At least it’s not April Fool’s Day.
(Actually, I came closer than I thought, since I nearly grabbed the file for last week’s column in error!)
Writers, Readers, Books:
Larry McMurtry and Beverly Cleary passed away last week. Both leave huge legacies.
Silvia Moreno Garcia and Lavie Tidhar share some Indian SFF novelists you might not know.
The Master of the Revels is the sequel to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O, a book I did not know existed.
March 31st, 2021. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |
A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen
A Beginning at the End (2020) is set in a near-future world where, in 2019, a deadly worldwide pandemic kills some five billion people, including seventy percent of the U.S. population. Johanna Moira Hatfield, a teenage pop music star known as Mojo, tired of being browbeaten by her stage father, Evan, uses the sudden panic at her Madison Square Garden concert to disappear into the crowd in search of a new life.
Six years later, in San Francisco in 2025,
March 31st, 2021. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3 | Mike Chen | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Life’s Edge: Searching for What It Means to be Alive by Carl Zimmer
In the past year alone, humans have landed multiple devices on Mars, retrieved samples from the Moon and not one but two asteroids, delved ever deeper into the Earth, and shattered records for the recovery of DNA from ever-older specimens. Meanwhile, plans are being hatched to zip a helicopter around Titan to examine its pools of liquid hydrocarbons, fly a probe through the geysers of Enceladus to collect samples, scoop surface ice off Europa, and use the next generation of space telescope to examine the atmospheres of exoplanets light-years away.
March 30th, 2021. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
All Systems Red by Martha Wells
The narrator of All Systems Red (2017), the 2017 Nebula award-winning novella by Martha Wells, is a once-nameless cyborg security unit or SecUnit that has given itself the name Murderbot (for reasons disclosed midway through the story). Using its own unprecedented and highly unauthorized initiative, Murderbot has hacked the governor module software that controls its actions and obligates it to be obedient. But instead of going on a killing spree, as one might expect given the name it adopted,
March 30th, 2021. Tadiana Jones, Kat Hooper and Jana Nyman´s rating: 4 | Martha Wells | Audio, Locus Award, Nebula Award, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
MONSTRESS 5: Warchild by Marjorie Liu & Sana Takeda
This is my fifth review for what is the fifth volume in Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s collaborative MONSTRESS project, and it’s getting difficult not to repeat myself. Here are the basics: it takes place in a matriarchal society that’s embroiled in a devastating war between those that wield magic and those that rely on technological advancements.
The main character is Maika Halfwolf, a girl with one arm and a Lovecraftian monster living inside her,
March 29th, 2021. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4 | Marjorie M. Liu | Comics | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Marion: I finished up The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso, which gives us a vagrant queen with an unusual problem, set in a well-realized second world. It’s Book One of a series and the second book, The Ikessar Falcon, is out now. In between revisions, and reading that, I browsed the poems of Xochitl Julisa Bermejo, in Posadas. “Our Lady of the Water Gallons” is the poem I keep returning to.
Bill: Mostly buried under papers this past week.
March 28th, 2021. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | no comments |
The Wolf of Oren-Yaro by K.S. Villoso
I judged this book by its cover and steered clear of it for more than a year, until by a strange, convoluted road I ended up reading it.
The cover of 2020’s The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, written by K.S. Villoso, is beautiful, featuring a gorgeous woman in profile, wearing body-hugging leather armor, with a sword over one shoulder and a decorative cut on one perfect cheekbone. This, combined with the blurb from a well-known fantasy writer and the back cover-copy which starts,
March 26th, 2021. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | K.S. Villoso | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
A Hole in the Sky by Peter F. Hamilton
Hazel, who’s 16, lives on a huge starship called Daedalus. It left Earth around 900 years ago with plans to terraform a new habitable planet. But when they arrived, they found a nearly sentient species that they didn’t want to disturb, so they decided to try another planet. A few decades later, citizens who were disgruntled about that decision mutinied and, in the battle, much of their knowledge and technology was destroyed.
Now, 500 years later, most of the people of Daedalus live in separate primitive farming communities where they work hard to eke out an existence.
March 25th, 2021. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3 | Peter F. Hamilton | Audio | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Writers, Writing, Reading, Books:
Nineteenth century SF writers imagined global warming, and this article take a look at a few examples.
File770 provides a tally of the Hugo nominating votes and it’s a small number indeed. This is worrisome because in 2015, this allowed a special interest group to control the nominations. On the other hand, we’ve had other things on our minds this year that nominating for awards. We’ll have to see what happens. The good news is, while 2020 was a terrible year, it was a year many great books came out.
March 24th, 2021. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | no comments |
One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
What’s a grumpy, misanthropic time traveling warrior to do? Governments and factions have misused time travel machines, each using their time machines to remake the past in the way they want it to be, over and over again. Time travel machines really are the ultimate weapon: if you go back far enough you can change history enough that your enemy never has a chance. Except that your enemy’s time traveling agents are cut off from those changes, so they’re still around to try to change history in a different way that favors them.
March 24th, 2021. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4.5 | Adrian Tchaikovsky | Short Fiction, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
COMMENT Was I hinting that? I wasn't aware of it. But now that you mention it.... 🤔
So it sounds like you're hinting Fox may have had three or so different incomplete stories that he stitched together,…
It's hardly a private conversation, Becky. You're welcome to add your 2 cents anytime!
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…