Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: December 2012


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Magazine Monday: Nightmare, Issue 3

The third issue of Nightmare is more accomplished than one would expect from a magazine so new. The choice of stories is excellent, and the debut story is especially disturbing.

That debut is “Chop Shop” by J.B. Park, and if it is any indication, Park is going to have a brilliant career as a horror writer. The viewpoint character is a woman who has a horrifying sexual fetish: she is turned on by a man cutting away her flesh, her limbs, her organs slowly but surely. She is able to experience this because a virtual reality program makes it so,


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Those Who Went Remain There Still: Southern Gothic

Those Who Went Remain There Still by Cherie Priest

Those Who Went Remain There Still is a short Southern Gothic horror novel by Cherie Priest which I listened to in audio format. The story follows two plotlines told in alternating chapters. One is excerpts from Daniel Boone’s Reflections Upon the Wilderness Road which he wrote while leading a group of trailblazers across Kentucky. Every night, Boone and his men are being stalked, picked off, and eaten by a huge bird-like monster.

The second plotline follows the history of Daniel Boone’s descendants in the rural Kentucky area where Boone met the monster.


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Breathe: Failed across the board

Breathe by Sarah Crossan

Breathe, by Sarah Crossan, is an unremarkable new entry in the teen dystopia field. Its premise is relatively simple: in the far future, the world’s oxygen level has dropped so far that people are relegated to living in oxygenated “pods,” where “Premiums” get all the oxygen they want and the commoners have to get by with far less. One result of this disparity is that the average person has to carefully moderate their physical activity (there are “speeding” laws with regard to walking) while the Premiums can go for a nice little job with their personal oxygen tanks.


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Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea: Kage Baker’s last story

Nell Gwynne’s On Land and At Sea by Kage Baker

The “ladies” of Nell Gwynne’s work hard for their money, providing elite custom “services” to the important men who run England. These men think Nell Gwynne’s girls are very good at what they do, but they have no idea what’s really going on inside those pretty little heads. In actuality, all of Nell Gwynne’s ladies are thoroughly educated and quite accomplished because their “real” job is to spy for the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society (the predecessor of Kage Baker’s The Company).

Their work is exhausting,


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Godland: Hello, Cosmic!

Godland: Hello, Cosmic! Volume One, Issues 1-5 by Joe Casey (author), Tom Scioli (artist) & Bill Crabtree (colors)

Godland is a fun, and funny, story about Adam Archer, an astronaut who gains super-heroic powers during a mission to Mars. It’s a playful comic, and even though its playfulness is based on a parody of older comics, knowledge of them isn’t essential. To be more specific, the visual style is based on older artists like Jack Kirby, who drew large, solid people with exaggerated perspective. If you aren’t familiar with Kirby,


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Epic: Legends of Fantasy: Lives up to its title

Epic: Legends of Fantasy by John Joseph Adams (editor)

Epic: Legends of Fantasy, edited by John Joseph Adams, is an anthology of stories written by some of the biggest names in epic fantasy. The book clocks in at over 600 pages not just because it’s very difficult to tell short epic stories (though some of these authors do manage to pull it off) but because here the authors are not just telling epic legends, they are legends in and of themselves. George R.R.


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Consider Phlebas: The first, but not the best, CULTURE novel

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

Consider Phlebas, the first of Iain M. Banks’s CULTURE novels, introduces readers to the Culture, a machine-led intergalactic civilization that offers its biological humanoids a carefree, utopian lifestyle. Though most centuries are free from worry, Consider Phlebas takes place in the middle of the Idiran-Culture War.

The Culture is an intergalactic utopia, but readers should not come to Consider Phlebas expecting dystopian narrative. The machines, led by their brilliant and sentient Minds,


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The Languages of Pao: One of my favorite Vance books

The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance

Jack Vance
is known as a master stylist who, at his best, has an exquisite way with the written English language, a tribute in many ways to his idols P.G. Wodehouse and the unjustly forgotten Jeffery Farnol, among others, but Vance is also a writer of thought-provoking and unique ideas. The Languages of Pao is Vance at the top of his game as far as exploring unusual concepts. The premise of the story is based on a theory known as “Linguistic Relativity” or the “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis” and in layman’s terms it basically means that the language a person speaks shapes human thought patterns and behavior,


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Merlin’s Ring: Historical fantasy with a strong dose of romance and optimism

Merlin’s Ring by H. Warner Munn

H. Warner Munn’s Merlin’s Ring is one of the odder fantasies I have come across in my reading, but also one for which I have a deep affection. The book is equal parts pseudo-Arthurian Romance (in both the medieval and modern sense of the word), era-spanning historical fantasy à la Edwin Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician, and epic hero’s journey; there is even some mild pulp sci-fi thrown in for good measure. Despite (or maybe because of) all of this melding and mixing,


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The Beyond: Not as inventive as its predecessors

The Beyond by Jeffrey Ford

The Beyond is the last book in Jeffrey Ford’s WELL-BUILT CITY trilogy. This bizarre story began with The Physiognomy in which Cley, an arrogant and cruel physiognomist, is sent by the evil ruler Drachton Below on a mission to the mining town of Anamasobia. While there, Cley makes a bad decision which destroys the beautiful face of Arla, the woman he has fallen in love with. This humbles and devastates Cley (drastically changing his personality for the better) and leads to the destruction of Drachton Below’s Well-Built City.


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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