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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: November 2014

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Child of a Hidden Sea: Satisfying

Child of a Hidden Sea by A.M. Dellamonica

Child of a Hidden Sea is the kind of fantasy book that usually leaves me very aggravated, not because it’s bad, but because parallel world/portal fantasy (whatever you want to call it) usually doesn’t work for me. There are too many leaps of logic that I never really buy into. Things feel clunky, and a good plot seems to be messed up by the complexity that a secondary world alongside our world creates. Therefore I approached Child of a Hidden Sea with a huge amount of skepticism,


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November 12th, 2014. ´s rating: | | | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

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The Three-Body Problem: Imaginative SF with a mind melting problem

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

When Cixin Liu opens his novel The Three-Body Problem during the abject years of China’s Cultural Revolution, you realize just how much of Chinese history and myth is already deep into speculative territory for most of us.

The teaching of quantum mechanics is forbidden, the Copenhagen interpretation that posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function is considered “the most brazen expression [of reactionary idealism].” When physicist Ye Zhetai continues to espouse such reactionary ideas,


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November 11th, 2014. , and | | SFF Reviews | 13 comments |

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A Swiftly Tilting Planet: Fascinating feminist SF for kids

A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978) is the third book in Madeleine L’Engle’s TIME quintet, a series of science fiction novels for children. The first book, the Newbery Medal-winning A Wrinkle in Time, blew my mind when I was a kid and I’m just now getting around to reading the sequels.

In A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Meg Murray is now an adult. She’s married to her childhood friend Calvin O’Keefe and is pregnant with their first child.


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November 11th, 2014. ´s rating: | | , | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire

Captain Flandry by Poul Anderson

Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire is the fifth part in Baen’s project to collect all the stories in Anderson’s Technic Civilization and publish them by internal chronology. Three of the previous four books centred on the characters of Nicolas van Rijn and David Falkayn. In book four, aptly named Young Flandry, a new hero takes over. It is graced by one of the most horrific covers I’ve come across although Captain Flandry is giving it a run for its money.


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November 11th, 2014. ´s rating: | | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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Academic Exercises: A collection of stories from an original voice

Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker

K.J. Parker is a relatively recent discovery of mine, and she (?) is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. Known for her dry cynicism, understated humor, and intriguing explorations of morality, her stories are set in a historically informed world fleshed out with Parker’s rich historical knowledge.

Collected here in her first anthology, Academic Exercises, her short fiction has so far won two World Fantasy Awards for her novellas “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong” and “Let Maps to Others.” Included in this anthology are also three non-fiction essays on historical subjects such as siege warfare,


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November 10th, 2014. ´s rating: | | , | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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Forest Born: A good choice for girls who struggle with confidence

Forest Born by Shannon Hale

Everyone thinks of Rin as her mother’s shadow. She belongs to a large extended family that all live near each other in the forest and, until recently, Rin has always been her hard-working mother’s helper. She cooks, cleans, fetches the water, helps take care of all the kids, etc. When she needs a little peace, she communes with the trees of the forest. She doesn’t really “speak” with them, but just feels their love and the constant harmony they provide.

But then Rin did something bad and the trees have withdrawn their love.


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November 10th, 2014. ´s rating: | | , | SFF Reviews | no comments |

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SubCulture Omnibus: Clever, insightful exchanges about geek culture

SubCulture Omnibus by Kevin Freeman (writer) and Stan Yan (artist)

I love to read, but for the life of me, I can’t stay up reading all night. Or at least, that’s usually the case. However, last night I had one of those rare occasions because I made the mistake of starting to read the SubCulture Omnibus by Kevin Freeman and Stan Yan. The subculture in this book is geek- or fanboy-culture. The geek/fanboy group in this comic consists of mostly young adults who have met through,


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November 8th, 2014. ´s rating: | | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

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The Midnight Queen: Like a Georgette Heyer Regency novel with magic

The Midnight Queen by Sylvia Izzo Hunter

Graham “Gray” Marshall is a gifted magician, studying magic at Oxford’s Merlin College, when some of his classmates insist he come along on a midnight adventure. In no time, things go bad. Gray is blamed for the misadventure and sent away from Oxford to the Breton estate of his tutor, the small-minded, petty and envious Professor Appius Callender. Sophie Callender is the ignored middle daughter of the professor. Her father has told her, repeatedly, that she has no magical ability, but she thirsts for knowledge and reads magical texts in secret.


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November 7th, 2014. ´s rating: | | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

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Taltos: Lots of backstory about Vlad

Taltos by Steven Brust

Taltos is the fourth novel in Steven Brust’s series about Vlad Taltos, a human crime boss in the fantasy world of Dragaera, where humans are short of stature and lifespan compared to the species that rule the world. Taltos is actually a prequel to the previous novels (Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla) in which Vlad tells us about an incident that happened years ago while he was solidifying his reputation as a new crime lord.


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November 7th, 2014. and ´s rating: | | | SFF Reviews | 8 comments |

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Valentine Pontifex: A worthy conclusion to Valentine’s tale

Valentine Pontifex by Robert Silverberg

In Lord Valentine’s Castle, Robert Silverberg created an exotic planet filled with peoples and landscapes, all bursting with imagination. Silverberg also gave his audience a strong, lovingly crafted main character in Lord Valentine, a man recovering after his throne was wrongfully swept out from beneath his feet. The conclusion of the tale, Valentine Pontifex, is the other side of the coin, however. How does Valentine deal with the weighty exigencies of leadership, all the while getting older?


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November 7th, 2014. ´s rating: | | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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