Look what the Book Elves left on my porch today! You can get yours here.

My Another Word column (“Dear Speculative Fiction, I’m Glad We Had This Talk”) is live at Clarkesworld. Of course, the issue is not that SFF doesn’t have some wonderful, wry, nuanced writers. It’s that, too often, what gets taken seriously by critics is the stuff that takes itself very seriously. And that can get a [...]

Tomorrow is Book Day! I’m afraid this means that there is going to be some spam between now and then. All about this: Here’s an essay at Black Gate, about how I always wanted to write an epic fantasy–and now I have! “I wanted to write a book that had the sense of scope and [...]

The web-pixies at Tor.com have posted an excerpt of Range of Ghosts, in which we meet a young semi-nomadic warrior named Temur, who is having an exceedingly bad day… By “bad day,” I mean that it starts with vultures. And goes downhill. The  cover copy says: Temur, grandson of the Great Khan, is walking away [...]

From the PW review of Range of Ghosts (Elizabeth Bear. Tor, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2754-3) “Bear launches a trilogy in a fantastic new world with this compelling tale…. Bear creates a vivid world where wizards must sacrifice their ability to procreate in order to control magic and the sky changes to reflect the gods of [...]

Kirkus has given Range of Ghosts a starred review, which reads in part: This lean, sinewy, visceral narrative, set forth in extraordinarily vivid prose full of telling detail, conveys a remarkable sense of time and place, where the characters belong to the landscape and whose personalities derive naturally from it. Though the book is not [...]