Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: January 2018

Thoughtful Thursday: Collaborative Cliché — Villains Edition!

It’s time for another Collaborative Cliché!

Villains. Here at FanLit, we love villains, especially when they are well-written, nuanced, smart characters. Often, though, villains still fall into the category of flat, stick-figure characters, or worse, the dreaded Evil Overlords. It’s boring to read, and fun to mock.

In this Collaborative Cliché column, we take on the thinly drawn, evil-overlord villain. Let’s look at every stereotypical thing the Big Bads do. We’ll start you off, but please use the Comments to keep us going! Add your favorite eye-rolling dumb villain move.

January 25th, 2018. Bill Capossere and Marion Deeds | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 6 comments |

Future Home of the Living God: Good, but bleak. Really, really, bleak.

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich

It’s winter. It’s cold. Our government is a mess. If you’re looking for a flight from reality, a pleasant escape, or a cozy book that offers comfort, do not reach for Louise Erdrich’s 2017 novel Future Home of the Living God. It’s not that book.

On the other hand, if you’ve been wondering what an update of the Margaret Atwood classic The Handmaid’s Tale might read like,

Heir of Fire: Opens up more plots, introduces more characters

Heir of Fire by Sarah J. Maas

This is the third book in Sarah J. Maas‘s THRONE OF GLASS series, detailing the journey of Celaena Sardothien throughout the fantasy world of Erilea; specifically her ongoing struggle to use her assassin’s training to pursue justice throughout the land. Given that she’s in the employ of the corrupt King of Adarlan, this requires a fair bit of subterfuge and deceit, for as we learned at the end of the previous book, Celaena is actually the lost queen of Terrasen and the heir to its throne.

WWWednesday: January 24, 2018

Here is an obituary I’ve been dreading. We lost Ursula K. LeGuin this week. It is impossible for me to calculate what LeGuin gave to the speculative fiction field, to women and to the world. I know what she gave to me; hours of magic; models for strength and truth in the face of oppression and corruption, and often, plenty of laughter. Here is the New York Times obituary.

Conventions:

Wellington, New Zealand is preparing to bid for WorldCon 78 in 2020.Wellington is the capital and it looks pretty.

January 24th, 2018. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 3 comments |

Darkness Falling: Searching for home… in between fighting aliens and politicians

Darkness Falling by Ian Douglas

Ian Douglas’s hard science military space opera adventure series, ANDROMEDAN DARK, picks up where the story left off in the first book, Altered Starscape. The colony spaceship Tellus Ad Astra has been hurled four billion years into the future, when our Milky Way galaxy is slowly colliding with the Andromeda galaxy, where a nearly irresistible force called the Dark Mind or the Andromedan Dark holds sway. The Andromedan Dark is intent on expanding its reach and assimilating all intelligent life forms with which it comes in contact ― voluntarily or involuntarily.

January 24th, 2018. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3.5 | Ian Douglas | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

The Glass Town Game: A strange, unsettling and deeply personal project

The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente

Any book by Catherynne M. Valente contains both the unexpected and the unsurprising. You can always anticipate clever wordplay, a sense of whimsy, and prose that just stops short of purple, but in regards to content all bets are off. She can write anything, from a Wild-Western Snow White, to a brand new take on Arabian Nights, to a sci-fi, alt-history space opera mystery.

And in this case, the plot of The Glass Town Game (2017) almost defies description.

The Only Harmless Great Thing: An imaginative work of social fiction

The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander

Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing (2018) is a lyrical, often moving, and sometimes searing novella that sets itself in an alternate reality that entangles two historical events: the public electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903 and the “Radium Girls” scandal in the early 1900s. That the two events were not simultaneous as in the novella is only part of the “alternate” part of this alternate reality. More central to the plot is the fact that elephants in this world are sentient.

Mixed Up: Stories and cocktail recipes; both are intoxicating

Mixed Up edited by Nick Mamatas & Molly Tanzer

Mixed Up (2017) is an anthology of cocktail-themed flash fiction and cocktail recipes, edited by Nick Mamatas and Molly Tanzer. The stories, like the drink recipes, are grouped by type and theme. I thought the editors took the most liberal view of “flash” here, because I think some of these works might run to 1200 words or slightly over, and I think of flash as topping out at 1,000 words. I don’t think there is a hard and fast threshold,

Iron Gold: A fantastic return to the universe of RED RISING

Iron Gold by Pierce Brown

I was a big fan of Pierce Brown’s RED RISING trilogy, so I was thrilled to hear he was going to continue the story with a new trio of books. And I’m happy to report that the first book in that new series, Iron Gold (2018), delivers the goods.

[Fair Warning: there will be of necessity spoilers for the first three books, so if you haven’t read those (and you should) I strongly recommend going no further in this review.]

RED RISING at its stripped-down core was the typical Downtrodden Rebels Against a Tyrannical State (DRATS!) story,

January 22nd, 2018. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Pierce Brown | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

Monster Hunter: Siege: In which Owen learns a lot about himself

Monster Hunter: Siege by Larry Correia

Monster Hunter: Siege is the sixth novel in Larry Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER INTERNATIONAL (MHI) series. If you’re a fan of Correia but haven’t read MHI, I can tell you that you’ll love it, so go back to Monster Hunter International and start there. If you’re totally new to Larry Correia and you’re not sure if MHI is for you, please read my review of Monster Hunter International — I think it’ll give you a good feel for whether or not you’ll like the series.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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