The Killing God by Stephen R. Donaldson
I was not, to put it mildly, a fan of Seventh Decimate, the opening book of Stephen R. Donaldson’s GREAT GODS WAR trilogy. Book two, The War Within (2022), was an improvement, but marginally. The good news is that book three, The Killing God, is a big jump up, though the obvious bad news is one has to get through the first two to arrive here,
November 10th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Stephen R. Donaldson | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The World Fantasy Awards were announced. The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri took home the Best Novel award while Premee Mohamed’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight snagged Best Novella, and “(emet)” by Lauren Ring Best Short Story. The convention was held in New Orleans this year.
Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer are separating. Thanks to File 770 for this item.
John Scalzi presents a long but clear column on how you can attempt to verify who is tweeting,
November 9th, 2022. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 2 comments |
Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories by Ralston Shields
Gathering together 10 remarkably grisly tales from the pages of three of the most lurid of the pulp magazines, Food for the Fungus Lady and Other Stories is the first collection of Ralston Shields’ work ever assembled. Released in 2014 by the Dancing Tuatara Press imprint of Ramble House, the book shines a long-overdue spotlight on an author whom John Pelan, in his introduction, calls the greatest writer of “weird-menace” fiction on a story-by-story basis.
November 9th, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Ralston Shields | Horror, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Neom by Lavie Tidhar
In Neom, Lavie Tidhar, returns to the universe of Central Station, his wonderful collection of linked short stories, though not to Central Station itself, which is only name-checked a few times. Instead, the setting is the titular city, an extrapolation into the far, far future of a city that today exists mostly as plans and dreams in Saudi Arabia (though you can fly into Neom Airport). Neom is a city “that valued nothing old, and chased the future,” a city that is “ever new,
November 7th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Lavie Tidhar | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Nightland Express by J.M. Lee
The Nightland Express (2022) by J.M. Lee is a solid YA fantasy that has its moments but also doesn’t quite reach its full potential due to several issues. It also suffers a bit perhaps from trying to take on too much, where a more streamlined approach might have allowed for more full development of its issues as well as a more tense narrative. A minor spoiler follows, one revealed quite early in the book and one whose “reveal” doesn’t really impact the reading experience,
November 4th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | J.M. Lee | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
FanLit readers, we just discovered that our email notifications for posts and giveaways haven’t been working for at least a couple of months because Google’s Feedburner finally quit sending them, as it’s been warning us for years that it would. We’re working on a fix for this. In the sidebar there’s a place to sign up for email notifications which you can filter for certain tags (such as “Giveaway”) if you like. For now, we’re trying it out to see how we like it. If we don’t like it, we’ll try something different.
It’s the first Thursday of the month.
November 3rd, 2022. FanLit | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 19 comments |
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
It’s 1877, and on a decaying rancho deep in the Yucatán peninsula, Carlota Moreau’s sheltered life — and world — is about to change. Carlota’s father, Doctor Moreau, conducts experiments on human-animal hybrids, with a stated goal of improving humanity. When his patrons, the Lizalde family, threaten to withdraw their support, catastrophic events are set in motion with Carlota at their center.
“Melodrama” has a bad reputation, but when it’s done intentionally and well, it is a high-quality entertainment form. In the hands of a prose stylist as good as Moreno-Garcia,
November 3rd, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Amazon has adapted William Gibson’s The Peripheral to a streaming show. To my disappointment, after three episodes, the show is like one of the book’s eponymous creations, an unpiloted peripheral; glossy, elegant, smart even, but lacking any spark of life.
The Peripheral takes place in two different timelines. One is set in 2032 in a world very much like ours, in a small town in the American southeast. The other is set in London in 2100, in a post-Jackpot world (the Jackpot is a convergence of natural and human-caused disasters reaching nearly extinction levels);
November 2nd, 2022. Marion Deeds | William Gibson | Film / TV | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova
2021’s The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina was practically a perfect book for me. It’s filled with fantastical magic that baffled me and thrilled me, and it brought to mind the early books of Isabel Allende. The Montoya family were complicated and realistic, in a real-world setting that simmers with magic and strangeness. While much of the story takes place in an undesignated “present” that seems very much like now (without pandemics), the history of Orquídea Divina’s life takes us to Ecuador in the late 1950s and early sixties.
November 2nd, 2022. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Zoraida Cordova | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Echo of a Curse by R.R. Ryan
In several of my earlier musings here on FanLit, I made reference to the list that editor/author Karl Edward Wagner released in the pages of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine back in the summer of ’83; the so-called Wagner 39 List. This overview of KEW’s favorite horror novels, and those that he felt were most in need of being brought to the public’s attention, was divided into three categories: The 13 Best Supernatural Horror Novels, The 13 Best Science-Fiction Horror Novels, and The 13 Best Non-Supernatural Horror Novels.
November 1st, 2022. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4.5 | R.R. Ryan | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Kind of you to say. I certainly like to think so!
BTW, Steve Sterner will be performing at seven films during this upcoming fest: https://filmforum.org/series/clara-bow
As far as I know, Bill, Steve Sterner is the only person who does the live accompaniment to silent movies…
And I'm positive that Kaidan will fondly remember watching these movies with his old man for the rest of his…
You bet, Marion!