I love fantasies set at colleges, so when I heard about Linda Haldeman’s Esbae: A Winter’s Tale (1981), I had to track it down and read it. The titular Esbae is a spirit who is found wanting by some greater power, and cast down to earth. It attaches itself to an awkward college student, Sophie, and is caught up in a magical battle between good and evil.
The three main human characters are all to be found in Dr.
August 26th, 2019. Kelly Lasiter´s rating: 2.5 | Linda Haldeman | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Soul Eater by Mike Resnick
Nicobar Lane is a hunter. People hire him to acquire (dead or alive) exotic species from all over the galaxy. They pay him a lot of money to do this and he’s very successful. But there’s one creature who he refuses to hunt: a creature known by different cultures throughout the galaxy as the Soul Eater, or the Dreamwish Beast, or Starduster. People say this creature lives in space, is not affected by black holes, and perhaps even eats them! Nicobar thinks the beast is a legend and that it’s not worth his time to go looking for it.
October 29th, 2018. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3 | Mike Resnick | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Secret Countess (aka A Countess Below Stairs) by Eva Ibbotson
As a Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer enthusiast, I’m always on the lookout for historical novels in that mold, with manners, a little romance and lots of deliciously witty dialogue. I previously was familiar with Eva Ibbotson solely from her 1994 children’s fantasy The Secret of Platform 13, in which a magical door at Platform 13 of King’s Cross Station in London opens every nine years for a nine-day period,
March 4th, 2016. Tadiana Jones | Eva Ibbotson | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Saturn Game by Poul Anderson
Poul Anderson’s The Saturn Game, published in 1981, is a pre-Internet era exploration of role-playing games and their effect on the human psyche, which won the 1981 Nebula and the 1982 Hugo awards for best novella.
On an eight-year long voyage to Saturn, one of the more popular ways for the crew and colonists to pass time is becoming involved in psychodramas, a verbal-type role-playing game. But when a team of four people from the spaceship lands their smaller craft on Saturn’s moon Iapetus to explore the terrain,
August 25th, 2015. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 4 | Poul Anderson | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Affirmation by Christopher Priest
I’ve heard Christopher Priest’s 1981 novel The Affirmation described as regressive, an ouroboros eating its own tail, a Moeibus strip. While there is undoubtedly an M.C. Escher quality to the book — a blurring of reality — the beginning and end are simply too different to form a contiguous whole reverting back on itself. They’re opposite ends of a spectrum in fact, and the appeal of the novel is immersing one’s self in the subjective reality Priest slowly unwraps and getting lost in the world of memories as a result.
November 21st, 2014. Jesse Hudson´s rating: 4.5 | Christopher Priest | Edge, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Flight of Dragons by Peter Dickinson
I loved this book as a kid, and not just because it had naughty boobie pictures that had nothing to do with the text. Dickinson takes the position that Dragons actually existed, then goes from there to ask questions like: why are they not in the fossil record? How could a creature that is generally depicted as huge and armoured supposedly fly? What’s the deal with the fire-breathing? Why are they often depicted as speaking and/or telepathic creatures? How come the accepted method of killing them is by a dude with a magic sword?
July 5th, 2013. Terry Lago´s rating: 4 | Peter Dickinson | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Act of Love by Joe R. Lansdale
Originally published in 1981, Joe R. Lansdale’s Act of Love is a serial-killer thriller. A year before Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon took us into the mind of a sadistic serial killer, Lansdale was doing it, giving us chapters in the point of view of a necrophiliac, sadistic, misogynist cannibal as he terrorizes the city of Houston, Texas.
Act of Love is set in the 1980s and follows the murders committed by the Houston Hacker.
April 2nd, 2012. Marion Deeds´s rating: 2.5 | Joe R. Lansdale | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Little, Big: or, The Fairies’ Parliament by John Crowley
“All Part of the Tale. Don’t Ask Me How…”
This review is going to be well-nigh impossible to write, as the subject matter is so impossible to describe. Well, John Crowley’s Little, Big is definitely a book. That’s a good start. But the second I try to narrow down rudimentary elements like plot and character, my brain gets a bit fuzzy. It’s about a family. And a house. And how this family lives in the house which is situated on the borders of another world which sometimes intrudes upon their own,
September 8th, 2010. Rebecca Fisher and Kat Hooper´s rating: 4, 4.5 | John Crowley | Audio, Mythopoeic Award, Stand-Alone, World Fantasy Award | SFF Reviews | 5 comments |
The Door in the Hedge by Robin McKinley
Despite an interesting title and a beguiling title page, I honestly found nothing exceptional about Robin McKinley’s collection of four fairytales. Whether her stories are original or retold, they are rather dull, predictable, and written with long-winded language that makes for sluggish reading. All are centered on the interactions between this world and that of Faerieland — or to be more specific, the interactions between young princesses and the inhabitants of Faerieland. None of these girls are individuals, instead they are cast straight from the princess stereotype and all the stories end on a slightly sickly-sweet note with each dilemma that the girls’
October 12th, 2007. Rebecca Fisher´s rating: 1 | Robin McKinley | SFF Reviews | no comments |
What a fascinating exploration of Edwige Fenech's contributions to the giallo genre! I love how the post highlights her unique…
Pretty challenging book. Cut by half, speed up the cadence. Trying to figure out the plot, the main point of…
Thanks for the kind words, Marion! Coming as they are from a professional writer, they are much appreciated!
Wonderful review, Sandy.
The "body count" bothered me a bit less because being dead seemed more like an inconvenience than anything else... unlike…