Starred review from Quill & Quire

Here's a great review of Irregular Verbs in Quill & Quire, Canada's magazine of book news and reviews: "This is, indeed, a writer who fearlessly invents and innovates. That said, readers expecting to find a consistent theme or singular, overarching style won’t easily be able to pin Johnson down. His ability to flit between voices, styles, and perspectives – from pulp-fiction gumshoe to historical fantasy to paranoiac storytelling – results in a collection that spans a remarkable range of characters and ideas. Johnson’s strength resides in his willingness to adapt and explore [...] Johnson [...] has created a new mythology – new lore that feels as familiar as it is daring and fresh."


#SFWAPro

Starred review from Shelf Awareness

Shelf Awareness has a great review of Irregular Verbs up. Here are the highlights:

Matthew Johnson, little-known despite having been published in a variety of anthologies, here collects some of his deeply original short stories for the first time. In the brilliant Irregular Verbs, Johnson proves that short, well-executed speculative fiction has all the heart-wrenching power of any epic historical novel or contemporary literary fiction. In her introduction, author Helen Marshall describes Johnson as "one of the very best science-fiction and fantasy writers that you've never heard of," and just a story or two from Irregular Verbs proves her point. [...] Certain themes recur: what Johnson considers the quiet, endless tragedy of capitalism, the pain of a partner's death. Whatever the subject, Johnson's treatment is elegant and wise, and his stories are treasures to be savored. [...] A masterful collection of poignant, clever science-fiction and fantasy stories. 

You can read the rest here, and check in tomorrow for a Spoiler Space entry about "Public Safety."


#sfwapro

Preview review roundup

For all you pre-orderers and early adopters, two reviews of Irregular Verbs and Other Stories are already out. First up is the one from Publishers Weekly, which says "Readers interested in modern speculative fiction would be strongly recommended to make this their next choice."

Next comes the Toronto Star, which says "Debut collections of short stories sometimes hit like a band’s breakout first album, its material gathered from a writer’s early and often most creative years. Such, anyway, is the feeling you get reading Irregular Verbs and Other Stories, Ottawa author Matthew W. Johnson’s meaty collection of speculative short fiction... Johnson also bends and twists genre conventions, with highly original riffs on everything from superhero to zombie fiction. But no matter how bizarre the setting, his stories always keep a focus on how individuals cope with the stress of these disruptions and intrusions into strange new worlds. Luckily his characters are sensitive but adaptable types, and given the plastic nature of Johnson’s universe another jump in time or space, or genre, is often the solution closest to hand."


#SFWAPro

On the racks: "Rules of Engagement"

So it looks like the April/May issue of Asimov's is out, containing my story "Rules of Engagement." Two reviews are already up too, and both are pretty good: Sam Tomaino at SFRevu calls it a "good, solid story" with "a shattering conclusion" while it's one of just two Recommended stories in Lois Tilton's early March short fiction reviews at Locus.

Here's the first page of "Rules of Engagement":

A Reporter At Large

It was not much of a fight, as bar fights go: not even enough to get Kevin Bishop, Tony Cervantes and Tom Hollis thrown out of the bar in which they had spent the afternoon and evening of July ninth. The three soldiers had been drinking at The Swiss Bar and Grill, a bar popular with college students on weeknights but largely taken over by military on weekends, when their implants relax the usual restrictions on alcohol. Bishop, Cervantes and Hollis had served together in the 23rd Infantry Division of the 2nd Infantry Brigade (more often referred to as the 23-IN), mostly in Somalia and Yemen, and two of them were still on active duty. Fire team Chinook had survived the worst that the war and al-Shabaab could throw at them, but before long two would be in prison and one would be dead.

 

The immediate cause of the fight was money. Bishop, who had ordered the last two rounds, had revealed that he was unable to pay his share of the night's tab. The entire 23-IN had been flush with back pay when they had come home from deployment in Yemen, bringing a welcome stream of money into the city's bars; it was not unusual during that period for John Pratt, The Swiss's owner, to make two or more bank runs per night, each time with a duffel bag full of money. (Soldiers in the 23-IN pay for almost everything in cash, due to a widely-held belief that their implants track direct payments.) Two months later the money was beginning to run out, and for Bishop – who was no longer receiving combat pay and was also making regular payments to the city's ghat dealers – it already had. 

#SFWAPro 

Views and reviews

Two new reviews over the interwires today. The first is of "The Afflicted" in Fantasy Literature, which describes it as "a zombie story that manages to be a touch original, likening zombies to those suffering from senile dementia (the first sign that one is starting to turn in his world is an inability to think straight). One becomes a zombie only gradually in this world, just as Alzheimer’s patients tend to fade away slowly. The parallel makes this story more painful than the usual zombie story, in which zombies are nothing but cannon fodder; here, they are people first." The second is a review of "The Last Islander" at Tangent, where reviewer Bob Leishman says "Matthew Johnson tells the story of a displaced people and he does so particularly well," concluding simply "I liked this story."

Great review of Fall From Earth in Black Gate

Matthew Surridge (@Fell_Gard) at Black Gate has published a terrific review of Fall From Earth, which he compares in quite interesting ways to Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series. It's particularly gratifying to see him descibe the book as being about "is about the difficult forging of a negotiated treaty, a modus vivendi between different peoples, many of them divided by religion and language, trying to reach a point of equilibrium fraught with tension but still capable of suggesting a joint future," which pretty much summarizes what I had hoped to achieve with it.