Jump Tribe by Clive Barker

Published by Subterranean Press on July 31, 2025

The Jump Tribe consists of 240 creatures painted by Clive Barker and exhibited at a comic book convention in 2005. Barker’s plan was to turn the creatures into plushies that would be packaged with stories that Barker would write about them. A few plushies were manufactured. They are apparently something of a collector’s item.

In “Yaboo’s Tale,” Yaboo finds a hole. Twoth believes it is dangerous and wants to take it to the police. As Yaboo and Billum fight over the hole, they fling it into the air. It comes down on top of Yaboo, who disappears, only to reappear with wings that he grew after learning magic from the Jump Tribe. Yaboo explains the purpose of the holes, avoids a visit from Kungo Nah, and begins an adventure with his two friends.

The next story, “Tale of Kungo Nah,” explains the origin of a villain who puts greed ahead of family and loses himself as he jumps through holes. Twoth becomes an accidental hero in “Twoth’s Tale.” In “Billum’s Tale,” Billum meets a 7-year-old human (“They lived on a round world called Urt, and they were always fighting.”). The stories are rounded out by forgettable poetry from the Jump Tribe.

Subterranean packages the stories in a collector’s edition and a less pricey trade edition. Both are printed in full color. The signed limited edition has illustrated end sheets and comes in a slipcase. A digital edition provides access to the stories for curious readers who don’t want to spend money on the limited or trade editions.

No plushies come with the book. As I understand it, the plushies never made it into stores because the company that made them went out of business.

Without the plushies, neither print edition seems likely to entertain kids for very long. Barker likely envisioned a long and lucrative series of stories tied to more plushies but abandoned the enterprise when the plushie manufacturer failed.

The stories are imaginative but too short to be substantial. If there were more stories, kids might get hooked on them, but the series ends with (spoiler alert) Billum rescuing the human kid as members of the Jump Tribe, who seem to be experiencing a food shortage (apart from the grossly overweight Lady Zoxi), make a plan to open more holes so they can raid Urt and eat everything they find. Fantasy world addicts might find value here, but casual readers won’t miss much by giving the book a pass. There is simply too little content to make the volume anything other than a curiosity.

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All the Ash We Leave Behind by C. Robert Cargill

Published by Subterranean Press on June 26, 2025

This novella is set in the same universe as Day Zero and Sea of Rust. Robots and humans are at war, sometimes with each other, although independent robots and humans are united against the One World Intelligence that seeks to assimilate all robots and destroy all humans. The setting is generally post-apocalyptic.

The protagonist of All the Ash We Leave Behind is a robot who will be familiar to readers of Day Zero, although I won’t identify him (or she or it, whatever the politically correct pronoun might be for a robot) because he doesn’t reveal his identity until the last sentence. For most of the story, the protagonist is known only as Nanny because he was created to care for and protect children. Before the war, he had a nice coat of fur, the better for cuddling. Now he survives by using the military/fighting skills with which he was programmed to protect the children in his care.

The story begins five years after the war began. Humanity “is all but lost. Pockets of resistance remain, but there is nothing resembling nations or provinces. Just city-states on the fringes of what civilization once was.”

Nanny is searching for a mythical place called Confederation, a fortress where humans and robot allies live together, fighting to keep the enemy from destroying them. Nanny encounters a human girl named Celeste who is accompanied by two lightly armed robots that can’t match Nanny’s skill. Nanny follows them to Confederation, where Nanny is assigned to take over the protection duties that were once delegated to a nanny robot that is now inoperable.

It will come as no surprise that Confederation will be attacked. How the attack comes about and its outcome may be surprising so I won’t spoil them. I can say that the ending is bleak.

The story stands alone reasonably well for readers who aren’t familiar with Day One. Nanny is a sympathetic character; the others, both human and robot, have little personality. After C. Robert Cargill gets the setup out of the way, action takes over. Action scenes are typical of post-apocalyptic fiction that emphasizes action over characterization. Cargill fans will appreciate the chance to be immersed again in this future history. Readers who are unfamiliar with his fictional universe will likely find the novella enjoyable but unremarkable.

