Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Bill Capossere

The Gorge: A perfectly serviceable movie

The Gorge directed by Scott Derrickson

The good news about Apple’s new movie The Gorge is that it’s a perfectly serviceable streaming movie, the actors do an excellent job, the visuals are fantastic, and you also are basically getting two movies for the price of one. The bad news is one of those movies is vastly more original and engaging than the other, the plot of that second film is overly familiar and predictable, and while the visuals are stunning, they’re also something we’ve seen before.

The premise of the film is that post-WWII,

February 17th, 2025. Bill Capossere | Film / TV | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Sanctum of the Soul: It’s difficult to recommend this series

Sanctum of the Soul by Kel Kade

I’ve been up and down on Kel Kade’s SHROUD OF PROPHECY series, with book one, Fate of the Fallen, striking me as enjoyable though with a number of issues. The sequel, Destiny of the Dead, took a small turn downward for me, though it had its strengths. Unfortunately, my experience with book three, Sanctum of the Soul, was closer to Destiny than Fate,

February 11th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 2.5 | Kel Kade | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planet

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital (2023) will, for some people, barely qualify (if that) as a novel, leaving them crying “Where’s the plot? Nothing happens!” And you know, I can’t argue with them. If you define a novel as a series of plot steps from a to b to c such that change occurs, then yes, Orbital probably won’t squeeze in under that definition. Its focus is less on “what is happening” and more on “what am I feeling about what is happening?” or “What am I thinking about while things are happening?” And if you’re looking for conflict or fleshed out and distinctive characters who are different at the end than when we first meet them,

The Voyage Home: Powerful, in a quieter fashion

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

Amongst the flood of Greek myth retellings over the past number few years, three authors have stood out to me. Two are Madeline Miller and Claire North, the first for her fantastic Circe (not to mention the brilliant The Song of Achilles from a decade earlier) and the second for her excellent and just-concluded SONGS OF PENELOPE trilogy. The third is Pat Barker and her WOMEN OF TROY series,

Mother of Rome: An uneven book

Mother of Rome by Lauren J.A. Bear

Lauren J.A. Bear’s first novel, Medusa’s Sisters, was a sharp feminist retelling of the well-known Greek tale. For her second book, Bear has left the Greeks behind and moved on to the Romans, giving us in Mother of Rome a sort of prequel to the Romulus and Remus Found Rome story. Though I found Mother of Rome to be more uneven than Medusa’s Sisters,

An Instruction in Shadow: Goes down smoothly

An Instruction in Shadow by Benedict Jacka

An Instruction in Shadow is Benedict Jacka’s follow up to An Inheritance of Magic, his tale of modern-day magic and family intrigue set in London. The main character remains likably engaging, the magic intriguing, the family history labyrinthine, and if the story doesn’t perhaps progress quite as much as one would prefer, it all results in a smoothly enjoyable read.

Stephen Oakwood is continuing to hone his “drucraft” while working at locating magical wells for a big drucraft company,

January 10th, 2025. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Benedict Jacka | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

The Insect Epiphany: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture

The Insect Epiphany: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture by Barret Klein

In The Insect Epiphany: How Our Six-Legged Allies Shape Human Culture (2024), Barret Klein explores the impact of insects on human society, an impact both broad and deep. The text is almost always fascinating and offers up more than enough representative examples of his points, while the numerous included illustrations and photographs add a wonderful enhancement to the text.

After a preface which offers a personal touch, and an introduction that gives us some foundational sense of context and numbers (sixty percent of identified animal species are insects,

November 29th, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Absolution: Still feels freshly fascinating

Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer

These f—-ing people complaining about this f—-ing book. What the f—-ing f? Sure it’s f—ing weird, sure you don’t get any f—-ing answers, but if you f—-ing read the first three f—-ing books, what the f—- did you expect? Goodnight f—-ing Moon? The Very F—-ing Hungry Caterpillar? If you’re gonna f—-ing buy a Jeff Vanderf—-ingMeer book, then you better expect a f—-ing Vanderf—ker.

Sorry, sorry. Got a little too immersed in the final section of Absolution, and I’ve seemingly picked up the voice of that section’s narrator,

November 19th, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Jeff VanderMeer | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |

The Navigator’s Children: If this is the end, it’s a fully satisfactory one

The Navigator’s Children by Tad Williams

A long, long time ago in a world far, far away (otherwise known as 1988), a younger me picked a heavy (like really heavy) book titled The Dragonbone Chair off the shelf in the bookstore. If you had told that younger, thinner, more-haired me that I’d still be reading about those characters almost 40 years later in 2024, I would have laughed at the absurdity. But here I am, just putting down The Navigator’s Children (2024),

November 15th, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Tad Williams | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star

The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star by Pierre Sokolsky

In The Clock in the Sun: How We Came to Understand Our Nearest Star, Pierre Sokolsky does a nice job in covering the history of solar mechanics and exploration, concisely and clearly explaining things in his own language but also, in one of my favorite aspects of the book, offering up a number of lengthy passages from his source material, letting us hear those early thinkers in their own words.

The early sections on pre-Scientific Revolution observations are detailed and often fascinating,

November 8th, 2024. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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