author, every convention, every argument over whether Star Trek or Star Wars is better . . . it all started one century ago, with one pulp magazine, and grew into a community that has spread across the globe and numbers in the millions.

That’s an incredibly humbling thought, isn’t it?

Hard to picture a world without it—I know I certainly couldn’t picture my life without it. Putting aside that I review books for the oldest continuously published science fiction magazine in the world, every day I get to read, edit, write and talk about books for a living! All of that exists because of science fiction—and because of you.

That century of genre fiction, this magazine, my job—none of this exists without you, the reader.

So pat yourself on the back, dear reader, and perhaps grab a slice of birthday cake to pair with a few of the books I bring before you. The grand tradition of science fiction marches ever onward, and with books like these carrying that banner forward, our genre can look ahead to many more milestones to come.

 

 

Since her 2005 debut, Elizabeth Bear has written books across a range of genres, from epic fantasy to hard science fiction. Even with that in mind, her White Space space opera series is one of particularly bold design and vision, high stakes and big ideas—in short, everything that has made Bear’s work stand out for the past three decades.

In spite of The Folded Sky being the third book in Bear’s White Space universe, having read the previous two books is not required, though they do add some color to the wider universe. Even for a universe filled with posthumans, artificial intelligences, and colorful alien life, The Folded Sky finds a strange new corner to plant its flag.

Dr. Sunyata Song is an archinformist—a blend of historian, archaeologist, and anthropologist—tasked with the mission of a lifetime for someone whose duty is to preserve information. The mission? Travel to a strange star system and aid in efforts to download all available information from an ancient alien artificial intelligence called the Baomind. Traveling there with her alien wife Salvie, two adolescent kids, Luna and Stavan, and two cats, competition at the system research station is absolutely cutthroat—there’s an attempt on the life of a research aide almost immediately upon arrival.

To add to the complications, the ragtag station is under threat from a coalition of opportunistic pirates and fundamentalists who think the Baomind is an evil that needs to be destroyed, and the system is under blockade. All the while, interdimensional beings dubbed the Strangers are reaching out to our plane—and so far, Song is the only person who can see them.

And then there is the matter of the ticking clock in the form of the system’s dying red giant star, due to go supernova at any moment, taking the Baomind and anything and anyone still in the system with it.

A major part of The Folded Sky’s charm comes from how vastly different it is from classical space opera, while still maintaining its spirit. This is a space opera without empire, no larger-than-life heroes, or vast star-spanning wars, and, save the pirates, the closest thing it has to a villain is a dying sun. 

What it does have is some significant thoughts on the nature of the universe and the origins of intelligent life, and a very human heart at the center of its conflict, of a scientist struggling to maintain a family life, make a mark professionally, and make contact with a computerized alien hivemind. Dr. Song is a wonderful protagonist, vulnerable and brilliant in equal measure, and her desire to protect her family is wonderfully well-realized. It’s a joy to see it help her rise to the occasion. Viewing cosmic conflict and first contact through the eyes of a struggling family woman adds a tremendous amount of charm to the vast events of The Folded Sky.

Everything that makes Elizabeth Bear a treasure of an author, and White Space such a unique take on classical space opera, is on full display in The Folded Sky. It’s charming and bold, nearly impossible to put down once started, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

 

 

One of the approaches to military science fiction we don’t see nearly enough is one that asks what should be among the more obvious questions: What happens after the fighting stops? What happens to soldiers of the future, often modified and trained for combat in ways we can’t imagine, who no longer have a war to fight, and come home with a plasma rifle and a head full of traumatic memories? It’s been a fixture of war fiction for decades, and the times military science fiction DOES tackle that question, it always goes interesting places—a personal favorite of mine is Timothy Zahn’s “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” (Analog, January 1982), which spawned his Cobra series.

That may be why I found Rogue Sequence, the debut novel from US Army veteran Zac Topping, such an exhilarating read. Its protagonist is Ander Rade, a genetically engineered super-soldier who spent ten torturous years as a POW, forced to survive as a pit fighter for a decade. Upon his release, he finds the world radically changed since his capture—most notably genetic medication has been banned, and all modified individuals have been branded enemies of the state. His very existence a crime, he’s offered a pardon in exchange for taking one last mission.

