Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Marion Deeds

Illusive: This brisk YA thriller follows all the rules

Illusive by Emily Lloyd-Jones

Emily Lloyd-Jone’s debut novel, Illusive, is a briskly-paced futuristic adventure for middle school readers. Jones created an interesting adventure, but stayed safely within the conventions and tropes of YA, drawing heavily from familiar works, resulting in a book that is fun, but predictable and in places a bit derivative.

Ciere (pronounced See-ARE) is a seventeen-year-old thief, part of a high-end theft ring. Ciere and her compatriots have special, almost magical abilities, awakened as a result of a vaccine they were given to combat a pandemic that broke out in 2017.

Fables: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham

Fables (Vol. 1): Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham (author) and Lan Medina (artist)

Snow White is having a rough week. It is only a few days away from Rememberance Day, Fabletown’s big celebration and fund-raiser. As the deputy mayor, she is in charge of the event. The Beast, of Beauty and the Beast, is reverting to his non-human form, and she must decide if he will be exiled from New York City and sent upstate to the “farm,” where the non-human immigrants from her home reality live. Her ex, the smarmy,

We Are All Completely Fine: Thought-provoking horror

We Are All Completely Fine by Daryl Gregory

Imagine that, like the hapless characters in movies like The Hills Have Eyes and Wrong Turn, you and a group of friends were captured by cannibals. You were kept alive while choice cuts of you were “harvested”, and you alone survived. Imagine that you were the victim of a sadistic abductor who flayed the flesh of your arms and legs and carved images onto your bones. Imagine that you alone survived the rising of the Elder Gods in your home town.

The Spectral Link: Subterranean Press provides two spectral short stories.

The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

Subterranean Press has issued two original stories by Thomas Ligotti in a special edition volume titled The Spectral Link. Ligotti is best known for a brooding, gothic style of psychological horror that avoids slashing, gore and disgusting body fluids for a deep, dark, almost spiritual sense of wrongness. He delivers that creepy sense of wrongness in both these tales.

Ligotti’s prose is masterful, as is his control of tone. Tone is not as easy to manage as people might think;

July 23rd, 2014. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Thomas Ligotti | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

The Silk Map: Vivid world-building and pretty decent poetry

The Silk Map by Chris Willrich

The Silk Map is Chris Willrich’s second adventure in the GAUNT AND BONE series. The poet and the thief, along with their bandit friend Snow Pine, are searching for their lost children, and this book takes them on a quest along an ancient trade route where they confront wonders, demons and their own fears.

Willrich has created a world based on ancient China, and the Spice Braid route that Gaunt and Bone follow is patterned on the Silk Road.

July 17th, 2014. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Chris Willrich | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

What threw you out of a story?

When you start to read a work of fiction, you check your disbelief at the door. This is even more important when you are reading speculative fiction or horror, and there’s even a name for it; the willing suspension of disbelief.

Usually, once you’ve seen a dragon on the cover, you’ve already suspended your disbelief and you are prepared to go along for the ride. Sometimes, though, in the middle of a book, just for a moment, you stumble across something that you just can’t accept and it jars you out of the book. You may still go back and finish the book,

July 10th, 2014. Marion Deeds | Thoughtful Thursday | 42 comments |

In Thunder Forged: Here’s my After-action Report

In Thunder Forged by Ari Marmell

To: Military Subcommittee, Colonial Council, Kingdom of Fantasy Literature

Month of Summer Solstice, in the Year of the Brazilian World Cup

Re: Codename In Thunder Forged, After Action Report

Honorable Council:

Herewith my report on the targeted objective, codename In Thunder Forged. In reviewing reports for this mission I noted that your intelligence analysts theorized that In Thunder Forged may have been based on a video game,

July 9th, 2014. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Ari Marmell | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |

The Great Glass Sea: A fine literary novel with a solid SF premise

The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil

It’s difficult to write a comprehensive yet succinct critique of a work by someone who understands storytelling from the bones outward, who writes unsentimentally about a place he loves and uses exquisite language while doing it. That’s my particular challenge with Josh Weil’s literary novel The Great Glass Sea.

I’m reviewing The Great Glass Sea for our Edge of the Universe column because the springboard for the story is an audacious SF what-if: What if orbiting space mirrors could provide 24 hours of light to an agricultural area on earth?

September Girls: This book does not stay safely in the shallows; it takes risks.

September Girls by Bennett Madison

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

September Girls, by Bennett Madison was nominated for a 2014 Andre Norton Award for best YA fiction (it didn’t win; Nalo Hopkinson’s Sister Mine did).

Beggars in Spain: Liked the ideas, didn’t love the characterizations

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress won a Nebula and a Hugo in 1991 for her novella “Beggars in Spain,” about genetically altered humans who don’t need to sleep. In 1993 she expanded the novella into a novel and ultimately into a series.

The first quarter of Beggars in Spain is basically the original novella, in which the reader meets Leisha Camden, the genetically altered child of multi-billionaire Roger Camden. Lithe, golden-haired, blue-eyed and beautiful, Leisha is also extraordinarily intelligent and sleepless.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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