Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Order [book in series=yearoffirstbook.book# (eg 2014.01), stand-alone or one-author collection=3333.pubyear, multi-author anthology=5555.pubyear, SFM/MM=5000, interview=1111]: 1970

Dread Companion: Try the audio edition of this one

Dread Companion by Andre Norton

In the far future, a young woman named Kilda thinks it’s unfortunate that she was born as a woman because she’s expected to do what every woman on her planet does – get married and have children. Kilda wants to travel and learn, so she appeals to her teacher, a mixed-race handicapped person who also lacks opportunity on this world. Her teacher suggests that Kilda take a job as a governess for a woman who is going off planet with her two children. Kilda takes that advice and travels with her employer and the kids,

The Atrocity Exhibition: Fascinating, disturbing, and informative

The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard

Pablo Picasso had his “blue period,” Max Ernst his “American years,” and Georgia O’Keeffe her later “door-in-adobe” phase. For J.G. Ballard, the early part of his career could be called his “psychological catastrophe years.” Using environmental disaster as a doorway to viewing minds under duress, novels like The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World unpacked the underlying subject matter.

Tau Zero: A mythological journey in hard SF form

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson is, and mayhap always will be, the speculative fiction writer who most integrates myth and legend into fantasy and science fiction. The former is relatively easy given that myth and legend are typically already half fantasy, the latter is the more difficult given that one of the aims of science fiction is believable futuristic extrapolation. Failing spectacularly with The High Crusade (a novel that sees Medieval knights take a space ship to another planet to fight blue-skinned aliens), his 1970 Tau Zero is a more subtle mix.

The Fall of the Towers: Early Delany shows promise

The Fall of the Towers by Samuel R. Delany

Not yet out of his teens, Samuel Delany had his first short stories published in science fiction magazines around 1962. Moving on to works of greater length, he shortly thereafter published two novellas, the second of which was called Captives of the Flame. Seeing the story’s greater potential, he expanded the novella (to Out of the Dead City) and tacked on two additional novels, The Towers of Toron and City of a Thousand Suns to create a series.

April 29th, 2016. Jesse Hudson | Samuel R. Delany | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

The Cat Who Came In off the Roof: A Dutch treat for cat lovers

The Cat Who Came In off the Roof by Annie M.G. Schmidt

Annie M.G. Schmidt, who died in 1995, was a beloved and well-respected author in the Netherlands, her native land. In 1988 she won the Hans Christian Anderson Award, the most distinguished international award in children’s literature, which is granted to authors and illustrators whose body of work has made a lasting contribution to children’s literature. Unfortunately, until now Schmidt’s work has not been published in the English language, so she is not well known in the U.S.

Downward To The Earth: Coexisting beauty and horror

Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg

Up until recently, I hadn’t read Robert Silverberg‘s brilliant sci-fi novel Downward to the Earth in almost 27 years, but one scene remained as fresh in my memory as on my initial perusal: the one in which the book’s protagonist, Edmund Gundersen, comes across a man and a woman lying on the floor of a deserted Company station on a distant world, their still-living bodies covered in alien fluid that is being dripped upon them by a basket-shaped organism,

Whipping Star: One of Herbert’s more interesting novels

Whipping Star by Frank Herbert

Whipping Star is one of Frank Herbert’s non-Dune books that Tor has been reprinting in recent years. This 1970 novel is the first full novel in the ConSentiency universe, which up to this point consisted of only two short stories. Both of them are contained in the collection Eye and may very well be included in other short fiction collections. Like these short stories, Whipping Star features the unusually observant BuSab agent Jorj X.

January 28th, 2015. Rob Weber´s rating: 3.5 | Frank Herbert | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Apollo’s Song by The God of Manga (and Comics?)

Apollo’s Song (Parts I & II) by Osamu Tezuka

Apollo’s Song (Part I and Part II) by Osamu Tezuka is a imaginative tale of out-of-body experience, time travel, fantasy, science fiction, mythology and love, all by the God of Manga himself. If you’ve never heard of Osamu Tezuka, you are missing out. He’s best known in the United States for Astro Boy, his very early comic-turned-anime that was broadcast in the U.S. as a Japanese-import English-dubbed cartoon.

October 25th, 2013. Brad Hawley´s rating: 5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |

Our Friends from Frolix 8: Furious action, thought-provoking discourse

Our Friends from Frolix 8 by Philip K. Dick

Unlike Philip K. Dick’s previous two novels, 1969’s Ubik and 1970’s A Maze of Death, his 27th full-length science fiction book, Our Friends From Frolix 8, was not released in a hardcover first edition. Rather, it first saw the light of day, later in 1970, as a 60-cent Ace paperback (no. 64400, for all you collectors out there). And whereas those two previous novels had showcased the author giving his favorite theme — the chimeralike nature of reality — a pretty thorough workout,

A Maze of Death: Intelligent SF thrills

A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

In Philip K. Dick’s 25th science fiction novel, Ubik, a group of a dozen people is trapped in an increasingly bizarre world, in which objects revert to their previous forms, reality itself is suspect, and the 12 bewildered people slowly crumble to dust, murderously done in, Ten Little Indians style, by an unknown assailant. In his next published novel, A Maze of Death, Dick upped the ante a bit. Here, we find a group of 14 people,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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