It was a brilliant debut, Rade was a great character, and Topping has a true gift for writing utterly brutal action. Which is why I’m thrilled to share that the sequel, Ghost Cell, delivers all that and more.

We rejoin Anders Rade as he tries to stay under the radar, his very existence still not entirely legal and above board, and working for the Russian mafiya to make ends meet. Then he’s once more contacted by the Special Activities division for the Genetic Compliance Department, with another mission. This time he’s asked to infiltrate a band of genetically modified mercenaries under the employ of an unscrupulous billionaire who uses them to do his wetwork in exchange for sanctuary. Among their number is his former team leader, Sevrina Fox, whom he hasn’t seen since his capture.

Succeed, and Rade will receive a full pardon, as will Fox. That’s easier said than done—infiltrating the unit means he will have to get his hands dirty to prove himself, avoid suspicion, and uncover what plans the company has in store in time to prevent them. All for a pardon that, even if he succeeds, he wonders if he will ever actually receive.

Rade remains a wonderfully complicated character, a dutiful soldier who has been betrayed and tortured enough times to lose count but still yearns to be able to settle down and find something close to a normal life again. If Rade didn’t have enough on his plate in Ghost Cell, he’s increasingly forced to deal with painful side effects as his modifications, long unmaintained because of their illegality, have begun to degenerate, making him subject to bouts of incapacitating pain and interference that can flare up at any moment.

Topping once more deserves a lot of credit for the white-knuckle action in Ghost Cell, and also for the sheer variety of set pieces he throws at the reader. Expect knife’s edge hand-to-hand combat, duels with drones, mecha battles, grand shootouts, and some genuinely impressive use of technology, all with a brutal authenticity to them.

Once Ghost Cell gets going, it will leave you on the edge of your seat and keep you breathless until the last shot rings out. A damaged hero seeking redemption and to save a lost comrade, pulse-pounding spectacle and enough twists to the central conspiracy to keep even clever readers guessing. For readers looking for thrills, no better time to join Anders Rade on his latest mission, and one hopes not his last. Once more into the fray!

 

 

Like no doubt many of you, Neal Stephenson had a reader for life in me from the moment I first encountered street samurai and mafia pizza delivery boy Hiro Protagonist in the pages of Snow Crash. It certainly doesn’t hurt that, after producing a work that may well be a contender for an entire subgenre’s magnum opus, he spent the next three decades penning some of the most bold and challenging works of modern science fiction, from The Diamond Age to Anathem, changing his approach and style as easily as some writers change jackets.

It should come as no surprise that Polostan, the first book in the new Bomb Light series from Stephenson, carries on that proud tradition, while also serving as a strange new entry from an author whose work is defined by strange and new entries.

Dawn Rae Bjornberg is a fiercely independent young woman, no doubt aided by her upbringing in a clan of anarchical cowboys in Wyoming. She is also Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, so named by her devoted Russian Leninist father for a Soviet battleship from the Revolution, and taught its doctrine from a young age. By the circumstances of her birth, she is torn between two countries and two visions of the future, even as the world starts to break down along similar lines.

On journeys that take her back and forth between the United States and the Soviet Union, she finds herself repeatedly at the crossroads of history. Dawn/Aurora is at the tense standoff with the Bonus March in Washington DC, one her father has been tasked by the Soviets with agitating towards revolt, and one tasked to be crushed by a recent dance partner of hers by the name of George Patton. She finds a love and passion for physics, as well as a young physicist, and can already see how the age of the atom is coming fast. She is a star polo player, a gun runner, a potential spy for the Soviets and Americans untrusted by either, and unsure herself which side to take.

On a journey that will take her from the hellish steel refineries of Magnitogorsk to the stalls of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, from bank robberies to physics lectures, Dawn/Aurora finds herself at the crossroads of a rapidly changing world, and will soon have to choose just what her place within it will be.

The clashing worlds and worldviews of Polostan are beautifully rendered, and Dawn/Aurora makes such a wonderfully well-realized protagonist, a polo mallet in one hand and tommy gun in the other, and a head on swivel in a world changing a mile a minute. It’s a novel that, much like its hero, defies categorization and norms, and moves as quickly as she does. Fans of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novels will find much to love here.

