The horizon flipping once, twice, camera flying from my hand.
It felt like plunging into shards of ice (294).

Emily St. John Mandel skips like a stone across genres. Last Night in Montreal (2009) begins as a detective story, but its mystery takes the tale into something else entirely. The brilliant Station Eleven (2014), a literary SF novel about a pandemic starts in the near future, jumps across twenty years into a tale of post-apocalyptic actors and a meditation on what makes us human. It brought her both SF and literary accolades, international fame, and an HBO mini-series deal.

So, naturally, her next novel, published earlier this year, concerns economics, a luxury hotel, and a Ponzi scheme.

However, it brushes against SF and Fantasy/Fabulism, and even features a couple of minor characters from Station Eleven.

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The Light Between Stars, an anthology released today, showcases a range of SF and Fantasy stories, from adult SF to YA dystopia and sub/urban fantasy.

I don’t know if any other Bureau-cats will review it. I have to recuse myself, as my short story, “The Rapture of Baatoon Hayes” appears in the anthology, alongside such exceptional work as Stephen B. Pearl’s post-apocalyptic adventure, “Tinker’s Toxin” (which led me to immediately order a novel by Pearl set in the same fictional universe), Hugh A.D. Spencer’s cryptic and literary “Nowhere to Nowhere.” and Simon A.G. Spencer’s excellent space-going “Awakening,” among others.

If you’d like to order a copy (paperback or e-book) or read a few reviews from elsewhere, please continue:

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He heard the slap of waves against barnacle-encrusted wood and the rush of the ship’s keel through choppy seas. Around the vessel smaller hollow casings floated, logboats dropped like calves….
–Michael D. Winkle, “Leviathan”.

One-hundred-and-fifty years after the publication of one of the original SF novels, Pole-to-Pole publishing has produced this collection of sixteen stories riffing on the world of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus.

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