Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Month: July 2023

Bridge: The multiverse but with parasites and serial killers

Bridge by Lauren Beukes

A quick glance at the jacket copy of Lauren Beukes’s 2023 weird thriller Bridge might make the reader think of the Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once. After all, this is a mother-daughter story set in the multiverse. Beukes weaves into her story a few elements EEAAO didn’t have, like a parasite and a serial killer, or more accurately a collective of serial killers. The core of the book is a mother-daughter story, but it is filled with chills,

The Children of Jocasta: Solid but somewhat disappointing

The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes

The Children of Jocasta (2018), by Natalie Haynes, does a nice job of shifting our view of some of the characters in the classic Oedipus tale, but was by the end a solid but somewhat disappointing read that felt its length and also felt too hemmed in by the tale as we all know it.

Haynes makes two good decisions early on. One is the structural choice to weave back and forth between two time periods.

The Runabout: Exploring the Boneyard

The Runabout by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Finally we get to explore more of the Boneyard in The Runabout (2017), the fifth full-length novel in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s DIVING series. It was actually published after The Falls, but it works better if you read it between Skirmishes and The Falls. (And this is what the author suggests, too.)

After the discovery of the Boneyard,

WWWednesday: July 26, 2023

Monday, July 24, Elon Musk officially changed Twitter’s blue bird logo to a capital X. (Remember, he changed the logo to a cryptocurrency dog logo for a while there.) He already announced he was changing the name. Poor Linda Yaccarino, that’s all I can say.

John Scalzi posted on his blog about his plans vis-à-vis X-Twitter.

This 5 minute video has interesting material and some beautiful images of cougars, or Florida panthers in Florida.

Alex Horman writes about leaving the Self-Published Science Fiction Contest (inspired by the Self-Published Fantasy Blog Off) after two years as a judge.

July 26th, 2023. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 1 comment |

Light Bringer: A mostly excellent series

Light Bringer by Pierce Brown

In my review of the fifth RED RISING book, The Dark Ages, I said that Pierce Brown’s series was beginning to feel its length. Brown is out now with that book’s sequel, Light Bringer, and I’d say that description holds even more true, even if there’s lots of good writing here.

The issue I’m having with these later books isn’t with the individual titles themselves. Considered on its own,

July 25th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Pierce Brown | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

The Whistling Ancestors: Caspar, the unfriendly host

The Whistling Ancestors by Richard E. Goddard

And so, I have just come to the end of another lot of books from the remarkable publisher known as Ramble House. And what an octet of books they were! In chronological order: Elliott O’Donnell’s The Sorcery Club (1912), which tells of ancient Atlantean magic being used by a trio of men in modern-day London; G. Firth Scott’s Possessed (1912), in which a deceased business magnate takes over the body of one of his former employees;

Night Fever: We are our own worst enemies

Night Fever: We are our own worst enemies

Brubaker and Phillips have done it again in their latest offering: They have given us another noir comic that is as stunning visually as it is engaging narratively. In Night Fever, Jonathan Webb, a businessman in Europe, cannot sleep, and his insomnia leads him to venture out into the night. This journey into the darkness is both literal and figurative, of course, and his drug- and alcohol-fueled adventures take a dangerous turn as he starts finding out that not everyone he meets after the sun goes down has his best interests in mind.

Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us

Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us by Keggie Carew

In Beastly: The 40,000-Year Story of Animals and Us, Keggie Carew takes us on an always passionate, sometimes meandering, often fascinating, sometimes disorienting, often depressing, occasionally encouraging tour of humanity’s lengthy and often abusive relationship with the animals we share this world with. Like many such works, it makes for some difficult reading, but it’s often the things we find difficult that are the most important to face.

The book is divided into ten sections,

July 19th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Nightborn: I hope Friedman isn’t done revisiting this world

Nightborn by C.S. Friedman

It’s been nearly 30 years since C.S.Friedman concluded her COLDFIRE trilogy, one of my favorite fantasy series with a brilliant character at its core. Now Friedman is back with a prequel, Nightborn, which thanks to the unique setting of the series is actually more science fiction than fantasy. Though not as immersive and compelling as the original trilogy, it’s a fast-moving and often tense book that if anything is too short. It also includes a novella (or sort of includes, it’s complicated) that jumps forward a few centuries and bridges us to the original series.

July 14th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | C.S. Friedman | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Skirmishes: Boss and Coop make a good team

Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Skirmishes (2013) is the fourth novel in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s DIVING universe. It begins a month after the events in Boneyards which, of course, you’ll want to read first. Skirmishes has a structure similar to Boneyards – there are two main plotlines (one starring Boss and the other starring Coop) and one of them jumps around in time.

In Boss’s plotline, she’s trying to get into the Boneyard which is,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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