Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: August 2021

Sunday Status Update: August 15, 2021

Jana: This week I finished Helene Wecker’s The Hidden Palace (hooray!) and became utterly immersed in Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor (even better than I was expecting, and my expectations were high). I’m so excited to get to read Addison’s 2021 stand-alone/follow-up, The Witness for the Dead, and to revisit this lovely and treacherous world.

Bill: This week I read:

The Rookery: Deborah Hewitt’s sequel to The Nightjar
Star Guard and Star Rangers: two Andre Norton favorites brought to my attention again
How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: A fantastic popular science book by Harry Cliff covering the building blocks of our universe and how they were put together to get us all here
Da Vinci’s Cat by Catherine Gilbert Murdock,

August 15th, 2021. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | no comments |

How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe

How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe by Harry Cliff

Harry Cliff takes the title for his wonderful non-fiction work, How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch (2021), from the TV series Cosmos, the original one narrated by Carl Sagan, not the most recent Neil DeGrasse Tyson version (you should watch both, btw). Early on in his book, Cliff recounts how in one of the episodes Sagan “turns to the camera and with a twinkle in his eye says,

August 13th, 2021. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Venus Liberated: When Tinus met Coris

Venus Liberated by Harl Vincent

Have you ever thought to yourself, while reading a particularly good book, “What a fantastic movie this novel would make!”? Of course you have … it’s a practically inevitable occurrence. And it is one that has just happened to me again, while reading Harl Vincent’s 1929 offering Venus Liberated. Indeed, featuring as it does space travel, a visit to two nearby worlds, weapons and assorted gadgets of superscience, romance, warfare, and some truly hissable and hideous aliens, the book would have been a natural,

Tenth Annual Speculative Fiction Limerick Contest

It’s time for our annual Fantasy Limerick contest!

Your task is to create an original limerick that has something to do with speculative fiction. It could be about a character, a series, an author, or whatever fits the theme. Here are the rules for creating a good limerick (quoting from this source). A limerick:

is five lines long
is based on the rhythm “da-da-DAH” (anapest meter)
has two different rhymes
Lines 1, 2, and 5 have three of those da-da-DAH “feet,” and rhyme with each other.

August 12th, 2021. FanLit | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 20 comments |

Synchronized Sorcery: This delightful series continues

Synchronized Sorcery by Juliet Blackwell

Juliet Blackwell’s WITCHRAFT MYSTERIES series has been delighting readers of paranormal cozy mysteries since 2009. At this point, it seems unnecessary to keep reviewing the individual installments, but since Tantor Media graciously sends me review copies (something I look forward to every summer!), I will continue to say something about them. But if you’re a fan of this series, all you need to know is that book 11, Synchronized Sorcery (2021), is just as good as its predecessors,

WWWednesday: August 11, 2021

Debris premiered on NBC in 2021. The network canceled it after one season. (You can find it On Demand if you really want to.) I’m not surprised they canceled it. The show never gained traction with the audience, and this was because it never found its footing as a story.

There are several good things about the show, which I will list. You can decide if they are enough to make you watch.

The pluses include:

Excellent special effects
Some good performances
John Noble (plus and minus)
Beautiful and strange “Debris” pieces—kudos to the props department
Great use of ending credits to advance the story (plus and minus).

August 11th, 2021. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |

The Kingdoms: Beautiful prose, complex characterization, some plotting issues

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

If Natasha Pulley’s latest novel, The Kingdoms (2021), were a movie script, the elevator pitch might have been “Master and Commander meets The Final Countdown” (look it up, kids). Part time-travel story, part love story (several actually), part Patrick O’Brian story, it curves and recurves through beauty and brutality (more of the latter than the former), time and space, trauma, and rescue (more of the former than the latter), as it delights,

The Stars are Ours: A fine SF adventure

The Stars are Ours by Andre Norton

Tantor Media has been publishing the omnibus editions of Andre Norton’s science-fiction adventures in audiobook format. The omnibus (originally published by Baen) called Star Flight contains the novels The Stars are Ours and Star Born (the PAX/ASTRA duology). Both novels are set in the same universe (ours, actually) but they stand alone.

The prologue of The Stars are Ours,

Even and Odd: Fun and thought-provoking

Even and Odd by Sarah Beth Durst

Even and Odd are pre-teen sisters living in Stony Haven, Connecticut, where their parents operate a border shop carrying “supplies for the mundane world, as well as imports from the magic world — anything a magical customer might need for their visit here.” Those imports and magically-inclined customers come from the land of Firoth, where Even and Odd were born, and which is accessible via magic portals. The sisters trade off magical abilities on alternating days, leading to their nicknames, though each girl has different opinions on their access to magic: Even,

Sunday Status Update: August 8, 2021

Kat: I’ve been on vacation, and the fall semester is about to start in a couple of weeks, so I’ve been pretty busy. But I did manage to read a couple more Andre Norton titles, Synchronized Sorcery by Juliet Blackwell, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. I’ve also read a couple of books about nutrition.

Bill: This week I read The Kingdoms, by Natasha Pulley,

August 8th, 2021. Tim Scheidler | Status Update | 3 comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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