For nearly two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. At the end of each month, he’ll be sharing the lists of B&N’s bestsellers in the genre, from new hardbacks, to trade paperbacks, to mass markets and media tie-ins, to graphic novels and manga. These are the […]
Though ostensibly genres of escapism, some of the best and most entertaining government agencies—hardly two words synonymous with “fun”—ever conceived were invented by sci-fi and fantasy writers. Of course, these speculative agencies, departments, and extra-legal bureaus tend towards the ungovernable, the incomprehensible, and the unregulatable—which makes them more or less just like the government agencies […]
We’re not going to argue with anyone who says 2016 was a bad year (“bad” being one of the more polite adjectives to pick from), but if they try to extend that blanket statement to cover sci-fi and fantasy books, well, we offer this rebuke: the new books the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog staff loved […]
Daniel O’Malley’s 2012 debut The Rook is a sharp, exciting urban fantasy that ditches the over-used tropes of the genre, retains its best traits, and piles on a heaping helping over bureaucratic intrigue and Lovecraftian horror. It earned favorable comparisons to Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and after four years, it hasn’t lost any of its zip—but we haven’t gotten […]
We’ve been waiting four long years for Stiletto, Daniel O’Malley’s followup to the much-adored, genre-bursting urban fantasy/horror thriller/suspense yarn The Rook, which took us deep inside the British government’s most twisted bureaucracy—the last line of defense between the human world and the realm of…well, you don’t want to know, but there are teeth, and tentacles, […]