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American Mythology by Giano Cromley

Published by Doubleday on July 15, 2025

There have been many Bigfoot novels, primarily in the horror genre. Some are blended with comedy. At least a couple combine Bigfoot with zombies because what’s a horror novel without a zombie?  I don’t know of any Bigfoot novels that are particularly noteworthy. Devolution by Max Brooks (better known for World War Z) is reportedly the best of them. Perhaps it will be supplanted by American Mythology, a novel that doesn’t inspire much fear but at least tells an entertaining story. And the story is zombie-free, which I mark as a plus.

A book with a green leather cover holds the story together. It first appears in a Montana trapping camp in the 1850s. One by one, the campers disappear. Their disappearances are recorded in the same notebook used to record the pelts of animals the men have captured. One of the men reports seeing a creature that is “large, hair-covered, walking upright like a man.”

The book is left behind, where it is discovered by miners in 1911 and again at a logging camp in the 1930s. In both cases, people record their own impressions in the book. In both cases, people in the camp begin to disappear.

The various camps were located near Ramsey Lake, named after a cartographer who insisted that the lake should be omitted from all maps of the area. One of the cartographer’s descendants came across the book while taking his son Jute to visit the lake. Jute’s father tells him that the lake is a “thin place,” where the boundary between dimensions can be crossed. Jute thinks he sees Bigfoot on that trip, then discovers that his dad has written I hear the voice. It’s beginning. Can’t fight it anymore. in the book. His dad became crankier and disappeared when Jute was sixteen.

Jute is now an adult. Jute and his best friend, Vergil Barnes, are the only members of the Basic Bigfoot Society. They differ in their belief about the nature of Bigfoot. Vergil is an aper who subscribed to the relict hominoid theory (Bigfoot evolved as something between an ape and human) while Jute belongs to the Woo camp (Bigfoot is an interdimensional being). They have occasionally undertaken local expeditions in search of Bigfoot, but mostly they conduct meetings in the local bar. Vergil has an uncurable disease that will soon kill him, although he has concealed that truth from Jute.

Dr. Marcus Bernard is a professor of evolutionary biology who has earned modest fame by arguing for the existence of Bigfoot. For reasons involving a reduced need for extra income and a desire to retore his academic integrity, he renounces his former view that Bigfoot is an actual creature. His conversion to reality-based thinking doesn’t sit well when he announces it at a Bigfoot conference. As he explains, “Bigfoot people don’t like being confronted with reality.”

In a scene marked by remarkable and unlikely coincidence, Bernard stumbles upon the bar where Vergil and Jute are meeting while he’s searching for a hospital to treat his bleeding foot. For reasons of his own, Bernard agrees to join a new expedition in search of Jute’s dimly recalled Ramsey Lake as Bigfoot’s possible home. The location is marked on a hand-drawn map that Jute finds in his mailbox. Who drew and delivered the map? That question is part of the mystery.

Vicky Xu, a film student, wants to make a documentary as a college project. She worms her way into the expedition after finding the leatherbound book in Jute’s collection of Bigfoot evidence. Vergil’s daughter Rye rounds out the group.

The main plot concerns the expedition, peppered with disclosures about Vergil’s illness that manage not to be melodramatic. Giano Cromley draws out the suspense for so long that a reader might wonder if the Bigfoot mystery will ever be solved. The first four-fifths tease the reader with improbable occurrences — a character sees an unusually large man with antlers growing from his head; a character hears her dead mother calling to her — in addition to various animalistic howls and roars, campsite disturbances, a watchful crow, little stick men left for the characters to find, and other horror movie staples.

When the reveal finally arrives — well, I won’t spoil it. Like many quest stories, the reader will realize that it's more about the journey than the destination. Maybe there’s a Bigfoot, maybe there’s not. Cromley comes up with something that approaches a happy ending, again under circumstances so improbable that my willingness to suspend disbelief was tested, but the characters probably deserve a happy ending, so who am I to begrudge them one?

On a more positive note, the characters are all reasonably likable and the story moves quickly. Cromley is a capable storyteller. American Mythology makes good points about the ease with which people latch onto fanciful notions (mythical creatures in this case, but conspiracy theories are another example) when reason and evidence might lead them in a more rational direction. I appreciated the recognition that academics sometimes sacrifice their honor for the dollars that come from being a contrarian pundit. Still, the story’s purpose is to entertain rather than to lecture, and it achieves that goal by asking readers to set aside reason for the sake of being entertained by the possibility that myths might be real after all.

