The Commodity of Time: Review of Jaroslav Kalfař’s A Brief History of Living Forever
Lillian Liao Under Review:A Brief History of Living Forever. Jaroslav Kalfař. Little Brown and Company, March 2023. “The body is political”—this, we have always known. From the body politics of the medieval times to capitalist exploitations of labour and the feminist fight for reproductive rights in the 20th (and 21st) centuries, Western history has indeed…
Calls for Reviews & Essays: September 2023
The Ancillary Review of Books publishes reviews and essays with an emphasis on utopian impulses and systemic injustices. ARB seeks to build a community of radical thinkers writing about amazing, speculative, global writing. If you are interested in writing for ARB, please check out our Procedures & Style Guide, and pitch us using the form…
I Keep Secrets: Review of Victor LaValle’s Lone Women
Jeremy Brett Under Review:Lone Women. Victor LaValle. One World, March 2023. Victor LaValle is no stranger to showcasing horror in places that already inspire a sense of dread or discomfort, whether a disorienting mental asylum in The Devil in Silver or the urban strangeness of New York City in The Changeling. With Lone Women, LaValle…
Imagined Agency: Review of Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone’s Fictional Games
Eric Stein Under Review:Fictional Games: A Philosophy of Worldbuilding and Imaginary Play. Stefano Gualeni and Riccardo Fassone. Bloomsbury Academic, January 2023. Throughout the media we enjoy, from novels to films to video games, we encounter games that exist as “part[s] of fictional worlds,” games that “cannot actually be—or at least were not originally meant to…
The Unlikely Utopia: Review of The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
E.G. Condé Under Review:The Mimicking of Known Successes. Malka Older. Tordotcom, March 2023. “Perhaps there’s a discipline, or trans-discipline, of flexibility and reactiveness, or a calculation of the principles involved in ecosystem survival rather than the literal mimicking of known successes.” Imagine a humanity exiled from the Earth they once called home, confined to live…
Snap! Criticism: An Introduction
Dan Hartland In his recent—and excellent—short book on Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood, Paul Kincaid writes of that novel’s worldbuilding that “we do not pass into the world of story, but rather story already occupies the real world.” In the Mythago Wood cycle, the fantastic is immanent in a world otherwise recognisably our own, rather than…
Hot Dogs and Fallout 76: Review of Making Our Future by Emily Hilliard
Ellie Campbell Under Review:Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia. Emily Hilliard. University of North Carolina Press, November 2022. To do the work of a folklorist is inherently to believe in the future. The work of memory institutions and the people who inhabit them—archivists, librarians, museum workers, and documentarians—is often assumed to…
Calls for Reviews & Essays: August 2023
The Ancillary Review of Books publishes reviews and essays with an emphasis on utopian impulses and systemic injustices. ARB seeks to build a community of radical thinkers writing about amazing, speculative, global writing. If you are interested in writing for ARB, please check out our Procedures & Style Guide, and pitch us using the form…
Mistborn Era 2 in Retrospect
Alex Kingsley If you’re at all connected to the SFF world, you’ve probably heard that Brandon Sanderson just released The Lost Metal, which concludes the Mistborn Era 2 series, part of his fictional universe called the Cosmere. So what is the Cosmere, why does it have so many die-hard fans, and why is The Lost…
The Church of Fakes Reproduces Fakes: Review of Stories of the Eye
The Church of Fakes Reproduces Fakes: Review of Stories of the Eye Zachary Gillan Under Review:Stories of the Eye. Edited by Sam Richard & Joe Koch. Weirdpunk Books, October 2022. In 1816, seven and a half decades before H. P. Lovecraft was born, E.T.A. Hoffmann published “The Sandman”, a nightmarish story of confused identities and…
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