I also love how deeply Polostan explores the wildly rich Interwar period, letting Neal Stephenson play around with dieselpunk as much as he has with cyberpunk. This was the age of art deco, skyscrapers, jazz, and rapid technological change in America, and the age of Soviet realism, Shostakovich, Stalinization, and massive social and industrial upheaval in Russia, an era whose styles and national visions would shape both countries for much of the next century. We get to explore both worlds through Dawn/Aurora’s eyes, with the added element that as she learns more about science, we see the Atomic age begin to take shape as well. 

Much like with his Baroque Cycle, the historical elements of Polostan are much more prominent than the science, but while subtle, you see the groundwork of the science fiction elements being laid for later Bomb Light novels. If I have but one complaint about the novel, it’s that it does feel like Polostan spends a little too much time on setup and not enough on immediate payoff—a consequence perhaps of this being Stephenson’s shortest novel by nearly half since the 90s.

Polostan offers a mix of memorable characters, a depth of historical drama, a splash of alternate history and atom age science fiction. The result is a novel that can only be called Stephensonian. It’s a strange and heady journey, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

 

 

There are doubtless some who might think that a novel like Powerless, expanded from a Harry Turtledove novelette of the same name that ran in Fantasy & Science Fiction (Sept/Oct 2018), is anachronistic, especially given its premise of a communist dystopia, a relic of the Cold War. I’d argue that with authoritarianism on the march throughout the West—I trust you to fill in the blanks on which particular brand of it here, we’ve many to pick from—a terrifying cautionary tale of all-consuming totalitarianism is well worth reading, especially one as powerful as Turtledove has crafted here.

Charlie Simpkins is like any other working man in the West Coast People’s Democratic Republic. He and his wife and two kids live in a one-bedroom tenement in Los Angeles, and he rides the bus that is always late to a (state-owned) vegetable shop where he works. He ignores the constant shortages and breadlines, and when the local Communist apparatchiks and nomenklatura say frog, he jumps.

Every man has his limits, and when the latest state propaganda campaign mandates Charlie hang a poster in his window—a truly dreadful rendition of the old “Workers of the World, Unite” motif—in a small act of willful defiance he pitches it in the garbage instead. This small act brings down the fury of the local party bosses, costing him his job, impacting his family, and putting himself directly in the crosshairs of the regime’s enforcers. In fact, the only reason he didn’t find himself in a forced labor camp or worse is those very state enforcers deemed him not worth the effort—powerless and easily subdued.

Yet to the surprise of even himself, where others would be beaten back in line, Charlie finds himself growing more willful with each retaliation, performing small acts of defiance where and when he can. Charlie also soon finds he is not alone, and dares to join others in calling for change, including an ambitious party member who takes up their mantle as a means of rising through the ranks. What began with a powerless man tossing away a poster has sparked a chain of events that offers the bright lure of reform and change within the WCPDR. Yet as those cries grow louder, they draw not only the casual cruelty of local petty tyrants—but the ire and guns of far more dangerous ones.

The dystopian communist California Harry Turtledove has crafted here should make even stern readers squirm in their seats. Those familiar with the norms of dystopian fiction—or with any passing knowledge of what life was like behind the Iron Curtain—will find a lot of familiar ground, but it doesn’t make Powerless any less effective. The novel doesn’t pull any punches, and, compared to many modern works of dystopian science fiction, isn’t afraid to show that more often than not resistance to authoritarianism doesn’t result in freedom, or even reform, but tanks in the town square and a lot of bodies in shallow graves.

You can also tell Turtledove drew heavily from real history, the obvious examples being the reform efforts within the Communist block—Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968—that were crushed by a mass invasion by their Warsaw Pact allies.

Part of what makes the all-consuming feel of tyranny so effective in Powerless comes from the glimmers of the world’s alternate history we see pop up from time to time. The point of divergence was the American Civil War, which here led to the complete dissolution of the United States, leaving no superpower of free men and free markets to stand opposed to the march of communism. It’s an important distinction—in our world, a key factor in the fall of the Soviet sphere was that a firm, free, and prosperous counterexample existed, shining as defiant as the dawn to darkness. Here, republicanism was a failure, the United States has been dead for a century, and an all-encompassing global communism is the only system the world has known for generations. There can be no rallying cry against the party line if the party line is all that exists.

