Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: October 2017


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Thoughtful Thursday: Stranger Things Season 2

Sure, you could wait for October 31st to immerse yourself in the creepily disturbing, to wallow in waves of nostalgia, to set your eyes upon a child’s wonder and fear intermingled, and of course to down mounds of, well, Mounds (and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and M & Ms, and Almond Joys and and and…).

Or you could do what the rest of us are planning on: break open those bags of Halloween candy a few nights early, plop on the couch, and binge-watch season two of Stranger Things which will be released on Netflix tomorrow.


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Phule’s Company: A short, entertaining, and heart-warming SF tale

Phule’s Company by Robert Asprin

Until I picked up Phule’s Company, I hadn’t read anything by prolific author Robert Asprin. I hadn’t planned to, either, but Tantor Audio is producing his PHULE’S COMPANY series in audio format, so I figured I’d give the first book a try. I liked it well enough to ask them to send me the second book, Phule’s Paradise. There are six PHULE’S COMPANY books, published from 1990 to 2006.


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Graveyard of Horror: Plenty of atmosphere and weirdness

Graveyard of Horror directed by Miguel Madrid

There is a world of difference in what Spanish filmmakers could get away with before the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1975, and what they could get away with after the subsequent introduction of the infamous “S” rating (denoting sex and violence) two years later. A pair of Spanish films that this viewer recently watched has served to demonstrate these differences very clearly. The 1977 film Satan’s Blood is replete with nudity (both topless and full frontal), orgies, rape sequences, beheadings and other gory carnage (as I have written elsewhere,


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WWWednesday: October 25, 2017

Obituary:

Julian May passed away earlier this month. She was best known the speculative fiction field for The Saga of the Pliocene Exile series, but May first published in 1951. She wrote nearly 300 novels in various genres under various pseudonyms. Locus has a nice obituary.

Books and Writing:

Kirkus Reviews gave YA novel American Heart by Laura Moriarty a starred review. When commenters complained about the story, which tells the story of a Muslim refugee in America from the point of view of a white American teenager,


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Paradox Bound: A sweet mix of time travel, road trip, and secret history

Paradox Bound by Peter Clines

Peter Clines’ 2017 fantasy novel Paradox Bound is a sweet, creamy double-scoop of time-travel, secret history, scavenger-hunt story and road trip, as Eli Teague, the protagonist, travels with Harriet Pritchard — she likes to go by Harry — across the continental US through various time periods, searching for something elusive: something unique to, and desperately needed by, the US if it is to continue as a nation.

Eli is eight and a half years old when he meets Harry.


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The Hounds of the Morrigan: A lesser known children’s classic

We’d like to introduce new reviewer Taya Okerlund. Welcome, Taya!

The Hounds of the Morrigan by Pat O’Shea

The Hounds of the Morrigan (1985) is an overlooked classic in children’s fantasy. A gem of a book published before the children’s fantasy readership exploded. (The classics are sometimes underappreciated by a readership who discovered children’s fantasy with Harry Potter.)

Consider Pidge, the sober-minded boy who unwittingly frees the evil Olc-Glas serpent from his prison within the pages of an old manuscript.


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Tragic Ceremony: When Luciana met Camille

Tragic Ceremony directed by Riccardo Freda

As I have said elsewhere, my abiding love for Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi has, cinematically, led me to some fairly unusual places. From my initial enthrallment with her Fiona Volpe character in 1965’s Thunderball and on to such disparate fare as the British comedy Carlton-Browne of the F.O. (1959), the Japanese sci-fi shlock classic The Green Slime (1968), the Jess Franco WIP flick 99 Women (1969) and the blaxploitation actioner Black Gunn (1972), I have always found that a little Luciana makes any film go down easier.


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The Piper’s Apprentice: A fast-moving MG fantasy

The Piper’s Apprentice by Matthew Cody

The Piper’s Apprentice concludes Matthew Cody’s THE SECRETS OF THE PIED PIPER series, which began with The Peddler’s Road, followed by The Magician’s Key. I haven’t read book one, but I found the second book to be an enjoyable enough story aimed squarely, and successfully I’d imagine, at its middle grade audience. Book three has its issues, but is mostly a solid and satisfying conclusion.


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Dead Eyes of London: My first krimi

The Dead Eyes of London directed by Alfred Vohrer

As distinct a film genre as the American film noir of the 1940s and ’50s and the Italian giallo of the 1970s, the German krimi pictures that flourished throughout the 1960s are almost exclusively based on the works of one remarkably prolific author: British novelist Edgar Wallace. The creator of around 175 (!) novels of mystery, crime, and detection, Wallace and his gigantic oeuvre supplied the German film industry of the late ’50s to the early ’70s with a superabundance of material to draw on.


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SHORTS: Gladstone, Kress, Khaw, Ndoro, Seiner

Our exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve read recently that we wanted you to know about. 

“Crispin’s Model” by Max Gladstone (Oct. 2017, free at Tor.com, 99c Kindle version)

A young woman, Delilah Dane, moves from Savannah to New York City to pursue her theatrical dreams; the cost of living in NYC being what it is, she supplements her waitressing income by posing for artists. (Nothing more than posing — she has very strict rules about conduct and respect.) After an extremely weird interview and some ground rules which are eccentric even by artists’ standards,


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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