I advise against reading this review if you haven’t yet read Mira Grant’s Feed, the first volume in her Newsflesh trilogy, but intend to. The review necessarily contains spoilers, without which discussing the second volume, Deadline, would be impossible.
Deadline (2011) picks up several months after the end of Feed (2010). The first-person narrator, Shaun Mason, is not the same since the death of his sister by his hand,
April 14th, 2017. Terry Weyna and Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Mira Grant | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Void Star (2017) is a brilliant, dense and challenging hard science fiction novel with a literary bent, rich in descriptions and imagery. It’s set in a relatively near future, perhaps a hundred years or so in our future. The chapters alternate between the viewpoints of three characters from vastly different social strata:
April 13th, 2017. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4.5 | Zachary Mason | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Mindwarpers by Eric Frank Russell
For his ninth novel out of what would ultimately run to 10, English sci-fi author Eric Frank Russell pulled a bit of a switcheroo on his readers. The book in question was initially released in the U.K. in 1964 in a hardcover edition by British publishing house Dennis Dobson, sporting the title With a Strange Device. A year later, it was released here in the U.S. as a 50-cent Lancer paperback (the edition that I was fortunate enough to acquire at Brooklyn bookstore extraordinaire Singularity),
April 13th, 2017. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Eric Frank Russell | Edge, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Awards:
China Mieville’s novella “This Census Taker”, which is nominated for a Hugo, is also nominated for the 2017 Rathbone Folio Prize, a literary award which celebrates “the best literature of our time, regardless of form.” Well!
Congratulations, Tennessee! You didn’t win an award, but you got an element named after you! So did Japan, Moscow and Yuri Oganessian. You can read the details here.
Books and Writing:
N.K. Jemisin reviews some new releases for the New York Times.
April 12th, 2017. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 3 comments |
I was so excited by the premise of Stephanie Garber’s Caraval (2017) that I listed it as one of my most anticipated books of 2017. Word has it that there are already plans to make Caraval into a film and I expect it is going to get a fair amount of hype. I can understand why and yet I find I cannot give it more than three stars. I will attempt to justify the reasons why.
Scarlett spent her childhood dreaming of the magical show called Caraval and its mysterious proprietor,
April 12th, 2017. Katie Burton and Ray McKenzie´s rating: 3 | Stephanie Garber | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
What if we exponentially reduced the scale of the galaxy so that the sun was only 50 yards across, extinguished its raging burn so that only a solid metal lump remained, and set a chain of a few hundred dwellings to orbit around the cold sphere that remained? Imagining as such, you would have the opening of Stephen Baxter’s 1991 Raft. By its conclusion, however, Raft reveals itself as a highly original mix of science and fantasy that continues playing with the scale of the universe while telling an uplifting yet sobering tale of personal and societal evolution.
April 12th, 2017. Jesse Hudson | Stephen Baxter | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Exile of the Crown by Melissa McShane
Note: this review contains a few spoilers for Servant of the Crown and many spoilers for the bonus short story “Long Live the Queen” at the end of that novel, which sets up Exile of the Crown.
In “Long Live the Queen,” a “five years later” short story that appears at the end of Servant of the Crown (2015), the first book in Melissa McShane‘s CROWN OF TREMONTANE series,
April 11th, 2017. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3.5 | Melissa McShane | SFF Reviews | no comments |
I have grown weary of zombies. In the past five years, everyone started writing zombie novels, apparently out of ennui at the thought of writing yet another variation on vampires, and that was good. But the mass of zombie material all seemed to hit the market at the same time, and it was too much, too undiluted, with too many books that weren’t good enough to be worth reading. Soon I was avoiding any book that purported to be about zombies, because, hey, enough already.
So when Mira Grant’s Feed came on the market,
April 11th, 2017. Terry Weyna, Stefan Raets and Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5, 5 | Mira Grant | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
There is so much free or inexpensive short fiction available on the internet these days. Here are a few stories we read this week that we wanted you to know about.
“Willing” by Premee Mohamed (2017, anthologized in Principia Ponderosa, $3.99 Kindle ebook)
“Willing” is set in a world that has pickup trucks, spaghetti and meatballs, ceramic heaters and gods that walk the earth. Gods demand sacrifices. When the gods help cattle rancher Arnold during a difficult calving season, they soon visit with an “invitation” to Arnold’s youngest child … and everyone knows what that means.
April 10th, 2017. Marion Deeds, Tadiana Jones and Bill Capossere | Theodora Goss | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
In STAR WARS AFTERMATH: Empire’s End (2017), Chuck Wendig shows us the fateful battle on the desert planet Jakku; we see the Contingency left in place by Emperor Palpatine, and we discover that none of Leia and Han’s friends understands the concept of a baby gift.
The AFTERMATH trilogy starts immediately after the destruction of the second Death Star. Empire’s End follows Wendig-original characters Norra Wexley, her son Temmin,
April 10th, 2017. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Chuck Wendig | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
If the state of the arts puzzles you, and you wonder why so many novels are "retellings" and formulaic rework,…
I picked my copy up last week and I can't wait to finish my current book and get started! I…
Gentlemen, I concur! (Forgive me for jumping into your convo)
The cover is amazing. I love how the graphic novel (and the review!) hewed close to the theme of "good…
I've thought about picking that one up. The artwork looks perfect.