[Reposted from Deedsandwords.com with permission.]

I paid #3.99 to watch Morbius. The price was about right. I don’t know the character from the comic books, but I’d seen a few articles and reviews so I knew that a doctor turned into a super-vampire.

Michael Morbius has a rare genetic condition that leaves him weak and likely to die young. He vows to find a cure. In the Greek hospital/hospice where he lives (he’s about 12) he befriends a younger boy with the same disease. the kid’s name is Lucien, but Morbius dubs him “Milo.” “You’re just the next Milo,” he says. When Morbius first arrived, the boy in the bed next to him was named Milo, and he died, as did the next and the next.

Flash forward. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) declines the Nobel Prize for his life-sav... Read More

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us by Steve Brusatte

2022 has been a banner year for me in terms of non-fiction reading, and that trend continues with The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us, by Steve Brusatte, an epic and vividly told survey of how evolution bit by bit equipped our ancestors with the tools necessary to at first survive and then thrive. As with Brusatte’s earlier work, the excellent The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, this is popular science as it should be done: clear and compelling.

Brusatte begins before the mammal line as we think of it comes into existence, setting the context for what drove the evolution and doing so broadly, discussing not just specific creatures but eco-systems (i.e. including plants), climate, and the impact of extinction events. He also does a n... Read More

Reposting to include Justin's new review.

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

FORMAT/INFO: Leviathan Wakes is 592 pages long divided over a Prologue, 55 chapters and an Epilogue. Extras include an interview with the author and an extract from Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse series. Narration is in the third person, alternating between Executive Officer James Holden and Detective Miller, except for the Prologue (Julie) and Epilogue (Fred). Leviathan Wakes is mostly self-contained, coming to a satisfying stopping point, but the book is the opening volume in The Expanse series. June 2, 2011/June 15, 2011 marks the UK/North American Trade P... Read More

The Green Rust by Edgar Wallace

In Ian Fleming’s 10th James Bond novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), 007 foils a plot by the Germanic supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld to use biological agents to destroy a goodly part of the world’s farm crops. But as it turns out, this was not the first time that an English author had given his readers a story featuring a Prussian madman employing bacterial warfare to cut off part of the globe’s food supply! A full 44 years earlier, we find Edgar Wallace, the so-called “King of Thrillers,” coming up with a similar dastardly scheme, in his 1919 offering entitled Green Rust. Wallace’s novel was initially released by the British publisher Ward, Lock & Co. and has seen a modest number of other editions since, sometimes under its original title The Green Rust, and other times as just Read More

Marion: Most of this week was spent reaching and completing the final chapter in my draft WIP, which is now… a complete draft. Yay me. I read around in The Lives of Fungi by Britt A Bunyard (research), and finished Book Three in the LIMINAL series by Ayize Jama-Everett. The Liminal War relies on music, family and time travel. To my pleasant surprise, Terry’s review of the first book is blurbed on the back!


Bill:  Since our last update I read:

Ithaca by Claire North,  a superbly voiced mash-up of the The Odyssey  Read More

My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies: A Criminal Novella by Ed Brubaker (writer), Sean Phillips (artist), and Jacob Phillips (colorist).

My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies: A Criminal Novella is another Ed Brubaker-Sean Phillips work of perfection. It’s another tale of danger and the criminal world.  The story and the art are each five-star outings, the storytelling melding well with the visuals. Simply put, this noir story has matching noir-ish artwork, but if you’re familiar with Phillips’s work in previous Criminal titles, you’ll be surprised by the light pinks and purples and light blues used this time, creating a different tint than the usual (colors are by Jacob Phillips, Sean Phillips’s son). Any noir novel fans, including fans of the covers, will appreciate both aspects of the book — content and look. The father and son artists give a sense of some of these covers with a contemporary, more r... Read More

The Entropy of Bones by Ayize Jama-Everett

When we meet Chabi, the protagonist of 2015’s The Entropy of Bones, she is running the sixty miles from Sausalito, CA, to Napa, CA. She plans to grab a meal and run back. This is our first clue that Chabi isn’t average… and it’s not our last. Chabi doesn’t speak, although she certainly has a voice. Her physical abilities are astounding. Her martial arts teacher is a strange, dangerous man, Narayana, who lives on a ship near Chabi’s mother’s houseboat.

On her semi-regular run this day, she stumbles into a marijuana grow and makes the uncomfortable acquaintance of a pair of brothers and the adult son of one of them. The family originally grew grapes, but a strange fungus is overtaking the vines, so they switched to premium marijuana. Chabi, who finds an odd peace when she’s around the fungus-swamped vines, agrees to provide some patch security for t... Read More

The Ecologic Envoy by L.E. Modesitt Jr

The Ecologic Envoy (1986) was the first novel published in L.E. Modesitt Jr’s THE ECOLITAN MATTER quartet but, according to the series’ internal chronology, it comes third, after The Ecolitan Operation (1989) and The Ecologic Secession (1990). You don’t need to read those two novels first because The Ecologic Envoy and its sequel, The Ecolitan Enigma, are set a few hundred years later and feature a completely different set of characters.

Our hero, though, is a direct descendant of JimJoy Earle Wright, the protagonist of t... Read More

It's the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!

What is the best book you read in July 2022 and why did you love it? It doesn't have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. 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.

And don't forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our Fanlit Faves page and our 5-Star SFF page.

One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes:

a FanLit T-shirt (we have sizes M, L, XL)
a book from Read More

You can find Season One of Moonhaven on AMC+. The science fiction show’s first season finale airs on August 4, and it has already had a second season greenlighted. Having watched the first five episodes, I’m slightly more baffled than intrigued, but still watching. The most recent episode, Episode 5, explained a few things, even if it meant a lot of awkward dialogue to shoehorn in the needed info. I’m in the unusual position of watching something whose strengths and weaknesses nearly perfectly cancel one another out.

For you visual folks, Moonhaven is beautiful. The showrunners and studio invested deeply in the special effects, especially the stunning credits. In general, the interiors and exteriors of Moonhaven, a 500-square-mile patch of terraformed moon, are beautiful. The exteriors are all forests, hedges, manicured green grass, rivers, ponds and even a sea (why yes, it is the Sea of Tranquility!). Colorful weavings, intricate carving... Read More