Val's Random Comments

There are a couple of pretty big novels on my to read list and at the moment I can't seem to manage to read them in a week. To fill th...

This is a review of the short story that originally appeared in Interzone in 1986, the same title was later used for a collection, which ...

Last year I read Drowned Worlds (2016), a Jonathan Strahan's anthology of climate change fiction. It had a few good stories in it, bu...

For the final story in Short Fiction Month, I picked The Long Chase by Geoffrey A. Landis. His work is primarily short fiction of which I...

Reiko's Universe Box by Shinji Kajio is one of the many translations in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's enormous anthology The Big Book...

These days, pretty much everything that is being published by this author, appears under the pseudonym Robin Hobb. Once in a while a story...

I have read quite a few pieces of short fiction by Nancy Kress. She seems most comfortable writing novella length pieces (to the point whe...

Blood Music is probably Greg Bear's best known story. It appeared in Analogue in June 1983 and won both the Hugo and Nebula Award for...

Walking Awake is one of the original stories in Lightspeed's special edition Women Destroy Science Fiction . Jemisin is very successf...

Ted Kosmatka is not a prolific short story writer. Only fifteen or so short stories appeared in the last decade, along with three novels. ...

Tanith Lee was a prolific British author of novels that moved all over fantasy, science fiction and horror. When she passed away in 2015, ...

Elizabeth Bear's interest in the old American West did clearly not begin with her novel Karen Memory (2015). The novelette Faster Gun...

The Fish of Lijiang by Chen Qiufan is another of the forty or so short stories listed on his website that Ken  Liu has translated from Ch...

Theodore Sturgeon is a man with a reputation for writing excellent short fiction. He also wrote a lot of it. His collected short stories h...

Margaret St. Clair is one of the few women who managed to publish stories under her own name. Most of her work appeared in the 1940s and 1...

An Owomoyela is another name new to me. I know absolutely nothing about Owomoyela, other than that se is from the US and prefers it if we ...

As some of you may know, my girlfriend is from Norway. I must to my shame admit that beyond Sophie's World my knowledge of Norwegian ...

Next stop in short fiction month is The Cost to Be Wise by Maureen F. McHugh, another author whose work I'm unfamiliar with. She is p...

Other than that he is from Bulgaria I know very little of Haralambi  Markov. He has published only a handful of stories thus far. The Lang...

Ever since encountering a story by Carol Emshwiller in John Joseph Adams' anthology Wastelands I have felt I ought to read more of he...