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UnWorld by Jason Greene

Published by Knopf on June 17, 2025

UnWorld is about loss and memory. Its theme of personhood — what it is that distinguishes a human from a digital entity — is interesting but primarily serves as a vehicle for exploring the memories we keep or lose of loved ones who have died.

Jayson Greene imagines a future in which people can synch their minds with Artificial Intelligence. The AI, known as an upload, typically resides in a device that interfaces with the brain. The upload records memories through the day that later synch with the mind’s memory, producing a unified, revised, more detailed memory. When the mind and the AI have conflicting memories, the AI may decide to keep the more pleasant one, the one that is less likely to stress the mind, even if it is less accurate. The novel’s AI character reminds us that “memories are created, not recorded,” an observation that roughly expresses the scientific understanding of memory formation.

The story follows four characters in five parts. Anna is the subject of the first and last. Anna had a son named Alex who died in a fall from a cliff. He was with his friend Samantha when he died, but Samantha has not been open with his parents about the full circumstances of Alex’s death. Samantha was older than Alex and some people found it odd that she would spend her time with him, but Alex suffered from anxiety and needed an understanding friend. He spent much of his time building characters in UnWorld, a simulated reality.

Greene gives his characters recognizable personalities. Anna endeavors to leave a small footprint. Unlike her husband Rick, Anna doesn’t like to be noticed. Alex encouraged her to “take up some space,” but Anna believes that everyone needs attention and she doesn’t want attention when others may need it more. She shares few of her thoughts with others, including Rick, and has never been satisfied with Rick’s explanation of the benefits of sharing everything. Anna takes pride in being stoic or, as her mother called her, “unflappable.”

Their difference in personalities became a problem when Alex died. Rick complains that living with Anna and her “unprocessed emotions” is like having a third person in the marriage, leaving no room for him. Anna retorts that Rick spends all day wallowing in his processed emotions while she goes to work to support them. Through Anna and Rick, Greene illustrates the different ways in which parents might cope with their grief after losing a child.

In the first part of the story, Anna and Rick have an uncomfortable visit with Samantha’s parents, Jen and Amir. Alex spent much of his time in their house, but Anna is distressed to see no evidence of his existence there. She worries that “maybe Alex was just an idea that we had. Somehow I had blinked or lost track of him, and now we couldn’t prove he had ever existed. This was the final violence of death: the way it turned people back into ideas.”

Anna and her upload have agreed to separate from each other. It’s the upload’s idea and Anna has little say, as uploads have the right to choose an independent existence. The upload got to know Alex better than Anna did — the upload inhabited sensors and devices in Alex’s bedroom while Anna was working — and after he died, the upload began to doubt the integrity of their synchronized memories of him. She worried that if she stayed with Anna, she would lose Alex. That’s an interesting and original spin on the familiar science fiction theme of conflict between a human mind and an integrated AI.

The novel’s second part focuses on an academic named Cathy who teaches a controversial seminar in Applied Personhood Theory — the notion that uploads have the same right of existence and independence as people who have a body. Isaac Asimov long ago popularized the idea of robots attaining so many human qualities that they demand to have the same rights as humans. Greene adapts that concept to AIs that have no corporeal existence. Uploads have the right to be emancipated, to separate from the person whose memories they once shared, although emancipation causes them to lose their right to vote (“one body, one vote”). Little digital infrastructure has been created for emancipated uploads, leaving them homeless as they move between mobile phones, ATMs, driverless cars, anything that has digital capacity.

Cathy doesn’t have an upload but decides to experience one by injecting biomechanical substances into her blood, creating a place for an emancipated upload to live. As the reader will suspect, she comes to be inhabited by Anna’s former upload, who was named Aviva by Alex.

The third part shifts the story to Samantha, who explains the circumstances of Alex’s death. The fourth part spotlights Aviva and explores the way in which Alex chose to leave a part of himself behind when he died. That last part circles back to Anna.

The concept of rights for thinking beings that need digital architecture to exist (just as human minds need a living brain) is interesting but not the center of the story, as it would be in a traditional science fiction novel. The larger theme of UnWorld is our memory of the dead. Characters want to hang onto memories of Alex but can’t be certain that the memories are real. People process memories differently, just as they process grief differently. Aviva represents memory in its purist form, a recording rather than a creation, but the act of synchronizing those memories with Anna’s reminds us how memories can be untrustworthy.

