Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Ryan Skardal

Steelheart: Trigger-happy YA

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart is a young adult novel, it has a post-apocalyptic setting, and it’s about superheroes (super villains, actually). It’s like Sanderson collected the last five years of blockbuster movies and novels and condensed them into one work that could be adapted into a newer, even bigger blockbuster movie. I also think there’s video game potential.

Steelheart is not adapted from a specific comic series, though Sanderson does appear to have been inspired by some of the genre’s most popular titles.

Vortex: Killer butterflies, interplanetary archipelagos, and a satisfying ending

Vortex by Robert Charles Wilson

Turk Findley has been returned to Equatoria ten thousand years after the Hypotheticals took him and Isaac. Things have changed. The Ring of Worlds that was connected by the Arches remains, but the societies that once traveled between these interplanetary portals have died away and been replaced. The Earth, sadly, is a wasteland. Its oceans are too acidic and its air is too poisonous to support life. Unfortunately, when the Hypotheticals connected Earth to other worlds, humanity began importing oil from Equatoria, which boosted the economy but destroyed our planet.

September 4th, 2013. Ryan Skardal´s rating: 4 | Robert Charles Wilson | SFF Reviews | no comments |

The Long Walk: A novel about exhaustion

The Long Walk by Stephen King

Ray Garraty, Maine’s own, lives in a near-future dystopian America where boys enter an annual game, the Long Walk, in which the winner is given anything he wants. The winning boy must walk at four miles per hour longer than any other boy in the competition. Boys whose pace drops below four miles per hour are given a warning, which they can lose after an hour of at-pace walking. Boys that collect three warnings, however, receive their “ticket,” a bullet.

The Long Walk was originally published under Stephen King’s pseudonym,

Wintersmith: Among Pratchett’s best work

Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

The older witches warn Tiffany Aching not to join in the dark Morris dance, but the soon-to-be-thirteen-year-old, who is usually so sensible, suddenly finds that she cannot resist her feet’s urging. Swept away in the heat of the moment, the young witch joins the magical dance before anyone can stop her.

She afterwards learns that she has danced with the Wintersmith. Winter himself becomes fascinated with Tiffany, whom he mistakes for the summer goddess. When the snow begins to fall, Tiffany discovers that every snowflake looks like her and that the Wintersmith is trying to become a man so that they can be together in a permanent winter.

Feet of Clay: Golems, vampires, and succession

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett

The City Watch is growing, and its new members bring new skills and talents to help stop crime in Ankh-Morpork. Angua, a werewolf, can trace criminals by their smell, while Detritus, a troll, interrogates suspects by “screaming angrily at people until they give in.” Cheery Longbottom is Vimes’ newest recruit, an alchemist, and perhaps the only dwarf in Ankh-Morpork who does not enjoy rowdiness. The criminals had better be careful.

In fact, the Watch has become so effective that the rich and powerful are hiring assassins to kill Commander Samuel Vimes.

July 31st, 2013. Ryan Skardal´s rating: 4 | Terry Pratchett | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Warp: Lev Grossman’s first novel

Warp by Lev Grossman

Hollis Kessler has just finished college, and now he’s coasting. He has neither purpose nor direction and can only tie everything he sees into a pop culture web of references. When he sees a woman, for example, he and his friends will immediately tell her what famous woman she resembles. The first woman they see looks like Denise Crosby, who played Lieutenant Tasha Yar in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Hollis and his friends otherwise spend most of their time together gossiping about what jobs and internships their peers have gotten while waiting for something more interesting than their web of pop culture references.

Men at Arms: The Watch is Growing

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett

Odd though it may be, most people agree that Ankh-Morpork is a city that works. Its citizens pay dues to the Thieves Guild so that they will not be robbed, and because the city’s leader, Havelock Vetinari, was a member of the Assassin’s Guild, there is little chance that he will be overthrown through assassination. (The assassins would of course kill Vetinari, but the price they have listed for his head is prohibitive). The guilds all agree that they would be worse off without Vetinari,

July 15th, 2013. Ryan Skardal and Marion Deeds´s rating: 3 | Terry Pratchett | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Axis: Obsessed with the transcendent forces of the universe

Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Earth has now been surrounded by the mysterious spin barrier that slows time relative to the rest of the universe for decades. Extra-terrestrial forces have also built the Arch that connects Earth to a series of unknown and increasingly environmentally hostile worlds. Humanity is now colonizing the first new world, but they still wonder about what beings — the Hypotheticals — could have created the spin barriers around these planets, not to mention the arches that connect them.

There are intergalactic forces at work in Axis,

July 3rd, 2013. Ryan Skardal´s rating: 3 | Robert Charles Wilson | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

The Vorrh: Pays aesthetic dividends

The Vorrh by Brian Catling

In his debut novel, The Vorrh, Brian Catling offers readers a fantasy in the tradition of Mervyn Peake’s GORMENGHAST novels rather than Tolkien’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The characters do surprising and often incredible things, they explore an African wilderness rarely seen in fantasy, and they sometimes manage to inspire the reader to imagine what it would be like to live in such a fantastic setting.

May 30th, 2013. Ryan Skardal´s rating: 3 | Brian Catling | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

Zodiac: The Eco Thriller: An accomplished blueprint

Zodiac: The Eco Thriller by Neal Stephenson

Sangamon Taylor is a professional asshole, he is known as the granola James Bond, and he knows how to use your child’s aquarium to filter PCBs from his body. Zodiac: The Eco Thriller is Neal Stephenson’s second novel as well as a clear blueprint for its successor, the cyberpunk classic, Snow Crash.

Sangamon Taylor works for GEE, an activist group that tries to act as a check against the toxic waste Boston industrialists dump into Boston Harbor.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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