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...

Cherie Priest has been writing for most of the last decade, her first published work being the Eden Moore series, a trilogy in the Southern Gothic genre which has received favorable reviews, including a Blooker Prize for the opening entry, Four and Twenty Blackbirds (originally distributed on Priest’s blog before being published by Marietta Publishing in 2003 and released again in an expanded edition from Tor in 2005). Cherie Priest’s latest work, Boneshaker, garnered further critical buzz, including last week’s nomination for the prestigious Nebula Award for Best Novel of 2009. Boneshaker is the second piece in an...

It seems every year a debut fantasy novels electrifies the speculative fiction community. Scott Lynch opened a planned seven volume series (The Gentleman Bastard Sequence) with The Lies of Locke Lamora, which arrived in a perfect storm of buzz, excitement, and positive reviews. So did Scott Lynch’s debut live up to the hype, and with the benefit of hindsight, does it compare favorably to other impressive fantasy debuts? I would say yes and no; unlike many reviewers, my reaction to The Lies of Locke Lamora was decidedly mixed. ..

Neal Stephenson established himself in the early 90's as a science fiction author to pay attention to: the cyberpunk classic/parody Snow Crash was included on Time's magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer won the Hugo and the Locus award in 1996.

Scott Westerfeld cut his teeth on the popular science fiction series, The Uglies, describing a not-quite-perfect future in which adolescents are surgically modified to be beautiful, but stupid. Demonstrating that he is definitely not afraid to switch gears, Westerfeld has leapt from the future to the past for his next creation, commencing with Leviathan, which the author describes as “Edwardian biotechnology versus Teutonic machinery. With airships.”

Paolo Bacigalupi has been making a name for himself in the science fiction community over the last half-dozen years, penning several short stories and collections preoccupied with the same dystopian future (he won two Locus awards for 2008's Pump Six and Other Stories. In his debut novel,The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi expounds upon his vision of a world dependent on human muscle as its primary energy source. In this grim imagining of Earth's future, the environment was devastated by global warming and rising oceans...