Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers
Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) is the third book in Becky Chambers’ WAYFARERS trilogy but it can stand alone. You don’t need to read the previous books and reading my review will not spoil any of them for you.
Record of a Spaceborn Few follows several future humans living on the Exodus Fleet, the spaceships that left a ruined Earth centuries ago. Kip is a teenager who is exploring himself and his world in the ways many teenagers do.
May 31st, 2019. Kat Hooper | Becky Chambers | Audio | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
The Nebula Awards are in our rearview, and next up are the Locus Awards, leading us into Hugo Season!
The Locus Weekend will be held in Seattle, Washington, on June 28-30, 2019.
The Locus Awards have lots of categories, so I am focused on the short fiction this week and in a few weeks we’ll discuss the novels.
Click the title links below to read our reviews and on the author links to visit our page for the author. I’ve included the cover art for some of our favorites.
Who do you think will win the Locus Award in these categories?
May 30th, 2019. Marion Deeds | Locus Award | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 17 comments |
SHORTS: Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few more Locus-nominated stories we’ve read that we wanted you to know about.
“How to Swallow the Moon” by Isabel Yap (2018, free at Uncanny magazine, $3.03 Kindle magazine issue). 2019 Locus award nominee (novelette).
“How to Swallow the Moon,” a Locus-nominated novelette by Isabel Yap, follows the cadence and arc of a traditional fairy tale — a village periodically plies a dangerous supernatural being with strictly-cloistered maidens,
May 30th, 2019. Jana Nyman, Tadiana Jones and Bill Capossere | Elizabeth Bear, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor, Yoon Ha Lee | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Golden Gate bridge had a birthday this week. It wasn’t a milestone one. The bridge opened to traffic on May 27, 1937.
Awards:
Selmaa Ahmad was awarded the first A.C. Bose Grant from the Speculative Fiction Foundation. The award is presented to a South Asian diaspora writer developing speculative fiction. Ahmad’s stories sound wonderful.
The Ursa Major awards, for excellence in the furry arts, were awarded on May 26, at AnthroOhio.
Also honoring the anthropomorphic, the Coyotl awards, presented in Portland, Oregon. (I’m tempted to write something with a nonhuman-mammal MC,
May 29th, 2019. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |
The Red-Stained Wings by Elizabeth Bear
Second books of a trilogy all too often suffer from BBS (Bridge Book Syndrome), and truth be told, Elizabeth Bear’s The Red-Stained Wings (2019) did at times evince several of the symptoms, including a sense of wheel-spinning and the occasional lagging of pace. Luckily, Bear was mostly able to keep the condition in check thanks to the host of remedies she has readily available in her writerly pharmacopeia, including rich characterization, fervent imagination, and vivid,
May 29th, 2019. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Elizabeth Bear | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black
When they were young, Jude and her twin sister witnessed the murder of their parents by their older stepsister’s father, Madoc. Feeling some responsibility for the girls, Madoc took all of them to live with him in the High Court of Faerie. Bullied by the fae nobles, and made to feel like a worthless mortal, Jude learned that’d she’d have to fight to survive. Now she’s scrappy, ambitious, clever, and an opportunist. But she still has a soft side.
It took me a while to warm up to The Cruel Prince (2018),
May 29th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Holly Black | Audio, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff
A lot of YA fantasy and science fiction works follow teenager characters as they attend magic or spaceflight school (I would take either!), but not nearly as many follow the characters’ lives after graduation. Aurora Rising (2019), a new YA space adventure from Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, the authors of the well-regarded ILLUMINAE FILES trilogy, take the latter approach, following a diverse cast of older teens as they graduate from Aurora Academy in the year 2380,
May 28th, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4 | Amie Kaufman, Jay Kristoff | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Human Errors by Nathan H. Lents
Human Errors (2018), by Nathan H. Lents, is a light, quick tour of some of the ways our human bodies are evidence of poor design, from our weak senses to our way-too-fragile ACL to our seemingly constant battle with back pain. Mostly engaging, often humorous, almost always informative if at times a bit sketchy, Lents does a nice job in conveying the way nature works in not just mysterious but often random ways.
Oftentimes, people mistake evolution and natural selection as a targeted means to an improved end.
May 27th, 2019. Bill Capossere | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Half-Witch by John Schoffstall
Appropriately enough, I’m of mixed mind about John Schoffstall’s Half-Witch (2018), which is itself about a young girl who is part one thing, part another, moving through a world that is also a kind of collage, a strange admixture of building blocks.
For most of her 14 years, Lizbet Lenz has been forced to flee one home after another as her lovable con-artist father finds yet another way to turn the residents against them. But when he accidentally causes a rain of mice,
May 27th, 2019. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | John Schoffstall | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Everlasting Rose by Dhonielle Clayton
The Everlasting Rose (2019) is the sequel to Dhonielle Clayton’s The Belles, a novel that is a finalist for the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Young Adult novel this year. I enjoyed The Belles despite some problems with characterization such as a boring romance and a totally over-the-top villain. If you haven’t yet read The Belles, but intend to, it’d be best to skip this review since I can’t help but spoil some of its plot here.
May 27th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 2 | Dhonielle Clayton | Audio, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no 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.