Brown Girl in the Ring

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Science fiction and fantasy often serve as way to examine and cope with societal issues, past or present. Given how prevalent the idea of “otherness” is within genre (from monsters to aliens), it’s no surprise that writers of color would choose to use SFF as a vehicle to access their own thoughts about race and feelings of otherness […]

Sprinkled throughout this “first” novel by Claire O’Dell (anom de plume for fantasy author Beth Bernobich) are references to Watson’s reading list, which is packed to the gills with meaty, diverse, interesting—and entirely existent— speculative fiction. It’s great fun, as an SFF reader, to see O’Dell name-drop real books and authors as having influenced her […]

tThe ability to write a great novel is some mysterious proportion of natural talent and hard-won mastery of the craft, yet the business of publishing, that eternal conflict between art and commerce, loves to celebrate the new, the untested. That is to say, there’s nothing quite like the excitement of a debut novel, even though […]