We're back! (Did you miss us?) I'm not sure why the SFBC Blog was down for two days, but let's make up for lost time:

The Agony Column reviews Alastair Reynolds’s collection Galactic North.

Fantasy Book Critic reviews Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway.

Scalpel, a new on-line SF/Fantasy review magazine, has launched with:

• a review of Adam Robert’s Gradisil
• a review of  Hal Duncan’s Ink
• and a review of Ted Chiang’s The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.

SciFi weekly didn’t much like Cameron Rogers’s The Music of Razors.

SFF World reviews John Scalzi’s The Last Colony.

The new issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction (which requires free registration) has a review of Jo Walton’s Farthing, one for Jeffrey Ford’s The Girl in the Glass, and more.

SF Signal reviews David Lynn Golemon’s Legend.

SF Signal also reviews the Jeff Prucher-edited Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.

Stainless Steel Droppings reviews Liz Williams’s The Demon and the City.

Strange Horizons reviews China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun.

John Crowley, in The Washington Post, reviews Jim Crace’s post-apocalyptic novel The Pesthouse. [via Locus Online]

Also in the Post (and also via Locus), is this review of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

New at Blogcritics:

• a review of the omnibus edition of Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” series (which the SFBC has as individual books, for a change)
• a review of Philip K. Dick’s Four Novels of the Future (which scandalously omits any mention of the near-overwhelming bone song that emanates from its pages)
• and a review of Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss.

Book Fetish reviews Katie Macalister’s The Last of the Red-Hot Vampires.

New at Bookgasm:

• a review of Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume One
• and a review of Jason Brannon’s The Cage.

Tobias Buckell reports the Booklist review for his novel Ragamuffin (coming soon to the SFBC).

David Louis Edelman continues his…dare I call it a quest?...to read all of Tolkien in internal chronological order with this review of The Fellowship of the Rings. (And, yes, you can get it from the SFBC, in our spiffy Lord of the Rings omnibus.)

From SF Site’s mid-May update:

• a review of  Greg Bear’s Quantico
• a review of Elizabeth Bear’s Carnival
• a review of Mike Resnick’s Starship: Pirate
• a review of Paul Park’s The White Tyger
• a review of Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky
• a review of Dave Duncan’s Mother of Lies
• a review of George R.R. Martin’s The Armageddon Rag
• a review of Jeffrey Thomas’s Deadstock
• and a review of Catherynne M. Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden.

SF Diplomat reviews Jonathan Barnes’s The Somnambulist.

Eve’s Alexandria looks at Hal Duncan’s Vellum.