Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 1
The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 2
by Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor
Perhaps you’re familiar with the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, created in 2012 by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, which takes the form of twice-monthly, roughly-30-minute dispatches from the community radio station in a small, exceptionally weird and yet utterly normal desert town.
May 9th, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 5 | Joseph Fink | Horror | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Seanan McGuire brings together horror, alchemy, and fantasy in Middlegame (2019), a novel about ambition, power, creation, family, genius, and imagination. And because it’s a McGuire novel, there are also plenty of things that go bump in both the day and the night, a terrifying amount of corn, a refutation of pastoral/nostalgic Americana as viewed through the lens of classic children’s literature, and a battle-scarred old tomcat.
James Reed and his assistant Leigh Barrow ― a pair of rebel alchemists of the mad scientist type ― have been doing human experimentation for years,
May 7th, 2019. Jana Nyman and Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4.5 | Seanan McGuire | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Zen Cho continues her SORCERER ROYAL series with The True Queen (2019), the first follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown. Technically, The True Queen could be read as a stand-alone or as an introduction to the series, and that was the spirit in which I read it, though I often found myself wishing I had read this book second rather than first; the series takes place in a definite chronological order,
May 6th, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 3.5 | Zen Cho | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Emma Newman continues her PLANETFALL series with Atlas Alone (2019), which takes place after Planetfall, After Atlas, and Before Mars. In fact, two of Atlas Alone’s characters will be immediately recognizable to those who have already read After Atlas, and one of those characters, in particular,
May 2nd, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Emma Newman | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Planetfall, the first science fiction offering from Emma Newman, is about a colony of humans who left Earth to follow Suh, an alleged prophet who received a supernatural message giving her the coordinates of an unknown distant planet where she was supposed to travel to receive instructions about God’s plans for humanity. Suh and her best friend Ren, a brilliant geneticist and engineer, gathered a team of like-minded believers and they landed on the planet 22 years ago.
May 1st, 2019. Kat Hooper, Jason Golomb, Marion Deeds and Jana Nyman´s rating: 3 | Emma Newman | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker
Ashok K. Banker crafts an intricate and wide-ranging world in Upon a Burning Throne (2019) the first volume in the BURNT EMPIRE SAGA. This novel alone covers the span of decades, touching on the lives of dozens of characters, implementing mythology and magic and carefully-plotted battles in equal measure. Gods, warriors, mystics, kings, and even the humblest of charioteers all have their parts to play in this nearly-700-page epic loosely based upon The Mahabharata,
April 30th, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 4.5 | Ashok K. Banker | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald concludes the LUNA trilogy with Luna: Moon Rising (2019), finishing many of the stories begun in Luna: New Moon and continued in Luna: Wolf Moon while leaving the futures of his characters and the Moon itself open for rampant speculation. This review will contain some inevitable spoilers for the ending of Luna: Wolf Moon, in particular, but I’ll try to make them as brief as possible,
April 29th, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 4 | Ian McDonald | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett
I’ll be perfectly honest: The Tempest is not my favorite of William Shakespeare’s plays. It’s well-written, it has some fantastically quotable lines, and it contains insightful commentary about men and the pursuit of power (through various means, and of various types). But The Tempest only has one active female character, the sorcerer Prospero’s teenage daughter Miranda, and her functions are to (1) receive only the information her father deems appropriate, (2) remain obedient and chaste so that her virginity can be the strongest bargaining chip possible,
April 24th, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 5 | Katharine Duckett | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are two more reviews of recent Hugo and Nebula award-nominated stories.
“The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society” by T. Kingfisher (2018, free at Uncanny magazine, $3.03 Kindle magazine issue). 2019 Hugo award nominee (short story).
“The Rose MacGregor Drinking and Admiration Society” is a charming little diversion, among a steadily-growing list of charming short works, by T. Kingfisher. This one also happens to be a 2019 Hugo Award nominee!
April 22nd, 2019. Jana Nyman and Tadiana Jones | T. Kingfisher | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Sky Without Stars by Jessica Brody & Joanne Rendell
Street-smart Chatine Renard spends her days scrounging for trinkets, or sometimes liberating them from their owners directly, and committing other crimes while dressed as a boy so that she can’t be forced to sell her blood, a nominally-legal vocation which might bring good money in the short-term but is sure to kill her within a few years. Alouette Taureau is a sweet, dangerously naïve girl brought up in near-seclusion under the watchful eyes of her kind father and the Sisters who hide belowground,
April 22nd, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 3.5 | Jessica Brody | Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
No, Paul, sorry, I don't believe I've read any books by Aickman; perhaps the odd story. I'm generally not a…
I like the ambiguities when the story leading up to them has inserted various dreadful possibilities in the back of…
COMMENT Marion, I expect that my half-hearted praise here (at best) will not exactly endear me to all of Ramsey…
Ramsay Campbell was all the rage in my circle of horror-reading/writing friends in the 1980s, and they extolled the ambiguity.…
Oh boy, I wish I could escape that Neil Gaiman article, too. I knew already he’d done reprehensible things but…