Touch, by Claire North, took me completely by surprise. I’d never heard of Claire North. (Yes, I know. More about that later.) I hadn’t seen much pre-release buzz about the book. I don’t think I’d ever read a book from (Hachette imprint) Redhook before. I frankly thought the blurb sounded a bit too standard-horror-ish, but I picked it up anyway to try a few pages and see if it could draw me in.
Am I ever glad I did.
August 26th, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 4.5 | Claire North | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Soda Pop Soldier essentially takes the e-sports concept (DOTA 2, Starcraft, etc.) that offers the promise of making buckets of money by playing video games to talented gamers, and mixes it up with a heavy dose of corporatization (well, a heavier dose than it already has) and a heaping serving of teenage boy wish fulfillment.
See, gamer PerfectQuestion (yes, that’s his name) fights for ColaCorp in an online wargame called WarWorld, where other megacorporations battle each other for dominance in the real world of advertising.
March 24th, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 2 | Nick Cole | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Hurricane Fever by Tobias Buckell
I very much enjoyed Tobias Buckell’s 2012 SF novel Arctic Rising, which was set on a near-future Earth dramatically affected by global warming. As much as I loved that novel’s main character Anika, I mentioned in my review that I wouldn’t mind reading a novel set in the same world but featuring one of its two excellent supporting characters, Vy or Roo.
Lo and behold, just about two years later, Buckell delivers Hurricane Fever,
March 17th, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 4 | Tobias Buckell | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s debut novel Signal to Noise, the 1980s are almost over, and Meche is a teenager in Mexico City doing all those random stupid teenager things we all did back then: listening to music all night, riding around on the back of friends’ motorcycles, and casting magic spells in dilapidated factories.
Meche’s dad is trying to make a living as a musician, which in practice works out to spending too much time in bars and not enough time with his family.
March 10th, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 3.5 | Silvia Moreno-Garcia | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
In early 2012, John Love made some serious waves with his debut novel Faith, a critically acclaimed space opera that was about as dark as anything I’d read in the genre. Faith was a novel many reviewers expected to see on Best-of-2012 lists and final award ballots, but instead it disappeared without much noise at all. Whether that was due to the novel’s admittedly disturbing content, or its early January release date, or the fact that all of this happened in the early days of Night Shade Books’ well-documented collapse,
March 3rd, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 4 | John Love | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Impulse is Dave Bara’s debut novel, published earlier this month by DAW. The cover copy starts off like this:
Following in the tradition of such top science fiction writers as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Gordon Dickson, Frank Herbert and Joe Haldeman, Impulse, the first novel of THE LIGHTSHIP CHRONICLES, launches readers on a star-spanning journey of discovery, diplomacy and danger.
February 24th, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 2 | Dave Bara | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Galaxy Game is Barbadian author Karen Lord’s third novel, following the critically acclaimed and award-winning Redemption in Indigo and last year’s well-received The Best of All Possible Worlds.
Something I want to get out of the way right from the start: while it’s not stated anywhere on the book’s cover, The Galaxy Game is the sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds.
February 17th, 2015. Stefan Raets´s rating: 3.5 | Karen Lord | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett
The latest entry in Terry Pratchett’s sprawling DISCWORLD series, Raising Steam, is an example of what I call the “innovation” series-within-the-series. Just like there are sets of books that focus on specific characters and areas of the Discworld, there’s an increasingly large set of books that take on specific technological innovations entering the fabric of Discworld society.
We’ve seen this as far back as 1990’s Moving Pictures (in which the movie industry hit the Discworld) and 1994’s Soul Music (rock and roll,
September 3rd, 2014. Stefan Raets´s rating: 2 | Terry Pratchett | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Theo Bernstein accidentally put a decimal point one place to the left instead of the right and, thusly, caused the Very Very Large Hadron Collider to explode, thereby disintegrating an entire Alp and becoming one of the most hated men alive. Coincidentally, Shliemann Brothers, the company that held all his investments, went bust at just about the same time, so, well, things aren’t going great for Theo.
After Theo receives an apple, a seemingly empty bottle and a small pink powder compact as part of an inheritance from his friend and former physics professor Pieter van Goyen,
February 14th, 2014. Stefan Raets´s rating: 3 | Tom Holt | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
This review turned out a bit rambly, but I’m too lazy to self-edit today, so I’m going to cut to the chase and place my overall opinion right up front for anyone who doesn’t feel like reading over a thousand words of enthusiastic rambling:
Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear is the best fantasy novel I’ve read all year, and you should read it too.
The setting of Range of Ghosts is a fantasy version of a place that vaguely resembles Central Asia around the time of the dissolution of the Mongol Empire.
November 8th, 2013. Stefan Raets´s rating: 5 | Elizabeth Bear | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…
Detailed, thoughtful review, Bill. I'm going to read it for two reasons. First, Karen Russell wrote it, and second, it…