Paper Girls (Vol 4) by Brian K. Vaughan
This is the fourth volume of Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls, and we are finally given enough glimpses of the larger plot to make sense of what’s happened until this point.
[SPOILER TERRITORY AHEAD – DON’T READ UNLESS YOU’VE READ VOLUMES ONE-THREE]
After being thrown into the distant past and battling cavemen and befriending fierce natives, the girls once again in their future (and our past), namely during Y2K before the millenium.
January 5th, 2019. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 5 | Brian K. Vaughan | Comics | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
SAGA Volume 3, Issues 13-18 by Brian K. Vaughan (author) & Fiona Staples (illustrator)
This highly original space opera romance is incredibly popular, and for good reason. Anyone who has read Saga Vols 1 & 2 will undoubtedly be fans of star-crossed lovers Alana & Marko, who come from opposing sides of a galactic war, Marko’s sharp-tongued mother Klara, freelancer assassin The Will and his lie-detecting cat, and Marko’s ex-fiance Gwendolyn. Not to mention the difficult-to-hate Prince Robot IV and all the other bizarre creations of Vaughan and Staples.
December 7th, 2018. Stuart Starosta and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 4.5 | Brian K. Vaughan | Comics | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Batman: Year One by Frank Miller
Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) completely reinvented Batman as an angry and bitter older man coming out of retirement to stem a rising tide of crime in Gotham City alongside Police Commissioner Jim Gordon. This was a dark vision of a complex and troubled soul driven to fight crime to avenge his parent’s senseless death, and it resonated with a new generation of readers and gained comics greater credibility among mainstream readers. Just one year later Miller produced a four-part story arc called Batman: Year One (1987).
November 10th, 2018. Stuart Starosta and Brad Hawley´s rating: 5 | Frank Miller | Comics, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
SAGA Volume Two, Issues 7-12 by Brian K. Vaughan (author) & Fiona Staples (illustrator)
I’m so late to the party that the weekend is over and everyone is back to work on Monday. I like to write SF reviews to introduce new books to people who might not have read them yet, but SAGA is already so popular and well known that the only advantage to discovering this series so late is that I can read the first 5 volumes straight through without having to wait!
The story moves so propulsively you have to force yourself to slow down.
September 21st, 2018. Stuart Starosta and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Brian K. Vaughan | Comics | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
Elysium Fire (2018) is the sequel to Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect (now renamed Aurora Rising to designate it as part of the PREFECT DREYFUS series), a complex and detailed police procedural set in the Glitter Band of his REVELATION SPACE series, set before the Melding Plague that destroyed the 10,000 orbitals that sported every conceivable political system, all run by real-time neurally-based electronic democratic voting systems that allow citizens to weigh in on each issue and decision on how to run their societies.
July 19th, 2018. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3.5 | Alastair Reynolds | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers
Tim Powers’ fourth novel, 1983’s The Anubis Gates, is a book that I had been meaning to read for years. Chosen for inclusion in both David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels and Jones & Newman’s Horror: 100 Best Books, as well as the recipient of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award in 1984, the book came with plenty of good word of mouth, to say the least.
June 18th, 2018. Sandy Ferber, Katie Burton and Stuart Starosta´s rating: 2, 5 | Tim Powers | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 13 comments |
Angelmaker (2012) is Nick Harkaway’s second book, after his exuberant, clever, digressive and exhausting debut The Gone-Away World. It shares the same qualities with that wild and free-wheeling tale, with relentlessly clever dialogue, quirky and in-depth characters, an intricate but playful doomsday plot, more flashbacks than most readers can handle, and chock-a-block with clever and ironic observations of the weirdly-unique world he has created, and by extension our own less colorful one.
June 15th, 2018. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3 | Nick Harkaway | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
This is a bad land for Gods… The old gods are ignored. The new gods are as quickly taken up as they are abandoned, cast aside for the next big thing. Either you’ve been forgotten, or you’re scared you’re going to be rendered obsolete, or maybe you’re just getting tired of existing on the whims of people.
Shadow, just out of prison and with nothing to go home to, is hired to be Mr. Wednesday’s bodyguard as he travels around America to warn all the other incarnations of gods,
June 11th, 2018. Kat Hooper, Rebecca Fisher and Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3, 4.5 | Neil Gaiman | Audio, Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
My copy of Memory looks like it was reread several dozen times and then shoved in the bottom of a backpack and schlepped a few hundred thousand miles (it was). It’s my favorite book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s VORKOSIGAN SAGA, which is a series made up of some of my favorite books. But it isn’t high literature or uber-intellectual science fiction or the kind of book that people call “genre bending.” The plot is pure, fast-paced, crime-solving fun, like the rest of the series.
April 25th, 2018. Alix E. Harrow, Kat Hooper, Marion Deeds and Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4, 4.5 | Lois McMaster Bujold | SFF Reviews | 20 comments |
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
This is Marion’s review of The Vor Game, Brothers in Arms, and Mirror Dance. Kat’s comments about Mirror Dance are at the bottom.
Miles Vorkosigan is nearly a dwarf, with bones as brittle as fine porcelain, and he is a Vor, one of the elite, the son of the Imperial Regent. The Vor, and everyone on Barrayar for that matter, are terrified of mutation because of their history, and Miles looks like a mutation even though he isn’t one.
April 23rd, 2018. Marion Deeds, Kat Hooper and Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4.5 | Lois McMaster Bujold | Hugo Award | SFF Reviews | no comments |
What a perceptive and beautiful review. You make it clear that Yamada not only knows the story she wants to…
Read together with The Serpent Mage, the series is one of the best works of art out there. The main…
thanks for this really well-written review. You've definitely piqued my interest in this, particularly in how you highlight the still…
Thanks for the kind words, Ira! Much appreciated!
Fine review