Harry Turtledove is no stranger to using alternate history to explore dystopian worlds or political allegory, yet with Powerless, he has crafted what may be a contender for his most terrifying world yet. Even in novels like In The Presence of Mine Enemies, where the Nazis win WWII, or Gladiator, where Communism won the Cold War, there was the glimmer of change or liberation, and an end to the evil. In Powerless, tyranny has won, totally and completely—there is no opposition, reform is mercilessly crushed, and there is no free world to flee to or serve as an agent of change. Just an endless march of broken society, broken promises, and broken men. Turtledove has written a world whose communist future is, as Orwell once envisioned, a boot stomping on a human face—forever.

The result is that Powerless is a novel that is a potent reminder of the dangers of tyranny, and the terrifying reality that once established, mere resistance may not be enough to see it toppled. It’s a dour, dark read that will linger in the back of your mind for days.

 

 

When genre and literature historians look back at the Silver Age of Science Fiction, all too often the influence of the men’s adventure magazines of the era is ignored, if not outright maligned. Which is a shame, because much like the pulp magazines of the Golden Age, they offered a very different flavor of fiction to readers, with several of the long running pulps, like Argosy and Adventure, even transitioning into men’s adventure magazines in the 50s.

They also played an understated role in genre literature of the period, allowing for speculative fiction stories outside the mold of Campbellian science fiction more common to magazines like Astounding or Galaxy to still find a home. Drawn by pay rates higher than many genre mags at the time, quick turnaround times, and a wide degree of editorial freedom, a number of science fiction authors also wrote for various men’s adventure magazines, with frequent contributors including Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, and Harlan Ellison. Even a young Ursula K. Le Guin made some of her earliest sales to the lad mags.

It’s that very flavor of science fiction that drew Robert Deis & Wyatt Doyle, whose previous effort Weasels Ripped My Flesh is a brilliant retrospective of men’s adventure magazines, to assemble a collection of genre stories that ran in these magazines. The result is Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants, a collection of science fiction stories that, with a couple of famous exceptions, have largely never been reprinted until now.

Many genre readers may already have passing familiarity with Theodore Sturgeon’s story “The Blonde with the Mysterious Body,” perhaps better known by its less lurid alternate title, “The Other Celia,” which has been reprinted dozens of times and widely recognized as some of the best work by a true giant of science fiction. “Killer of the Cave,” written by Gil Paust, the editor of Argosy and Adventure, is a post-apocalyptic story where the solution to the central “Whodunnit?” gives the collection half of its name. The story “Their Bodies Glowed with Fire,” by Dane Marshall, is remarkably radical for the time for its protagonist and subject matter, a disgruntled Native American war veteran who finds greater acceptance with the aliens that have abducted him than in his bigoted Arizona hometown.

One of my personal favorites has to be “The Man Who Couldn’t Die,” by Gardner Fox, better known for his sword-and-sorcery and comic book work, here with a character-driven space opera. Clarr Morson is a criminal sociopath whose brain has been placed in a robot body, now ageless, immortal, and tasked with exploring another star system and making first contact with the aliens that live there on Earth’s behalf. Naturally, Clarr almost immediately starts scheming ways that he could abandon that assignment in favor of a number of ways to personally profit from it instead. What he doesn’t count on is that maybe Earth knew what it was doing, giving this mission to a criminal—and that his lingering human nature is what they’re counting on to fulfill his mission. It’s a fun, fast-paced story that manages to throw a few curveballs along the way, and it’s almost worth hunting down Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants for alone.

Completely new to me was Rick Rubin, an Oregonian author whose “The Hunted” offered a gripping tale of humans on the run from their sentient robot overlords, with some gripping action and clever twists to the core concept along the way. Rubin only ever wrote four science fiction stories—this, two for Fantasy & Science Fiction, and one for Playboy—which makes this the kind of deep cut I wish we’d see more of in reprint anthologies; obscure journeymen authors who, no matter how briefly, still left a mark on the genre.

The collection also includes a selection of stories far more commonly featured in the men’s adventure magazines of the era, ranging from animal attack stories to violent true crime capers, all with a speculative fiction twist. Two particular favorites of mine were Ronald Adamson’s Korean War tale, “The Flag of the Stonewall Brigade,” which has Confederate specters intervene to save an American unit in a very different war between the North and the South, and the Manly Wade Wellman horror story “Song of the Slavers,” which has Africans claim a gruesome vengeance on the slave trader who put them in bondage.

