Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: November 2019

The Water Dancer: Sharply moving but also oddly distant

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is, of course, supremely well-known, and justifiably so, for his non-fiction, whether that be his essays/columns, or his long-form works such as We Were Eight Years in Power or Between the World and Me. Now he’s out with his first fiction work, The Water Dancer (2019), a blend of realism and the supernatural set in the antebellum period. While Coates’ already-documented strengths as a writer are evident, particularly on a sentence level,

A Little Hatred: Everything I’m looking for in a fantasy novel

A Little Hatred by Joe Abercrombie

You have never heard me gush over a novel by Joe Abercrombie, but times have changed and gushing will now commence. A Little Hatred (2019) is fabulous. It’s got everything I’m looking for in a fantasy novel.

A Little Hatred is the first book in Abercrombie’s new fantasy series, THE AGE OF MADNESS. It’s set in the same world as his FIRST LAW series (The Blade Itself,

Briar Rose: Fairy tales and trauma

Briar Rose by Jane Yolen

In the 1980s, Terri Windling created the FAIRY TALE SERIES, a collection of stand-alone retellings for adults, featuring some of the best writers in the field. The series continued into the early 2000s and spans a wide variety of styles, tones, and interpretations of the tales. Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose (1992) was the sixth in the series and combines its fairy tale with an all-too-real historical horror. It won the Mythopoeic Award in 1992,

The Moon Terror: A wonderfully pulpish double feature

The Moon Terror by A.G. Birch

During my first, recent visit to London, besides doing all the typical touristy things, I also happened to visit several of the very fine bookstores that the great city currently offers. The used-book stores on Charing Cross Road were especially interesting to me, but I also stopped in at Forbidden Planet (so much better than the Forbidden Planet store here in NYC), the mammoth independent bookstore called Foyles, and, of course, the Waterstones on Piccadilly. It was at this gigantic bookstore, supposedly the largest in Europe,

Sunday Status Update: November 10, 2019

Kat: One book this week, but a good one: Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Redemption. This is the finale of his WORMWOOD trilogy. It’s creative, smart, and entertaining. The audiobooks of this series, narrated by Bayo Gbadamosi, are fabulous. I am likely to read this trilogy again someday. Tade Thompson is on my “must-read” list.

Bill: This week I read Jenn Lyons The Name of All Things, several more essays in Philip Pullman’s Daemon Voices,

November 10th, 2019. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | 3 comments |

The Line Between: Apocalyptic thrills and doomsday cult chills

The Line Between by Tosca Lee

The Line Between (2019) is a chilling and believable take on what happens when a long-extinct disease emerges from the frozen tundra in Alaska. Apparently free-range hogs will eat almost anything, including a disease-infested caribou carcass exposed by the melting permafrost (nod to global warming here). The prion-based disease promptly teams up with a modern flu virus. Invariably fatal cases of rapid early-onset dementia ensue.

These sobering events are seen through the eyes of twenty-two-year-old Wynter Roth, who, as the story begins,

November 8th, 2019. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3 | Tosca Lee | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

The Refrigerator Monologues: A herald of change?

The Refrigerator Monologues by Catherynne M. Valente

In her Afterword, Catherynne M. Valente lays out the inspiration for 2017’s collection of linked short stories The Refrigerator Monologues. Valente was inspired partly by the work of comics writer Gail Simone, who created and popularized the term “Women in Refrigerators” as a way to describe women cape-and-mask heroes, and how they are treated in conventional comics. As for structure, Valente looked toward Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking theatrical work The Vagina Monologues.

Thoughtful Thursday: What’s the best book you read last month?

It’s the first Thursday of the month. You know what that means, ’cause we do this on the first Thursday of every month! Time to report!

What is the best book you read in October 2019 and why did you love it? It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF. We just want to share some great reading material. Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.

November 7th, 2019. FanLit | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 21 comments |

Nimona: A fun, colourful and heartfelt fantasy tale

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

I picked up Nimona (2015) after recognizing that writer/illustrator Noelle Stevenson was also the showrunner of Netflix’s rebooted She-Ra, and becoming interested in what she worked on in the past. As it happens, if you enjoyed She-Ra then you’ll probably like Nimona as well (and visa-versa) as there are many similarities in style, character, depth and tone.

Ballister Blackheart returns home to his evil fortress one day to discover a perky young girl waiting for him,

November 7th, 2019. Rebecca Fisher and Jana Nyman´s rating: 5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

The New Voices of Fantasy: A diverse and worthy collection

The New Voices of Fantasy edited by Peter Beagle

This collection of nineteen fantasy short works, edited by Peter Beagle, is definitely worthwhile if you like speculative short fiction. Many of them left an impact on me, and a few are true standouts. These stories are by relatively new authors in the speculative fiction genre and are all fantasy; otherwise there’s no discernable overarching theme.

These stories have almost all been published previously over the last seven years, and several of them are Hugo or Nebula winners or nominees.

November 7th, 2019. Tadiana Jones, Jana Nyman and Skye Walker´s rating: 4 | A.C. Wise, Amal El-Mohtar, Ben Loory, Brooke Bolander, Hannu Rajaniemi, JY Yang, Maria Dahvana Headley, Max Gladstone, Peter S. Beagle, Sarah Pinsker, Sofia Samatar, T. Kingfisher | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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