Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
Fevered Star (2022) is the follow-up to Rebecca Roanhorse’s enjoyably original Black Sun, set in a fantastical Mesoamerica (with a few other cultures mixed in as well). As the second book, it does suffer somewhat from that dreaded middle book curse, but Roanhorse offers enough original worldbuilding here to compensate for the book’s weaker aspects, leaving the reader eager to see the trilogy’s conclusion.
As with Black Sun,
August 16th, 2022. Bill Capossere and Marion Deeds´s rating: 4, 4.5 | Rebecca Roanhorse | SFF Reviews | no comments |
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,
August 10th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
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,
August 9th, 2022. Robert Thompson, Bill Capossere and Justin Blazier´s rating: 4.5, 5 | James S.A. Corey | Audio | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |
Locklands by Robert Jackson Bennett
In Locklands, Robert Jackson Bennett closes out his FOUNDERS TRILOGY in epic style, raising the stakes to literally “all of creation” and upping his characters’ (some of them) power levels to god-like heights, all while managing to keep the story grounded in the personal thanks to Jackson’s typically sharp characterization. Being the concluding novel, two things should be obvious: one, you need to have read the prior ones and two, there will be inevitable spoilers for those prior books.
July 27th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Robert Jackson Bennett | SFF Reviews | 10 comments |
Into the Narrowdark by Tad Williams
Into the Narrowdark is the concluding volume to Tad Williams’ epic THE LAST KING OF OSTEN ARD series, and it … Hold on. Scratch that. Apparently, Williams and his publishers have decided to split the concluding work into two books. So readers will have to wait a bit longer for that conclusion, though at least they’ll have a short novel to read instead of … Wait a minute. OK, never mind on the brevity. Turns out Into the Narrowdark is still 600+ pages,
July 26th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Tad Williams | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Deep and Shining Dark by Juliet Kemp
The opening of a new series, The Deep and Shining Dark is a debut novel by Juliet Kemp, that for the most part avoids many if not all of the common issues of first books, making for a smoothly enjoyable read that falls just a bit short of a richly realized story.
The city of Marek is ostensibly part of the larger nation of Teren. It for some time now has operated as an independent city-state thanks to several factors: being a port city,
July 21st, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Juliet Kemp | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts by Sylvia Ferrara, translated by Todd Portnowitz
Sylvia Ferrara is an Italian scholar/researcher/professor who has devoted much of her life, both in solo work and (more importantly and effectively to her) in collaboration, to learning how writing developed/develops and to deciphering a number of scripts that have stubbornly resisted translation. In The Greatest Invention she offers the fruits of that research in often fascinating, sometimes dizzying, sometimes frustrating, always exuberant fashion.
The dizzying part comes partly from the way Ferrara flies all over the place in space and time,
July 1st, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Extractionist by Kimberly Unger
With The Extractionist, Kimberly Unger presents a pretty typical futuristic-internet-cybersetting-with-a-name background (in this case the cyberverse is called “the Swim”), but enhances the familiar setting with an original spin — a class of workers called Extractionists whose job it is to rescue people who get “stuck” in the Swim by reconnecting their Swim persona and their real-world body.
I loved the idea, and mostly loved its embodiment in Eliza McKay, the book’s protagonist, but felt the story could have been executed better.
June 30th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Kimberly Unger | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan
Walk the Vanished Earth by Erin Swan is a debut novel with great potential in its underlying premise, structure, and characters, but while the story does at times rise to meet that potential, it does so unevenly and by the end, for me at least, unsatisfactorily.
The story opens at the close of a buffalo hunt in the Kansas prairie in 1873, with a young Irishman named Samson doing the last bit of work amidst the bloody carnage and recalling the harsh life that led them here and making plans for the better one he hopes to forge for himself: “In this New World,
June 24th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Erin Swan | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs by Riley Black
As just about any child can tell you, roughly 65 million years ago a nearly ten-mile-wide asteroid crashed into the earth in the Yucatan, unleashing planet-wide firestorms, geography-changing tsunamis, and years of acid-rain and dark days. In short, it was not a good day for Planet Earth. Or for the more than 75% of animal species wiped out by the impact, including, of course, its most famous victims, the dinosaurs. In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (2022), Riley Black gives a wonderfully evocative and vivid accounting not just of those horrible days following the asteroid’s impact,
June 20th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 5 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Very interesting, Ulrich! Thanks for clueing me in!
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