Devastatingly powerful. The Only Harmless Great Thing is a searing meditation on myth, history, and the persistence of poison in all its terrible forms. Bolander gives voice to the voiceless with such controlled and perfect fury the pages seem to char and burn as you read. It feels like an alternate Just So Story revealed to us by an ecstatic punk oracle. I can’t stop thinking about it. Nor will you.” —Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk
“Bolander shares literary DNA with Le Guin, and shows it in this tragic and triumphant novella.” —John Scalzi, New York Times bestselling author of Old Man's War
“Bolander's skilled prose always leaves me agog, but days after finishing The Only Harmless Great Thing, I'm still swimming around in its depths with a sense of wonder. It's beautiful and sad and relatable and unremittingly, crucially defiant.” —Kevin Hearne, New York Times bestselling author of the Iron Druid Chronicles
“A brutal story beautifully told. [Bolander's] prose sings like music.... Read this.” —Chuck Wendig, author of Star Wars: Aftermath
"Characteristically poetic prose . . . poignant." —The Guardian
“This handcrafted arrow of a novella becomes more absorbing with each read.” —Kirkus
“The most beautiful and heart-breaking piece of work Bolander’s written to date.” —Amal El-Mohtar, Lightspeed Magazine
“Elephants have infrasound and memory and majesty; we have Brooke Bolander.” —Lawrence M. Schoen, author of Barsk: The Elephant's Graveyard
“A fierce and visionary Jumbo Agonistes aimed straight at the present day—mango-pulping, temple-smashing, exploding out of history with the all the grand power and folly of story.” —Max Gladstone, author of The Craft Sequence
“The Only Harmless Great Thing is Southern Gothic come to the big Northern City, where it settles in and begins to glow, dangerously, and to sing, mightily, and to break out and trample reality into a new shape. This book is transformative. I can hear echoing long after I've set it down.” —Fran Wilde, author of Updraft, Cloudbound, and Horizon.
“Fork-suckingly, plate-lickingly good.” —Nat Cassidy, author of Steal the Stars
“As succinct as it is beautiful: a snippet of times and of characters who struggle with unthinkable injustice.” —The Book Smugglers
Today, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America announced the nominees for the 2018 Nebula awards, honoring science fiction and fantasy works—novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories—published during the prior calendar year. If the Hugo Awards, voted on by fans, are the SFF version of the People’s Choice Awards, the Nebulas are the Oscars, […]
From The Time Machine to Kirk and Uhura‘s unprecedented kiss, speculative fiction has long concerned itself with breaking barriers and exploring issues of race, inequality, and injustice. The fantastical elements of genre, from alien beings to magical ones, allow writers to confront controversial issues in metaphor, granting them a subversive power that often goes unheralded. On this, the […]
As the real world grows each day stranger by leaps and bounds, the skewed secondary worlds, fantastical lands, and alternate histories that are the realms of science fiction and fantasy have only grown more vital, not only as a means of escape from blaring headlines, political turmoil, and the crescendo of climate change, but as […]
This month brought stories of horror and hope, post-apocalyptic worlds and the afterlife, the power of art and literature, and of desert dogs and Scorpion Men. In other words, it was a great time to be a reader of science fiction and fantasy short fiction. “Rapture“, by Meg Elison, in Shimmer If you need a […]
Game recognizes game: we’re pretty proud of what we’ve built in the three and a half years of the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog’s existence, but there’s no doubt we’ll always be chasing the accomplishments of Tor.com, the internet’s most beloved source for discussion of sci-fi and fantasy books, films, TV, and fandom—as […]