The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin
Everyone with even a passing knowledge of SF/Fantasy will likely have heard of Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the giants of the field whose work has transcended genre and literary categories. Her SFF works have ranged from mythical fantasy such as the EARTHSEA CYCLE to brilliant studies of gender, identity, and political ideologies like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed.
October 31st, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4 | Ursula K. Le-Guin | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock
James P. Blaylock is a fabulist, a teller of magic realist tales that reframe our everyday world in more colorful, fanciful, sinister, and whimsical ways. His style and themes often overlap with the works of Tim Powers and they have collaborated on several stories and even have shared the character William Ashbless, which is no surprise since they met as students at Cal State Fullerton. There they also befriended author K.W. Jeter (who coined the term “steampunk” and wrote perhaps the earliest full-length example,
October 20th, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4 | James P. Blaylock | Audio, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds
Redemption Ark (2002) is the follow-up to Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds’ debut novel and the second book in his REVELATION SPACE series of hard SF space opera in which highly-augmented human factions encounter implacable killer machines bent on exterminating sentient life. The first entry had elements of Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, Frank Herbert’s Dune,
October 19th, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3 | Alastair Reynolds | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Having recently finished Death’s End (see my review here), the epic finale of the THREE-BODY TRILOGY by Cixin Liu, which rose to prominence when the the first book The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award for Best SF Novel of 2015 (translated by Ken Liu), I was intrigued by the process of translating foreign SF works into English, and was excited that Ken Liu, also the acclaimed author of The Grace of Kings (first book of the DANDELION DYNASTY series),
October 11th, 2016. Stuart Starosta | Ken Liu | Author Interviews, Giveaway! | 17 comments |
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
I’ve been planning to read this series for many years, because Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross and Iain M. Banks are regularly mentioned at the forefront of the British Hard SF movement. Sure, there are many non-British well-known hard SF and space opera practitioners like Kim Stanley Robinson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Vernor Vinge,
October 11th, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3.5 | Alastair Reynolds | Audio | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Ignore the YA label slapped on this one if that gives you pause. Though that won’t be hard to do because The Graveyard Book opens with a hand in the darkness holding a knife wet with the blood of almost an entire family: father, mother, and older child. The knife lacks only the blood of the toddler son to finish its job. Luckily for the reader (and the boy) he escapes into a nearby cemetery where a mothering ghost convinces the cemetery community to protect him.
October 10th, 2016. Bill Capossere, Ruth Arnell, Stuart Starosta and Skye Walker´s rating: 5 | Neil Gaiman | Audio, Children, Hugo Award, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Although virtually unclassifiable, Gene Wolfe’s 1975 novel, Peace, was chosen for inclusion in both David Pringle’s Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels AND Jones & Newman’s Horror: Another 100 Best Books. While the novel certainly does have shadings of both the horrific and the fantastic, it will most likely strike the casual reader — on the surface, at least — as more of an autobiography, telling, as it does, the story of Alden Dennis Weer,
October 6th, 2016. Sandy Ferber and Stuart Starosta´s rating: 4 | Gene Wolfe | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle is a well-known author of many fantasy novels, including the classic The Last Unicorn. However, I don’t often hear mention of his debut novel, A Fine and Private Place (1960), written when he was only 19 years old. Given his age it’s a phenomenal achievement — the prose is polished, filled with pathos and humor, and the characters’ relationships are deftly described. And yet I couldn’t get into the story at all,
September 28th, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3 | Peter S. Beagle | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Last year I tried twice (unsuccessfully) to finish The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Retrospective of His Finest Fiction, giving up in defeat. Many SFF readers are baffled and frustrated by his stories, because they are packed with metaphors, literary references, hidden themes, and require extremely close reading to understand and appreciate. I did get a lot of supportive feedback from various readers who encountered the same difficulties, including a very knowledgeable person named “Aramini”.
When the 2016 Hugo Awards were announced, Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe,
September 27th, 2016. Stuart Starosta | Gene Wolfe | Short Fiction | Author Interviews | 2 comments |
Listening to Cixin Liu’s THREE-BODY trilogy reminds me of those graphics on cosmology that illustrate our relative scale in the universe. It starts with the microscopic world of individual atoms and molecules (or even subatomic particles like quarks and neutrinos), expands outward to individual cells, organisms, and larger creatures, then jumps out further to continents and the planet Earth, zooming back to encompass our solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and then pulling out further to an endless sea of galaxies that make up our universe.
September 23rd, 2016. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 5 | Cixin Liu | Audio | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Do it! One of the best things I've read in recent years.
This reminds me. I want to read Addie LaRue.
We’re in total agreement David!
I felt just the same. The prose and character work was excellent. The larger story was unsatisfying, especially compared to…
Hmmm. I think I'll pass.