That Worlds May Live by Nelson S. Bond
In my recent review of David V. Reed’s Empire of Jegga, I mentioned that this was a Golden Age sci-fi novel in the space-opera mold that featured an excessively recomplicated plot and a wealth of colorful detail. Reed’s novel had come out in the November 1943 issue of Amazing Stories magazine, but the Golden Age being what it was, this was hardly the first such space-opera affair to be released in the magazine that year.
November 2nd, 2021. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 3 | Nelson S. Bond | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Shadow Over Mars by Leigh Brackett
Shadow Over Mars (1944), also sometimes reprinted as The Nemesis from Terra, was the first full-length novel by space opera author Leigh Brackett. (“Full-length” is relative here, though, as Shadow Over Mars is quite short, only 145 pages in the edition I read.) It is currently in the running for a 2020 Retro Hugo for Best Novel.
The book begins with the hero, Rick, running through a Martian city,
July 17th, 2020. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3 | Leigh Brackett | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
For all those folks out there who hold conversations with their pet dog and know for certain that Fido/Fifi understands every word; for those who have gotten a tad “verklempt” at the conclusion of such novels as The Call of the Wild and Old Yeller; for people who believe that canines just cannot get any smarter than Lassie, Rin Tin Tin or Benji, all of whom starred in innumerable motion pictures; and, well, really, for anybody with a soft spot in his or her heart for man’s best friend,
July 13th, 2020. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 5 | Olaf Stapledon | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves
The Golden Fleece (1944), also sometimes known as Hercules, My Shipmate, was Robert Graves’s attempt to create a unified, mostly realistic version of the legend of Jason and the Argonauts and their quest for the titular fleece. He incorporated a variety of ancient sources, some of them contradictory, some of them fragmentary, keeping the elements he thought made the most sense and assembling them into a single narrative. The result is this novel, which has been nominated for a Retro Hugo in 2020.
July 8th, 2020. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 3.5 | Robert Graves | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Glass Bead Game (or Das Glasperlenspiel or Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse
The Glass Bead Game (1943), written by Hermann Hesse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, is a finalist for a Retro Hugo Award this year. I picked up the audio edition produced by Blackstone Audio and pleasantly read by David Colacci. It’s more than 21 hours long.
The first section of the novel, which lasts 1.25 hours in the audiobook version,
August 6th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 4 | Hermann Hesse | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 8 comments |
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H.P. Lovecraft
Randolph Carter keeps dreaming of a beautiful unknown city which he is aching to visit. After begging the gods to show him the way and receiving no answer, he sets out on a dream-quest to find it. The priests tell him that nobody knows where the city is and that the journey will kill him, but Randolph Carter is not deterred. His quest takes him through fantastic and mostly dangerous places where he meets strange friends and enemies. All the while he can tell that the gods who don’t belong to Earth are trying to stop him from discovering Unknown Kadath.
July 26th, 2019. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | H.P. Lovecraft | Audio, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Nominated this year for a Best Novella within the 1944 Retrospective Hugo Awards category, The Little Prince is a slight, yet powerfully thought-provoking work. Originally published by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943, who filled each page of his story with charming watercolor illustrations, it tells the story of a pilot who has crash-landed in the Sahara Desert with “only enough drinking water for eight days” and who, upon his very first night, is visited by an extraordinary child who asks for a drawing of a sheep.
July 26th, 2019. Jana Nyman´s rating: 5 | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Children, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
Clash by Night by C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner
Clash by Night (1943) , by the wife-husband team of C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner, is an odd bit of a bird, feeling less like a smoothie that blends together different story types and writerly styles and more like a salad where you can easily spot the tomatoes, greens, peppers, etc. Uneven overall, but it does have its good points.
The opening gives us the setting quite directly, with an unknown narrator of the future telling us,
June 25th, 2019. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner | Short Fiction, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Gather, Darkness! by Fritz Leiber
By April 1943, Chicago-born author Fritz Leiber had seen around 20 of his short stories released in the various pulp magazines of the day and was ready to embark as a full-fledged novelist. Thus, his first longer work, Conjure Wife, did indeed make its debut in the 4/43 issue of Unknown, the fantasy-oriented sister magazine of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science-Fiction. In it, a college professor, Norman Saylor, discovers that his wife,
June 3rd, 2019. Sandy Ferber´s rating: 4 | Fritz Leiber | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 7 comments |
Conjure Wifeis a 1943 horror novel by master fantasist Fritz Leiber, who is best known for his excellent FAFHRD AND THE GRAY MOUSER stories. While Conjure Wife is usually labeled as horror, the recently released trade paperback edition from Orb is marketed as “the classic of urban fantasy” — maybe to latch on to the recent surge in popularity of that sub-genre? Regardless of which genre it’s placed in, Conjure Wife is an excellent novel that definitely deserved a re-release.
October 26th, 2009. Stefan Raets´s rating: 4 | Fritz Leiber | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
...as well as the 1932 sequel, "Topper Takes a Trip"!
It's such a rich and ancient ambience - in many ways the plot itself doesn't matter, I just like strolling…
I didn't know he wrote Topper!
Best new book: Play of Shadows by Sebastien Sebastien de Castell Honorary mention for The Naming Song by Jebediah Berry…
Best read for August was Karel Capek's War With the Newts, another one of his acerbic fables about the human…