Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: November 2016

WWWednesday: November 30, 2016

This week’s word for Wednesday is a phrase. ‘To turn your tippet’ meant ‘to entirely change your behavior or course in life’ in 16th century English. Thanks, as always, to Haggard Hawks.

Awards:

Margaret Hamilton, a software engineer for NASA whose software guided the first lunar landing, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA’s highest civilian honor, this month.

The group called the Sad Puppies seem to be arguing among themselves over this year’s Hugo Awards. The Sad Puppies have always stated that they are different from the Rabid Puppies,

November 30th, 2016. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 5 comments |

The Fate of the Tearling: An explosive ending to our feisty heroine’s story

The Fate of the Tearling by Erika Johansen

With The Fate of the Tearling (2016), Erika Johansen concludes her QUEEN OF THE TEARLING trilogy, which began in 2014’s The Queen of the Tearling and continued in 2015’s The Invasion of the Tearling. Fans of this YA series have eagerly waited for answers to questions posed throughout the preceding books: What makes Queen Kelsea Glynn special, and why can she experience memories and lifetimes that aren’t her own?

The Witch of Lime Street: It’s society wife vs Houdini in this riveting nonfiction spiritualist duel

The Witch of Lime Street by David Jaher

Harry Houdini is still famous as a magician and an escape artist. The last few years of his life, though, he devoted large chunks of time to exposing and debunking fake “spiritualist mediums.” In The Witch of Lime Street, David Jaher takes a look at Houdini’s most famous spiritualist case: his two-year battle with the “Boston Back Bay Medium” who used the alias Margery.

Most people date the spiritualist movement in the USA from the 1840s,

November 30th, 2016. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |

The Family Plot: You’ll think twice about a nice hot shower after this

The Family Plot by Cherie Priest

With The Family Plot, Cherie Priest takes a break from steampunk and Lovecraftiana to tackle a tried-and-true convention, the haunted-house story. The book, filled with atmospherics, family feuds and long-buried secrets, is a spooky read that will leave you side-eyeing bathrooms and showers for days after you’ve finished.

The Dutton family business is salvage, and Music City Salvage has just purchased a bonanza of a job — a full Southern estate, built in the 1800s,

The Devils of D-Day: Extraordinary concept; disappointingly delivered

The Devils of D-Day by Graham Masterton

All the devils and demons that appear in this book are legendary creatures of hell, and there is substantial recorded evidence for their existence. For that reason, it is probably inadvisable to attempt to conjure up any of them by repeating out loud the summons used in the text, which are also genuine. I would like to point out that the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defense strenuously deny the events described here, but I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

SHORTS: Dicken, Martin, Sturgeon, Simak, Garcia-Rosas, Vonnegut

Here are a few short stories we’ve recently read and listened to that we wanted you to know about. This week’s selection includes some excellent classic tales.

“The Uncarved Heart” by Evan Dicken (Nov. 2016, free at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 99c Kindle magazine issue, 0.99£ UK magazine issue)

It’s hard to tell what someone is really made of, at least until you crack them open. Some have hearts fragile as spun glass, quick to break and impossible to put back together; others have iron in their chests heavy enough to weight the whole of their being.

November 28th, 2016. Katie Burton, Kat Hooper, Tadiana Jones and Marion Deeds | Clifford D. Simak, George R.R. Martin, Kurt Vonnegut, Theodore Sturgeon | Audio, Free!, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation edited and translated by Ken Liu

Invisible Planets is an interesting and varied anthology of thirteen speculative short fiction stories and three essays by seven contemporary Chinese authors, translated into English by Ken Liu. As Liu mentions in the Introduction, several of these stories have won U.S. awards (most notably the 2016 Hugo Award for best novelette, given to Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing) and have been included in “Year’s Best” anthologies.

The Chemist: The torturous path of revenge and love

The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer

Stephenie Meyer changes it up fairly dramatically in The Chemist (2016), her second adult novel, where there is nary a vampire, werewolf or space alien to be found. It’s a rather pulpy but absorbing thriller in the vein of a Jason Bourne novel (to whom she’s dedicated this novel, among others). There’s no real speculative element here, other than perhaps some new developments in chemical-based torture and some startlingly smart dogs.

The narrator, a bright, rather repressed molecular biologist,

Look Straight Ahead by Elaine M. Will

Look Straight Ahead by Elaine M. Will

Over the years, I’ve found that more and more I seek out unique black-and-white comics that, most often, are written and drawn by female creators. And I have a particular interest in any books dealing with mental illness. For example, one of my favorite graphic novels is Ellen Forney’s Marbles, a memoir focusing on her learning to live with bipolar. I was pleased to find recently another book that addresses the topic of bipolar — Elaine M. Will’s Look Straight Ahead.

November 26th, 2016. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick: A revealing biography of PKD

Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin

Philip K. Dick is certainly one of the most iconic, unusual, and hard-luck SF writers ever to grace the field. His books subvert our everyday reality, question what is human, and explore paranoia and madness, all with a uniquely unadorned and often blackly-humorous style. In classic starving artist fashion, he only gained recognition and cult-status late in life, and much of his fame came after passing away at age 53.

In his prolific career he published 44 novels and 121 short stories,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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