The Martian by Andy Weir is brilliant. That’s one word I try not to overuse or water down—brilliant. This novel earns it.

It’s the story of an astronaut, Mark Watney, a member of the Ares III mission to explore Mars, who gets stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew abandons the planet and believes him dead. On his own in an environment lethal to life, Watney must find a way to survive with only the equipment and supplies left behind. If he can survive, he also needs to find a way to get back home…

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Patrick Rothfuss introduces The Slow Regard of Silent Things with a warning that it’s not a proper story. It doesn’t do the things a story is supposed to do.

And it’s wonderful. It’s unlike most anything else I’ve read and I treasured every word of it.

This isn’t a story so much as it’s a contemplation. Reading it isn’t an act of reading so much as it’s a meditation.

Even more so than in the novels of his Kingkiller Chronicle, this novella displays Mr. Rothfuss’ delight in language. He plays with words here in a way that’s both elegant and giddy. The book is lyrical, bursting with alliteration, homophones, and rhyme, but it never comes off as contrived or self-conscious. Rather, his language is a search to find just the right words for each thing that needs to be said.

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Like many of my generation, I went through a Clive Barker phase when I was a teenager. The Hellraiser movies, Nightbreed, Candyman; his novels, The Great and Secret Show and Imajica. He defined dark and edgy for me, and he was much cooler than Stephen King.

Sacrament was the first new-to-me Clive Barker novel I’d read in over two decades. It wasn’t what I expected.

Because of his early work, Mr. Barker is too easily dismissed as a horror writer, albeit one who incorporates a greater portion of magic and fantasy than most. This has never been entirely fair—his best novels have always been more than just horror, as fantastical as they are horrible, works of unfettered imagination.

Sacrament casts off any chains previously tying Mr. Barker to the horror genre. There’s darkness in it, and danger, but it’s definitively not a horror novel.

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I last read The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker back when I was a teenager. I loved it then. I wasn’t sure how I’d react to it as an adult.

I’m happy to report the writing holds up really well. It stands the tests of time and experience. This novel is still staggeringly imaginative, exciting, and moving.

What makes this novel unique—what makes many of Mr. Barker’s novels unique—is a narrative structure built on an escalating series of crises and climaxes. The conflict that opens the story would be the climax of an entire novel in the hands of a lesser writer. For Mr. Barker, however, it’s just the beginning. Then he ramps up to another conflict and climax, and another, and another—building tension and emotional investment to a fever pitch.

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The two novels contained in The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane are surprisingly satisfying. Well-written and displaying a strong command both of style and the standards of the scifi horror genre, these works present an interesting look into the early history of such work.

They function well as science fiction and even better as mysteries and tales of horror.

These novels make me wonder how much influence Mr. Sloane might have had on the genre if he’d continued his career as an author. Instead, he turned away from writing and spent most of his life as an editor and publisher.

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Historians agree that jazz was born when African musical sensibilities met European instrumentation. For Western listeners, it offered familiar sounds voicing unfamiliar phrases. For African listeners, it gave them familiar rhythms and musical ideas echoing through strange sounds.

For anyone who cared to listen, jazz was a music that expanded perceptions and broadened minds. It was a music that blended different heritages into something new and vibrant.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor is the kind of novel you get when non-Western storytelling traditions and sensibilities utilize the quintessentially Western cultural tools and structures of SF. Like jazz, the experience is revelatory.

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Lock In is what you get when John Scalzi decides to write a mystery novel. And it turns out he’s pretty good at it.

The science fiction in this novel is as good as I’ve come to expect from Mr. Scalzi. He offers a compelling premise with intriguing ramifications. He creates a world based on this premise that’s completely believable—it’s unforced and naturalistic, populated by nuanced and quirky characters who feel very real.

But make no mistake—this is a mystery novel more than it’s a science fiction novel.

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