Besieged by Rowena Cory Daniells
I have very mixed feelings about Besieged. Overall, I’d give it a positive ranking, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that the text does have issues. Quite a few issues, really. What does work is very good, and I can really give those elements a sterling review. But then there’s… the other hand.
Besieged is a big, sprawling political drama concerning a race called the T’en, the ordinary humans (here called True-Men or Mieren),
November 5th, 2012. Tim Scheidler´s rating: 3 | Rowena Cory Daniells | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin
With the recent Sci- Fi Channel miniseries, there is bound to be renewed interest in Ursula Le Guin’s classic first book in her Earthsea series, as there should be. This remains a classic fantasy for good reason. The world within which the characters move is fully developed, having a sense of past, present and future as well as a sense of a larger “there there”, as opposed to some fantasies that feel like a Hollywood stage set, as if nothing exists beyond the narrow social/geographical worlds the characters move through.
September 8th, 2012. Tim Scheidler, Bill Capossere, Kat Hooper, John Hulet and Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 5 | Ursula K. Le-Guin | Audio, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer
The ARTEMIS FOWL series in general has always been amusing, but after the first couple installments it rather lost the feel of being the breath of fresh air it seemed when the first novel rolled around. Eoin Colfer is never less than witty, and his premise and characters remain lively, but there has been an increasing sense that the series and the protagonists have been treading water a bit. Artemis’s world is like a slightly daring sitcom: at the end of each adventure there’s one token change that seems impactful,
September 6th, 2012. Tim Scheidler´s rating: 3.5 | Eoin Colfer | Children | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate is the Elric book that’s been cited to me as “coming from left field” or “the weird one,” which considering it’s Elric is saying something (the next book is actually called The Weird of the White Wolf, for an amusing bit of trivia, although Weird in that context is used archaically to mean “fate”). It’s not that The Sailor on the Seas of Fate is bad necessarily,
August 29th, 2012. Tim Scheidler and Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Michael Moorcock | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |
Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock
Elric of Melniboné is one of those fantasy giants that shook the genre. He’s probably not so well-known as Conan or Gandalf, but he’s nonetheless in the same country club of figures often cited as seminal to sword and sorcery — for good reason. The argument could definitely be made that Elric was the basis for most of the brooding, troubled heroes that have become so popular of late. Think of all those angsty sorcerers and tragically doomed warriors wandering across unforgiving worlds.
July 24th, 2012. Tim Scheidler, Kat Hooper and Greg Hersom´s rating: 4 | Michael Moorcock | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Crystal Crown by Brenda Clough
The Crystal Crown is basically a simple story. Liras-Ven, an unassuming and softspoken gardener, is chosen to be his nation’s next king, much to his horror. He makes a few bumbling attempts to extricate himself from the situation before settling down to endure a comical succession of royal duties and a military campaign that will test his resolve as leader as well as his ties to those he holds… he h….*snore*
Huh? What? Oh… right, yes. Anyway, The Crystal Crown measures in at about 230 pages in a pocket-size paperback,
July 18th, 2012. Tim Scheidler´s rating: 3 | Brenda Clough | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Sharp swords, dirty books and pickled cabbage. Why has everything on this trip got to be horrible?
The neighboring kingdoms of Permia and Scheria have always been enemies. Some of their citizens like it this way — particularly those of the military aristocracies who are valued (and therefore kept in power) by their countrymen when the two kingdoms are at war. The last war ended, though, when General Carnufex of Scheria managed to divert a few rivers and flood a major Permian city, killing its entire population of thousands of people.
July 17th, 2012. Kat Hooper and Tim Scheidler´s rating: 4.5 | K.J. Parker | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
A Prince Among Men by Robert N. Charrette
Aside from some rather grotesque cover art, there’s really not anything particularly wrong with A Prince Among Men. Unfortunately, it’s equally difficult to think of anything that it actually does right. It’s a relentlessly ho-hum sort of novel, reasonably diverting while it’s in front of you but always giving the lingering sensation that if an overenthusiastic friend or a speeding bicycle messenger were to come along and knock it flying from your hands into a storm drain,
June 5th, 2012. Tim Scheidler´s rating: 2.5 | Robert N. Charrette | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
George MacDonald’s Phantastes is generally regarded as pivotal in the development of fantasy literature: it is the first ever fantasy novel written exclusively for adults. Now of course we have fantastic literature intended for an adult audience going back centuries before that, to epic poems like Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal in the 14th Century, or — leaving English literature behind — to the Iliad and suchforth. MacDonald, however, does bear the distinction of being the first to introduce the world to the adult fantasy in its most common present form.
April 20th, 2012. Tim Scheidler and Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | George MacDonald | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Green Rider by Kristen Britain
The trouble with Green Rider (or, well, the major trouble with Green Rider) is that it all just feels a bit silly. This may be a bit of a chuckle for some of you as, let’s face it, our entire genre could be and is regarded as rather silly what with the Halflings and dragons and so on, but the trick we demand of fantasy authors most of the time is that they either embrace that silliness in a sort of ironic,
March 26th, 2012. Tim Scheidler, Kat Hooper and Rob Rhodes´s rating: 3 | Kristen Britain | Audio | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
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