Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: October 2013

The Time Traders: Non-stop adventure for kids and adults

The Time Traders by Andre Norton

Ross Murdock just can’t follow the rules, so he keeps getting in trouble with the law. He’s arrogant, rebellious, independent, smart, competent, and proud. That makes him the perfect recruit for the government’s secret Time Traders program, so when they offer Ross the option to either join up or go to jail, he doesn’t have much choice. Ross has no idea what’s going on with his new job, but he figures he’ll be able to escape. That turns out to be a lot harder than he expected — because they’ve sent him back in time!

WWWednesday: October 23, 2013

If you’re looking for something spooky to read for Halloween, John DeNardo has some suggestions. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24, edited by Stephen Jones, just landed in this house last week, so I’m all set.

It’s good news for Americans that Jo Fletcher Books is moving into the American market; I’ve been drooling over books put out by this publisher for some time now, and being able to get my hands on great British fiction makes me one happy reader.

October 23rd, 2013. Terry Weyna | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

The Dreaming Jewels: Unique, uncomfortable

The Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon

Horty Bluett is only eight years old, but his short life has already been utterly miserable. One day, after suffering at the hands of his classmates and his adoptive parents, he runs off and joins the carnival. The only thing he carries is his sole possession — a jack-in-the-box doll named Junky. Junky has hard shiny eyes and Horty gets nervous and sick when Junky isn’t around.

At the carnival, Horty finally finds acceptance among some of society’s outcasts. For the first time in his life,

The Green Hills of Earth: A still enjoyable sojourn into Heinlein’s early work

The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

I grew up a part of the baby boomer generation of young geeks that discovered science fiction around what the famous quote (attributed to one Peter Graham, later publicized and re-quoted by many, many others) said is the best age: “The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve.” For me and many others it was around that age that I was voraciously devouring a host of science fiction and fantasy writers, including Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs,

The White Isle: The story of Prospero gone bad

The White Isle by Darrell Schweitzer

Readers familiar with Darrell Schweitzer probably think of him mostly as someone who writes short stories, edits magazines and anthologies, and writes books and essays about speculative fiction. But he’s written a few novels, too. The White Isle, published in 1989, is one of these, though it was originally serialized in the magazine Fantastic in 1980. It tells the story of Prince Evnos of Iankoros who we meet as a boy and follow into madness.

The story is divided into two parts.

The Extinction Gambit: An old-fashioned kind of dashing romp for YA

The Extinction Gambit by Michael Pryor

Michael Pryor’s The Extinction Gambit, book one of the EXTRAORDINAIRES series, is not the best book I’ve read this year. But it does have the best pithy plot summary uttered by a character:

“So the Olympic Games are being jeopardized by a band of evil sorcerers who want my brain,” Kingsley said, “while I try to find my foster father who may have been abducted by creatures from the dawn of time.”

That’s Kingsley Ward,

Magazine Monday: Nightmare, October 2013

Nightmare is celebrating its first anniversary with Issue 13, and it starts off with a humdinger of a story by Norman Partridge called “10/31: Bloody Mary.” The use of the date is a deliberate reminder of 9/11, and connotes a catastrophe of equal or greater weight. On 10/31 — this year, next year, last year, we’re never told — all of the monsters became real. Somehow, on Halloween, “werewolves and witches, mummies and zombies, and other nameless things the boy would rather never see” become real. The boy (the protagonist of the story) hides during the day,

The Unwritten by Mike Carey

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor & the Bogus Identity (Vol 1) by Mike Carey (writer) & Peter Gross (artist)

The Unwritten by Mike Carey is one of the best current series being published right now. It is one of the few titles put out by Vertigo — DC’s mature line of comics — that has kept Vertigo from losing its respected place in the world of comics. Vertgo was started by Karen Berger with Neil Gaiman’s wonderful Sandman stories,

Shaman: It almost breaks the heart

Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

I tell you, once upon a time kids had to walk to school barefoot. And not just barefoot, but naked. In snow and rain. Uphill. And they had to not get eaten by wolves. And be chased by Neanderthals. And eat shrooms. Or at least, they did if their school was learning how to be a shaman. And if they lived back about 30, 000 years ago. And their name was Loon, the protagonist of Kim Stanley Robinson’s wonderfully detailed Shaman.

Our Friends from Frolix 8: Furious action, thought-provoking discourse

Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K. Dick

Unlike Philip K. Dick’s previous two novels, 1969’s Ubik and 1970’s A Maze of Death, his 27th full-length science fiction book, Our Friends From Frolix 8, was not released in a hardcover first edition. Rather, it first saw the light of day, later in 1970, as a 60-cent Ace paperback (no. 64400, for all you collectors out there). And whereas those two previous novels had showcased the author giving his favorite theme — the chimeralike nature of reality — a pretty thorough workout,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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