Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: July 2018

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern & David Grinspoon

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect of Chasing New Horizons (2018). Sure, a trip to Pluto is exciting and intriguing, and the results that have already come back are thrilling. But I wasn’t sure that a book about devising the actual mission would be — the planning, the meetings, the engineering, the pushing of buttons and waiting while radio signals traveled for hours after which one could push more buttons.

July 11th, 2018. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Arrow’s Fall: The end of Talia’s story

Arrow’s Fall by Mercedes Lackey

Arrow’s Fall (1988) is the third and final novel in the first trilogy of Mercedes Lackey’s VALDEMAR saga (THE HERALDS OF VALDEMAR). This trilogy features Talia, a girl who lived in a close-knit conservative rural area who was unexpectedly chosen as the Queen’s Own Herald. In Arrows of the Queen and Arrow’s Flight we watched Talia come to the heralds’ collegium,

Dawn of Wonder: An ambitious plot with a moon-shooting character arc

Dawn of Wonder by Jonathan Renshaw

I’d wanted to read Jonathan Renshaw’s 2015 self-pub Kindle Unlimited enrollee for several months. Dawn of Wonder sports upwards of 3700 Amazon reviews with an average rating of 4.6 stars — a rare feat for any well-established author, much less a self-publishing up-start. But it’s also a whopping 710 pages long, so you see my hesitation.

But enough wind-up. I read it.

The first sixth of the novel gripped me. Thirma peasant Aedan of Misty Vales lives in a medieval world of war and political intrigue,

Chaos Choreography: This one is really fun

Chaos Choreography by Seanan McGuire

This review will contain spoilers for the first two INCRYPTID books, Discount Armageddon and Midnight Blue-Light Special.

Seanan McGuire’s INCRYPTID series (which currently includes eight novels and numerous shorter works) follows the adventures of the Prices, a family who used to belong to the Covenant, a rigid group of monster-hunters whose mission it was to eradicate all supernatural creatures from the face of the planet.

Circe: A winningly feminist retelling/expansion

Circe by Madeline Miller

“When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Thus begins Circe’s self-told tale, and the yet-to-be-invented descriptor she references here is “witch,” though it could just as easily, and perhaps more significantly for this story, be “independent woman,” since both concepts, it turns out, are equally confounding to Titan, Olympian, and mortal alike, much to the reader’s satisfaction.

Beyond that bedeviling of the uber-powerful, there’s a lot that satisfies (and more) here: Madeline Miller’s lovely prose, how she stays faithful to the myths but fills the spaces between them with a rich originality,

Prador Moon: Grimdark space opera

Prador Moon by Neal Asher

In his far-future POLITY series, Neal Asher writes consistent, dependable, grimdark space opera. Prador Moon is one of three POLITY books that came out in 2006, and the fifth overall. It’s the first in the in-universe chronology, though, telling of the first meeting between the Prador and humanity. To say things don’t get off on the right foot would be to sell the opening scene (and the several novels which follow) short. Prador-human relations tumble to bits in the aftermath of “diplomacy,” and all-out space war erupts.

July 8th, 2018. Jesse Hudson´s rating: 2.5 | Neal Asher | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Mars, Inc.: The business of space

Mars, Inc. by Ben Bova

Mars, Inc. (2013), by Ben Bova, is an interesting exploration of how to get to Mars, not by way of NASA or the government, but by privatizing the space industry and using big business, investors, and the like to get there. While you might expect some trips into space in this book, most of the novel takes place on solid ground, watching Art Thrasher gather his investors, headhunt for scientists, and test out his program.

That’s both the strength and the weakness of the novel.

Sunday Status Update: July 8, 2018

And some more great reads this week!

Kat: Because they were nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series, in the past few weeks I’ve been reading all of Seanan McGuire‘s INCRYPTID novels. I also read the latest of Elliott James‘ PAX ARCANA novel, Legend Has It, Mercedes Lackey‘s Arrow’s Fall (just released in audio) and the first two novels of Tanya Huff‘s KEEPER CHRONICLES,

July 8th, 2018. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | 1 comment |

Noir: It’s noir, it’s Moore; what else can I say?

Noir by Christopher Moore

At the first sentence of this review I’m having trouble because: “Christopher Moore’s 2018 novel Noir is a hard-boiled detective story set on San Francisco’s mean streets…” only it’s not quite, okay, so, “Noir is a darkly funny comedy set in 1947 San Francisco, following cops and wise guys and…” only it’s not quite, or not only, so maybe: “Noir is a dark comedy set in 1947 with corrupt cops,

Frogkisser!: A weighty quest in a fairy tale-mashup world

Frogkisser! by Garth Nix

Anya is an orphaned young princess, about twelve or thirteen years old, and a bookworm (as many of the best princesses in literature seem to be). She and her fifteen year old sister Morven are orphans under the dubious care of their stepmother, a botanist who is enthusiastic about plants but completely uninterested in and uninvolved with the girls, and Duke Rikard, their stepstepfather (which is what you get when your stepmother remarries after your father dies). Morven is supposed to be crowned as the queen when she turns sixteen in three months,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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