All of these stories are accompanied by full color artwork—in many cases the interior art or often infamous covers that graced the magazines where these stories originally ran—and the result is a beautifully put together book. Atomic Werewolves and Man-Eating Plants offers not just an overview of the science fiction of men’s adventure magazines, but some absolutely gripping pulp science fiction that hasn’t been read since the Silver Age. If you’re at all intrigued by a chance to sample some of science fiction’s more salacious and sensational chapters, this is essential reading.

 

 

Speaking of sensational, few authors can claim to have left a mark on as many genres as the late, lamented Tanith Lee. With a career spanning over 90 novels and 300 short stories, Lee was a master wordsmith of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and romance, and known for her gift of bleeding them together in ways that are as hard to describe as they are unforgettable to read. She was a brilliant and unique voice within speculative fiction who we lost far too soon, and a decade after her passing, we’ve only truly begun to grasp the full measure of her legacy and influence.

That an author like Tanith Lee should inspire a tribute anthology is not surprising, nor that the caliber of talent it drew would be impressive. That Storyteller and its authors managed that most daunting of tasks, capturing Tanith Lee’s spirit and style within its pages, is a feat worthy of praise. Collecting sixteen stories by a range of authors as diverse as the body of work they’ve come to pay tribute to, a love of Lee’s life and work shines through each tale.

For those who prefer their science fiction a little more hard edged, Martha Wells’ “Data Ghost” delivers a brilliant caper aboard a derelict space station. The story follows three crewmates, Dini, Winnie, and Tulip, whose encounter with the dilapidated base takes a dangerous turn when a lingering signal on the station begins to interfere with their implanted devices and coms. It reads like a haunted house story that fits in some biting commentary about overreliance on AI and technological dependence along the way.

Towards the stranger side of the science fiction spectrum, “Vortumna,” by Mike Allen has a performance artist in an opulent post-human future who causes a stir by embedding long extinct plants—tobacco and morning glories—to grow from her skin. “Like It’s Golden,” by Nisi Shawl, follows a woman’s participation in a time travel experiment to bring her late wife back from the dead.

And then, with what may well be the wildest story of the bunch, Amelia Mangan’s “Death Valley ’71” delivers a heavy metal Lovecraftian horror story set in the American Southwest, a tale of sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, Joshua trees, human sacrifice, and planar travel. It plays out like The King in Yellow set to a grunge rock soundtrack, and I loved every riff.

Of the more fantastic stories in the anthology, I particularly loved “Moons Over Sea,” C.S.E. Cooney’s tale of five orphans seeking out their monstrous birth parents, in some cases quite literally, with Cooney’s lush prose making a heartfelt story that much brighter, and “Another Face,” by Getty Hesse, which was a wonderful homage to Lee’s Flat Earth tales.

To top it all off, Storyteller opens with a deeply personal essay from Lee’s widower, John Kaiine. Julie C. Day and Ann VanderMeer’s introduction and afterword do a wonderful job of not only making the case for the impact and importance of Tanith Lee as an author, but revealing just what she was like as a person, from her kindness at conventions to her love of Italian food and Russian classical music.

In another brilliant flourish, each of the author bios also has each author give a paragraph or two describing their first encounters with Lee’s work, their favorite books and stories, or the influence she had on their own work. A tip of the hat to Nisi Shawl for having impeccable tastes—we share a favorite, Cyrion, Lee’s sword-and-sorcery magnum opus.

Plenty of tribute anthologies pay homage to the author, or memorialize them or honor their work and legacy. Storyteller achieves the daunting feat of helping build upon that legacy, not only capturing Tanith Lee’s voice, but helping to carry on her spirit. It reminded me of all the little things I love about Lee’s work, and made me dig out my old DAW Flat Earth paperbacks, track down a copy of Electric Forest, and with it some of the work of Storyteller’s contributors. This is an essential read for any who have loved the work of Tanith Lee, and, for those yet unacquainted with her style and work, an exquisite first taste.

 

Sean CW Korsgaard is a U.S. Army veteran, award-winning freelance journalist, author, editor, and publicist who has worked with Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Baen Books, and Writers of the Future, and recently became the editor of Anvil and Battleborn magazines. His first anthology, Worlds Long Lost, was released in December 2022, as was his debut short story, “Black Box.” He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and child, along with, depending on who you ask, either far too many or far too few books.