Neal Stephenson's willingness to skip through time to tell his stories flaunts an authorial fearlessness. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer both envisioned possible futures, near and far, respectively. Anathem leapt even further into the future, in addition to occupying an entirely different dimension. Cryptonomicon explored a fictionalized history of the modern computer's origin during the events of the World Wars; the multi-volume Baroque Cycle followed characters fictional and historical at the beginning of the 18th century. Zodiac, The Big U, and (portions of) Cryptonomicon all reside somewhere near our own time...

After the huge success of Paolo Bacigalupi's 2010 debut novel, The Windup Girl, the science fiction world waited with baited breath for his sophomore effort. Could he repeat his early success? After all, The Windup Girl struck an incredible cord with fans and critics alike, winning both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Time Magazine went so far as to declare the story one of the top ten fiction novels of the year. So when Ship Breaker was announced, fans lined up to discover if Bacigalupi could once again snag the haunting thread woven through The Windup Girl. So, has he?

Seattle-based author Cherie Priest has established herself as a writer to keep a close eye on, first garnering fame for the Lulu Blooker-winning Four and Twenty Blackbirds, the opening novel of her Eden Moore trilogy. More recently, her series of steampunk tales have been earning her further attention; the stories of the Clockwork Century universe showcase an America that never came to be: the Civil War extended, both sides armed with strange new weapons, nimble airships roaming the skies. Boneshaker connected with fans and critics alike...

Joe Abercrombie has earned a reputation as a writer of gritty, intense fantasy that’s unafraid to deconstruct and reexamine the typical fantasy assumptions. For many readers, this falls firmly in the camp of being “a very good thing,” though individual mileage may vary (see here for an interesting blog post and an impressive thread of commentary responding to one critic’s unfavorable opinions on postmodern interpretations of the fantasy genre). His freshman effort, The First Law, offered up a fresh, violent, and often funny take on epic fantasy...

Dan Simmons’s begins his second foray into the far future with Ilium, the first half of the Ilium / Olympos duology, and what a journey he has made! Ilium won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2003, and Olympos was also nominated in 2005. For anyone counting, Simmons has claimed that same prize for Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, and The Rise of Endymion, all three part of his acclaimed Hyperion Cantos. Each year, Locus magazine presents the Locus Award to the winner of their readers’ poll, and it isn’t difficult to understand why so many science fiction fans chose Ilium: Dan Simmons’s dramatic epic offers something to satisfy every speculative fiction readers’ tastes, cramming dozens upon dozens of literary references between scenes of nerve-racking action, intriguing puzzles, and visionary glimpses of astonishing technology.

As I mentioned in my review of Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay is well known for his “historical fiction,” using the geography and societies from factual history as the inspiration for his meticulously written, fantasy-based accounts. An analogue of a moment often overlooked in Europe’s history, The Lions of al-Rassan replicates the final decades of the Reconquista, a thousand years ago. For several centuries after the Muslim capture of the Iberian Peninsula (now the modern states of Spain and Portugal), three radically different cultures and religions coexisted in precarious balance, until the inevitable tensions between Islam...

Brandon Sanderson’s first novel, Elantris, was published only five years ago, in 2005. Since then, this prolific writer’s impressive catalog of published novels has established him as a fantasy author to be reckoned with. His Mistborn trilogy is especially loved among fantasy readers for its knuckle-whitening action, meticulous world-building, and intricate system of magic. When fantasy author Robert Jordan died before completing his magnum opus, the 10,000 page The Wheel of Time, Jordan’s widow selected Brandon Sanderson to finish the series’s final three volumes, the first of which, 2009′s The Gathering...