Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 27, 2024

Two books came in from Tachyon this week, so let me take a look at them and tell you what looks interesting.

These Fragile Graces, This Fugitive Heart is a novella-as-book from Izzy Wasserstein, previously author of the story collection All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From and two books of poetry. It's a near-future story billed as "a queer, noir technothriller of fractured identity and corporate intrigue" - I'm not clear if "fractured" here means "torn between competing parts of your life" or "technologically-augmented people doing SFnal things." Our main character is Dora, who's dragged back to a place she used to live by the death of her ex-girlfriend, which murder, in best fictional style, she must solve. It's publishing on March 12th in paperback and the usual collections of electrons.

Slightly earlier - publishing in just about a month, on February 29th - is The Forgotten Beasts of Eld: 50th Anniversary Edition by Patricia A. McKillip. (And looking at the bound galley, I realize I keep forgetting that McKillip died in 2022, and keep thinking of her as still around and writing. We all need our comforting untruths.) Eld was her first major book, her first book for adults, and a World Fantasy winner back in 1974...which doesn't seem like it was really fifty years ago, but that's how time works.

I read Eld when Tachyon first published it, a few years back, and both before and after that have wanted to read more McKillip for a while without really doing so. But I already have two collections of her stories on the shelf, and might have to pull one of them down.