Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: January 2016


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Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (writer/artist) and Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley (Artists)

Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986-87) are generally considered the watershed graphic novels that revived and reinvented the comic book industry, forced mainstream critics and readers to take the genre more seriously, and laid the groundwork for a massive superhero movie industry eager to bring classic comic superheroes to the big screen with new interpretations aimed to capture a need for more dark,


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The 5th Wave: One too many apocalypses in this YA alien novel

The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey

An alien apocalypse is Rick Yancey’s take on a new challenge for the plucky heroine prototype that has emerged in the wake of Katniss Everdeen. Whilst The 5th Wave is not quite a dystopia, there is something startlingly familiar about the feisty female lead who attempts to single-handedly take down the alien race that’s oppressing humankind in a post-apocalyptic world. With the film adaptation just released in the US, could this be the next YA mega-franchise?


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Penny Dreadful, Season 1: Everything you could want from Victorian Gothic Horror

Penny Dreadful: Season 1 by John Logan

If you had told me the premise of Penny Dreadful before I’d seen it, I would have probably rolled my eyes. A collection of famous characters from 19th century Gothic horror novels thrown together into an original plot? Yeah that worked SO well for Hollywood’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Van Helsing. (Not).

So the fact that Penny Dreadful manages to be compelling, thought-provoking, and genuinely interested in engaging the themes of the books that inspired it is a miracle in itself.


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Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, 1949-1984: An amazing guide to lesser-known SF gems

Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, 1949-1984 by David Pringle

Note: You may also be interested in Stuart’s reviews of:
Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, 1946-1987.
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010.

This book was such a great guide for me while growing up in Hawaii. Without any real sci-fi fan community, conventions, or the Internet, there really weren’t many places to get good SF reading tips. Of course I knew every bookstore in town,


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The Walking Dead: Curtiz directs Karloff for the first and only time

The Walking Dead directed by Michael Curtiz

Offhand, I cannot think of another actor who gave us a more impressive run of films in the horror genre than Boris Karloff did in the 1930s. Starting with the sensation that was 1931’s Frankenstein, Boris continued to appear, year after year, in films for Universal, Columbia and (English studio) Gaumont that are now deemed eternal classics in the genre. In 1935 alone, the so-called “King of Horror” appeared in The Black Room, The Raven, and Bride of Frankenstein,


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WWWednesday: January 27, 2016

This week’s word for Wednesday is the verb adumbrate; it means to outline or sketch lightly, to prefigure or foreshadow, or to overshadow. It is from the Latin word adumbratus (to shade), from the root of the word for shadow. Its earliest known use is around 1575. Since “to foreshadow” is a very different meaning from “overshadow,” this is a word that clearly draws its meaning from context.

Obituary
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction described David Hartwell as “perhaps the single most influential book editor of the past forty years in the American SF publishing world.” He was affiliated with Tor,


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The Ginger Star: “The Queen of Space Opera” comes roaring back

The Ginger Star by Leigh Brackett

Old-time fans of Leigh Brackett’s most famous character, Eric John Stark, would have to exercise a great deal of patience after the first three Stark stories — “Queen of the Martian Catacombs,” “Enchantress of Venus” and “Black Queen of Mars” — appeared in the pages of Planet Stories magazine, from 1949 – ’51. It would be a good 13 years before the author revisited her “Conan of the spaceways,” and then it was to only revise and expand the first and third tales to create the short novels The Secret of Sinharat and People of the Talisman.


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Robert Jackson Bennett talks CITY OF BLADES

Since the publication of Mr. Shivers in 2010, award winning writer Robert Jackson Bennett has not looked back. He has won the Shirley Jackson award twice, once for Mr. Shivers and once again for American Elsewhere in 2013. His current series is the brilliant second-world fantasy THE DIVINE CITIES. Bennett’s work is wildly imaginative and heart-breakingly human. City of Stairs introduced us to The Continent, a collection of conquered city-states still mourning their fall from glory, and the island nation of Saypur,


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Winter’s Tale: A strange experiment that never finds its feet

Winter’s Tale by Akiva Goldsman

I made a point of watching Akiva Goldsman’s Winter’s Tale AFTER reading the book upon which it’s based, knowing that stories are usually considered better on the page than as filmic adaptations. But having completed Mark Helprin‘s novel of the same name, I was left pretty bewildered as to how on earth the transition from book to screen would take place.

The trailers would have you believe that Winter’s Tale is a bittersweet time-travelling love story (perhaps a more fairytale-esque version of The Time Traveller’s Wife),


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The Stone Canal: The ideas fly fast and furious

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod

The Stone Canal, second in Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series, is a difficult book to write a review of. The reason is the story’s structure: the book is broken in half, chapters alternating to tell the first and second halves separately, with the ending joining the two together at the middle into a single whole. The details at the end of one half reveal important information about the beginning of the other, and vice versa.


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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