Author: Bill Capossere

The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life

The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma)

The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life by Johan Eklöf (translated by Elizabeth DeNoma) is a solidly informative book that raises some serious questions and challenges us to think differently about how we might live our lives, though it suffers somewhat from its structure.

Eklöf is an ecologist who specializes in bats, so one can see where he might get his fondness for the darkness of night.

February 17th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Non-fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women

Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women edited by Lee Murray & Angela Yuriko

In Unquiet Spirits: Essays by Asian Women, edited by Lee Murray and Angela Yuriko Smith, twenty-one Asian writers (all women as one might have guessed from the title) offer up a single personal essay each that both explores their heritage of ghost stories/folklore and charts their own experiences navigating the in-between world of shared cultures. Like many collections, it’s a mixed bag. For me, the collection as a whole didn’t wholly succeed, though it contains several strong essays.

February 14th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Fugitive Telemetry: Pitch-perfect narrative voice

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells

Martha Wells continues her popular and highly-acclaimed MURDERBOT DIARIES series with another novella, Fugitive Telemetry (2021), which actually takes place before the only novel in the series so far, Network Effect. (So you could read this one before that novel, but you do need to read books 1-4 first.) At this point in time Murderbot, the introverted and snarky cyborg who is the narrator and the heart of this series, is a fairly new resident on Preservation,

Network Effect: Complex connections

Network Effect by Martha Wells

Martha Wells’ Murderbot has been gathering enthusiastic fans (which would be certain to have Murderbot hiding behind its opaque armored faceplate), along with multiple Nebula, Hugo and other awards and nominations, as each of the first four novellas in the MURDERBOT DIARIES series has been published over the last three years. In Network Effect (2020), the first full-length novel in this series, Wells is able to explore a more complex plot and to more fully develop Murderbot’s character and its relationships with others.

December 29th, 2022. Tadiana Jones, Jana Nyman, Marion Deeds, Kat Hooper and Bill Capossere´s rating: 4.5 | Martha Wells | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

The Lost Metal: Brings this series to a solid, if not wholly inspired, close

The Lost Metal by Brandon Sanderson

The Lost Metal brings to an end Brandon Sanderson’s MISTBORN ERA TWO series, and does so I’d say in semi-satisfying fashion, bringing some plots lines and character stories to a close and opening up the world of the Sanderson’s expanded universe (the Cosmere) more fully.

Waxillium returns here in his Senator role, along with his partner Wayne, Wayne’s new partner constable Marasi, and Wax’s wife Steris as they continue to battle against the secret society (The Set), which has amongst its high-ranking members Wax’s own sister,

December 15th, 2022. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Brandon Sanderson | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

City of Last Chances: An intellectual pleasure

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky

City of Last Chances (2022), by Adrian Tchaikovsky, is one of those novels that I completely admired all the way through but had a hard time connecting to many of the characters, so that while the reading experience was enjoyable, it was more an intellectual pleasure than an immersive, emotional one.

The novel is set in the titular city of Ilmar, suffering under the heavy boot of an occupation force left over from the city’s conquest three years earlier by the Palleseen,

The Killing God: Concluding novel is a huge leap up in quality

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 |

Neom: You should read this book

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: A solid YA fantasy

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,

For David Walton, it’s all about the dinosaurs. (Giveaway!)

Today we welcome David Walton, whose science fiction thriller Living Memory was just released on October 18th (here’s my review). This is the seventh novel of David’s we’ve reviewed and in the past he’s been gracious enough to sit down with us (so to speak) to answer some questions about his books and his writing in general.

This time, we’re not doing any of the talking. Instead, David has gifted us with an essay about how Living Memory, at least in part,

October 21st, 2022. Bill Capossere | David Walton | Author Interviews, Expanded Universe, Giveaway! | 12 comments |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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