For nearly two decades, Jim Killen has served as the science fiction and fantasy book buyer for Barnes & Noble. Every month on Tor.com and the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, Jim shares his curated list of the month’s can’t-miss new SFF releases.
The last week in September closes out an amazing month for new SFF with another towering stack of exciting new books. There’s something here for everyone, from expansive space opera, to weird fantasy, to side stories in your favorite SFF universes.
Though we consider things in much starker genre divides now, there is nothing so universal as a fantasy story. Fantasy’s roots are in folklore: the timeless myths, legends, fairy tales, and tall tales that have shaped culture and been passed down through centuries of literature. There would be no sweeping epic fantasies—no Tolkien—without first the enduring folk […]
It’s no secret that modern epic fantasy, as a genre, tends toward Euro-centrism, taking its cue from Tolkien’s Middle Earth. That doesn’t mean you can’t spin original, unique stories from Western medieval cultures and myth, but it does mean that when a fantasy drawn from a different setting and historical period comes along, it’s a welcome change.