Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: March 2018

The Invincible: Early classic encounter with a swarm intelligence

The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem

Stanislaw Lem was a Polish SF author, one of the most famous and successful writers outside the English language world, selling over 45 million copies in 40+ languages over five decades from the 1950s, but mainly in Eastern European communist bloc countries such as Poland, Germany, and the Soviet Union. However, despite his success he had a rocky relationship with the United States SF community, having a fairly low opinion of American SF fiction writers other than Philip K Dick’s works,

WWWednesday: March 7, 2017

The Oscars:

The Shape of Water won Best Picture, and Jordan Peele’s incisive social-commentary horror film Get Out won for best original screenplay. A good year for speculative fiction.

Genevieve Valentine gives critique of the Dresses of the Red Carpet.

Conventions:

Tomorrow, March 8, I’ll head down to Walnut Creek, California for FOGCon. Expect next week’s column to be the FOGCon edition.

Books and Writing:

LitHub shares 20 adapted works whose authors loathed the adaptations.

March 7th, 2018. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

Burn Bright: Life on the wilding side

Burn Bright by Patricia Briggs

Burn Bright (2018) is the fifth and latest novel in Patricia Briggs’ ALPHA AND OMEGA urban fantasy series … actually, it’s more mountainous wilderness fantasy, but it does involve werewolves and witches living amongst humans. Burn Bright, though it has different main characters, also intertwines nicely with the main MERCY THOMPSON series.

Bran, the grand-Alpha or Marrok of most of the werewolf packs in North America, is still out of town due to the events in the last MERCY THOMPSON book,

March 7th, 2018. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4 | Patricia Briggs | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Tomorrow’s Yesterday: Unearthing a true obscurity

Tomorrow’s Yesterday by A.M. Stanley

I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb in making the following sweeping statements about a certain book that I just read, A.M. Stanley’s Tomorrow’s Yesterday: You have never heard of this book, or of its author. You’ve never read anything about the book, either in print or online. This, my friends, is a lost book; one that, since its initial publication in 1949, has plummeted stone-like to the bottom of the literary pool. Not just a book that is currently out of print but is easily researchable ― there are tens of thousands of those ― but rather,

Godslayer: The bad guys’ story

Godslayer by Jacqueline Carey

I loved the unique world, loveable characters, unusual plot, and sumptuous prose I discovered in Jacqueline Carey’s KUSHIEL books. Most of these elements are also present in her THE SUNDERING duology but, as I mentioned in my review of the first installment, Banewreaker, I found the book easy to admire and hard to love. With its formal style and remote, larger-than-life characters, it reads more like a myth than a story. If you’re in the mood for that type of tale,

Norse Mythology: A master storyteller relays the myths he loves

Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman makes no secret of his love of Norse mythology and folklore. It shows up over and over in his fiction (Sandman, American Gods, Odd and the Frost Giants to name a few); and he has mentioned his love of the stories in interviews and essays. In Norse Mythology (2017), Gaiman puts his distinctive narrative voice in service to this mythological cycle and tells us the tales of the beginnings of the Norse gods,

Sunrunner’s Fire: Not the end of the story

Sunrunner’s Fire by Melanie Rawn

Sunrunner’s Fire (1990) is the third and final book in Melanie Rawn’s DRAGON PRINCE trilogy, but it is not the end of the story. The story continues in a second trilogy called DRAGON STAR. While the immediate tension of Sunrunner’s Fire is resolved by the end, there are looming issues that remain, making Sunrunner’s Fire feel like another middle book.

The story begins just after the end of the previous book,

The Vor Game: Mixes space opera with political drama

The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold

This is Marion’s review of The Vor Game, Brothers in Arms, and Mirror Dance. Kat’s comments about The Vor Game are at the bottom.

Miles Vorkosigan is nearly a dwarf, with bones as brittle as fine porcelain, and he is a Vor, one of the elite, the son of the Imperial Regent. The Vor, and everyone on Barrayar for that matter, are terrified of mutation because of their history, and Miles looks like a mutation even though he isn’t one.

Paper Girls (Vol 1) by Brian K Vaughan

Paper Girls (Vol 1) by Brian K Vaughan (writer) and Cliff Chiang (artist)

If you are a fan of Brian K. Vaughan’s amazing Saga comic series, you are likely to want to check out some of his other series as well. In addition to writing many stories for Marvel and DC comics’s well-known franchises, he has also written a number of original series, including Y: The Last Man, Ex Machine, Runaways,

The Sky is Yours: We wrestled with this literary SF novel

The Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith

I wrestled with this review for Chandler Klang Smith’s 2018 novel The Sky is Yours from the first paragraph. I wanted to refer to it as a “zeitgeist novel.” After I wrote that, I glanced at Wikipedia and decided that, as Inigo Montoya says to the Sicilian in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” So, I’ve decided that The Sky is Yours is not a zeitgeist novel.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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