SETTING is a huge draw for sf and fantasy readers, promising total escape from the humdrum real world. While many are imagined, these fictional universes often carry an author's cultural influences or borrow from an actual society or physical place. This month's titles give readers a sense of the variety in cultures and settings in both genres. Traces of Yoon Ha Lee's Korean American heritage could be lost among the sheer delightful weirdness of his sf landscape in Raven Stratagem, but it exists around the edges, seen in the way he approaches cultures assimilated into the hexarchate. Natasha Pulley's The Bedlam Stacks, takes readers to Victorian-era Peru, with added magical clockwork inventions. We have immortal Egyptian pharaohs in Michael F. Haspil's Graveyard Shift, a Soviet-style mining planet undergoing a revolution in Mike Brooks's Dark Sky, and a half-Chinese witch seeking revenge in the Old West in J. Danielle Dorn's Devil's Call. Racing to the other planets in the solar system is still exciting, but in David D. Levine's Arabella and the Battle of Venus, the indigenous populations and warring factions from the Napoleonic times cause issues.—MM
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机译：《科幻小说》对科幻小说和奇幻小说的读者来说是一个巨大的吸引力，它有望完全摆脱单调的现实世界。尽管有许多想象中的故事，但这些虚构的宇宙通常会承载作者的文化影响或从现实的社会或自然环境中借用。本月的标题使读者对两种流派的文化和背景都有不同的认识。 Yoon Ha Lee的韩裔美国人文化遗产的痕迹可能会因为他在Raven Stratagem的科幻小说景观的令人愉悦的怪异而失去，但它存在于边缘，从他对待同化为六面体的文化的方式可以看出。娜塔莎·普利（Natasha Pulley）的《床Bed叠》（The Bedlam Stacks），带了神奇的发条发明，将读者带到维多利亚时代的秘鲁。在迈克尔·哈斯皮尔（Michael F.争夺太阳系中的其他行星仍然令人兴奋，但是在大卫·D·莱文的《阿拉贝拉》和《维纳斯之战》中，拿破仑时代的土著居民和交战派系引起了争议。
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