Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Author: Terry Weyna

Magazine Monday: Shadows & Tall Trees, Spring 2012

“A well-wrought horror story is a potent thing, lingering in the mind long after the tale has ended,” says Michael Kelly, the editor of Shadows and Tall Trees, in his introductory note to Issue 3. The magazine strives to be one of “quiet, literate horror fiction,” and on the evidence this issue, it succeeds.

The first story in the magazine, “The Elephant Girl” by Nina Allan, is especially powerful. Brigid is a teacher in a primary school with a new student, Jeanie Henderson, who is an exceptionally unattractive child.

Flesh Eaters: A Bram Stoker winner

Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney

Was 2011 a bad year for the horror novel? I’ve yet to read any of the nominees for the 2012 Bram Stoker Award for best novel except Flesh Eaters by Joe McKinney, the winner, and I find myself puzzled. Was this really the best the year had to offer? It’s a competent enough zombie novel, but nothing special.

Flesh Eaters tells the story of the loss of Houston, Texas, to a close series of tropical storms,

Dragon in Chains: An uncommon fantasy setting

Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox

Most epic fantasy written in English has its basis in Western culture. While the worlds created in these books are not our world, they are generally recognizable: the use of language is comfortable, the foods are what we or our ancestors ate, the customs are basically familiar. Even mythological creatures look the way we expect them to, so that unicorns have horns and dragons have wings. When there are exceptions to these rules, the author is certain to provide an explanation, and the exception is often integral to the tale.

June 2nd, 2012. Terry Weyna and Robert Thompson´s rating: 3.5, 4 | Ben Macallan, Chaz Brenchley, Daniel Fox | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology

Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel

Is there really any difference between post-modernism, interstitial fiction, slipstream and New Weird? Does anyone know? James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel try to outline the boundaries of slipstream with their anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, particularly by including a learned introduction and excerpts from a discussion that took place on the subject on a blog a few years ago. Ultimately, like so many things literary,

May 31st, 2012. Terry Weyna´s rating: 4 | Bruce Sterling, James Patrick Kelly, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Ford, John Kessel, Jonathan Lethem, Karen Joy Fowler, Kelly Link, Michael Chabon, Ted Chiang, Theodora Goss | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Lost Everything: A quiet post-apocalyptic novel

Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery

Lost Everything, by Brian Francis Slattery, is a surprisingly small-bore and quiet post-apocalyptic novel. Where many deal with destruction on a country-wide or global scale and follow near-epic quests by some doomed or maybe-doomed survivors, Slattery takes his characters through a just-as-ravaged countryside but it all seems a little more domestic than the usual sort of end-of-the-world tale, a twist that is both the book’s strength and its weakness.

The world has seemingly been in the grips of ecological disaster,

May 25th, 2012. Bill Capossere and Terry Weyna´s rating: 3, 4 | Brian Francis Slattery | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Magazine Monday: 2012 Nebula-Nominated Novellas

I do not envy the awards panel for the Nebula Awards this year. There are two excellent novellas equally deserving of the award in that category.

The first of the novellas I refer to is “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” by Ken Liu. This story concerns the Pingfang District in China and the infamous Unit 731 maintained there by the Japanese for biological and chemical weapons research before and during World War II. I had never heard of Unit 731 before reading this novella, and was shocked to learn of its existence and the role of the United States in hushing it up after the war in order to profit from the research.

After the Apocalypse: Stories like jewels

After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh

I’ve read Maureen McHugh’s “Useless Things” at least three times now, and I admire it more with each rereading. It appears just a bit less than halfway through McHugh’s thought-provoking short story collection, After the Apocalypse. The first-person narrator is a woman living well outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a time when the United States seems on the brink of collapse: the economy is terrible, and water is extremely scarce in the Southwest — a time that doesn’t feel very far away from today.

City of Lost Souls: Very disappointing

City of Lost Souls by Cassandra Clare

THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS series started out as a trilogy, and should have stayed there. This fifth book in the series has devolved into nothing more but one incident of teenage groping and/or angst after another.

City of Lost Souls is very disappointing.

[Editor’s note: Terry, a perfectionist, didn’t want to post this short opinion as a review, but we thought you’d want to know, so we posted it anyway.]

Magazine Monday: 2012 Nebula Award Nominees for Best Novelette

It was a treat to reread Geoff Ryman’s “What We Found” to prepare to write this column. As I noted when I wrote about this story for my review on the issue of F&SF in which it originally appeared, Ryman has been writing in recent years of third-world cultures, in such a way that the reader becomes immersed in the culture, surrounded by sights, scents, tastes and sounds of a world so foreign to a first-worlder that it might as well be an alien civilization. This time, the setting is Makurdi in central Nigeria,

Reunion: A lovely story

Reunion by Rick Hautala

As we grow older, we tend to think of childhood as a golden time, when the hours poured through our fingers like water, glistening and plentiful. Summers were especially wonderful, those days when school was out and there was nothing to do but play. But when we call up specific memories, they never seem quite so golden; our friends never seem quite such good friends; and there are terrors that we have worked hard to forget. Perhaps that’s why so many books have been written about that time when we transition from childhood to young adulthood,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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