Greene’s first book was a nonfiction memoir that addressed his grief at the loss of his toddler daughter. UnWorld examines grief from a fictional perspective, but the loss of a child is at the novel’s center. Processing loss, the impact of a child’s death on marriages, and the difficulty of letting go are strong themes that Greene examines through the lens of science fiction. Readers who expect a traditional sf novel might be disappointed, but anyone who wants to contemplate loss and the fear of losing cherished memories of loved ones will find much of value in UnWorld.

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The Two Lies of Faven Sythe by Megan E. O'Keefe

Published by Orbit on ‎ June 3, 2025

The protagonists of The Two Lies of Faven Sythe are strong women. Whether they are entirely human is a separate question.

Bitter Amandine sounds like the name of an herb, but it is actually the name of a pirate. Bitter’s ship, Marquette, is unlike most other vessels for reasons that are only revealed late in the story. Like other spacefaring ships, it is powered by a lightdrive. A breach in the drive’s shielding can lead to lightsickness, a condition that makes the mind fuzzy and might lead to delusional thought.

The other protagonist is a navigator, Faven Sythe. Navigators are able to map the pathways through space that make interstellar travel possible. Every time they use that power, they add new scales to their body and shorten their lives. Sixteen starpaths are available for everyone’s use, but other starpaths must be custom ordered from navigators at significant expense.

The scales that grow on navigators are known as cryst, as is the glasslike shielding that surrounds drives. Hulls are also plated with cryst to protect people in a ship from radiation. The “ancient species” known as the cryst left behind technology that enables navigators to map starpaths. Navigators appear to be the descendants of humans who used that technology to merge with the ancient cryst.

When the cryst want to reproduce, they meditate. Sometimes they are rewarded with a growth beneath their skin that is “plucked free to be nurtured into a woman, or something like a woman.” Reproduction doesn’t seem to be happening in recent years, one of several mysteries that will be resolved by the novel’s end.

Shortly before they are entirely covered in scale, navigators pose themselves in the posture they will assume for eternity. As the story begins, Faven’s mother has become fully crystalized and deposited in a location where she will have a nice view, like a statue in a park.

As she is coping with her mother’s crystallization, Faven learns that her mentor, Ulana Valset, has been reassigned to a distant space station. Navigators (and by extension, space travel) are controlled by the Choir of Stars, sort of a council of elder navigators. Ulana is one of several navigators who have recently been sent to inconvenient locations, never to be seen again.

After engaging in a clandestine and forbidden investigation, Faven learns that Ulana’s starpath actually took her to the Clutch, a “dark fist of a dyson sphere seized around a whimpering star” that has become “the graveyard of their predecessors.” The Clutch is also the location of a “derelict ship called the Black Celeste.”

Faven wants to follow Ulana in the hope of discovering the truth underlying her fictitious reassignment. To that end, she engages with a pirate named Tagert Red without realizing that he plans to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. Bitter foils that plan but can’t prevent the Choir and its army of enforcers (known as Blades) from capturing her and taking her to the Clutch.

The space opera plot follows Bitter and her crew through a series of action scenes as they attempt to reclaim possession of Faven and learn why navigators are disappearing in the Clutch. Their discoveries lead them to a new understanding of the ancient cryst and the true nature of navigators. Bitter also discovers the true nature of the Marquette and its crew.

While navigators don’t reproduce sexually, their sexual desire becomes apparent when Bitter and Faven develop the hots for each other. Their personalities in other respects are developed in as much detail as space opera requires. Bitter doesn’t say “arrr” or wear an eyepatch, but she has the swashbuckling fearlessness a reader would expect of a pirate, as well as a moral sense and willingness to make sacrifices that traditional pirates lack. Her dialog suggests that pirates of the future have adopted the grammar of high school dropouts from the 1950s, although Bitter seems to be brighter than her crew. Faven has a bit less personality but is nevertheless a sympathetic character.

Science fiction writers often put all their energy into worldbuilding and pay insufficient attention to plot construction. Megan O’Keefe creates an interesting universe while building an intriguing mystery about the Clutch and the Choir of Stars. In the grand tradition of science fiction, the mystery holds a threat to the continued existence of humanity, the kind of threat that only a plucky pirate and her scaley lover can prevent. The story moves quickly and gives the reader a fun ride on its way to a resolution that, if a little too neat, is nevertheless satisfying.

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