A Brother’s Price by Wen Spencer In a frontier land on some other world, a close-knit family of outlaws lives in the same sort of manner that you’d expect such a family to live in the American Wild West. They’re tough, they wear cowboy hats and ride horses, they speak coarsely, they curse and brawl, […]
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The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood It is Alicia Ostriker, in her wonderful collection of essays Dancing at the Devil’s Party, who writes “the true poet is necessarily the partisan of energy, rebellion, and desire, and is opposed to passivity, obedience, and the authority of reasons, laws and institutions.” Daring to deconstruct one of the most […]
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Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett As NASA’s Curiosity rover trundles about the surface of Mars today, another page turns on the glories of pulp science fiction. Leigh Brackett’s vision of a land populated with humans and aliens, ancient cities and creatures, long-buried secrets and mysterious deserts fades a shade closer to pale […]
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Od Magic by Patricia A. McKillip The city of Numis is home to the famous Od School of Magic, founded years ago by the legendary giantess Od. She’s apparently immortal, but appears only occasionally, and therefore the school lies in the hands of the king Galin and the wizard-headmaster Valoren, who demand strict obedience from […]
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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro [In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.] Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is about clones, but don’t get your hopes […]
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I Am Alive and You are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère Anyone familiar with the SF novels of Philip K. Dick and the many films inspired by his works knows that he was one strange and visionary guy. Certainly the SF genre is filled with works of […]
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Batman: The Man Who Laughs (2005) #1 by Ed Brubaker Ed Brubaker is one of the best writers in comics overall, and he is unquestionably the best writer of noir comics. Batman: The Man Who Laughs is a re-imagining of what Batman’s first encounter with the Joker might have been like. In the story, the […]
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Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds Pushing Ice (2005) is a standalone novel. It is not set in Alastair Reynolds’ REVELATION SPACE universe and as far as I can tell it is not related to any of his other works either. On his website, Reynolds mentions that there may one day be a sequel though. Pushing Ice is […]
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A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country collects essays about living in George W. Bush’s America. Published in 2005, these essays were written after America invaded Iraq in order to defeat terrorism, to find and neutralize weapons of mass destruction, and to spread freedom and democracy throughout […]
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Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories by Frederik Pohl Platinum Pohl is a career-spanning collection of Frederik Pohl’s best short fiction. Almost every collection of short fiction contains weak stories but I was absolutely blown away by editor James Frenkel’s selection of Pohl’s work. It is one of the best collections of short fiction I have […]
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Fledgling by Octavia Butler In some ways there are superficial resemblances between Fledgling and the last vampire book I read, Let the Right One In: both books have as their star apparently pre-pubescent vampires who have ‘complicated’ relationships with their human companions. In John Ajvide Lindqvist’s case it was a Renfield-like adult who was enamoured […]
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The DC Infinite Crisis and the “Old” 52 (part 4): Villains United by Gail Simone I just reread Gail Simone’s Villains United for what must be the third time, and it wasn’t as good as I remembered it being. I think there are several reasons for this reaction. When I first read it, I was still […]
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Infinite Crisis and the “Old” 52 (Part 3): Day of Vengeance by Bill Willingham In this third review, I will cover the rest of the issues included in the Day of Vengeance trade paperback. This story is written by Bill Willingham, well-known for Fables, his excellent Vertigo series at DC. These issues are also available on […]
Read More The DC Infinite Crisis and the “Old” 52 (Part 2): “Lightning Strikes Twice” by Judd Winick In Part One, I gave an introduction to this series and discussed Countdown to Infinite Crisis #1 (it’s available on Comixology or in the trade paperback The OMAC Project). This second review is about the first three issues included in […]
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The Stonehenge Gate by Jack Williamson What do you plan to do when you’re 97 years old? Me? If I’m fortunate enough to attain to that ripe old age, I suppose I will be eating pureed Gerber peaches and watching Emma Peel reruns on my TV set in the nursing home … IF I’m lucky. […]
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Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link Kelly Link’s short story collection, Magic for Beginners, is a great piece of work. In a bit of a departure from her earlier collection Stranger Things Happen, the stories in it don’t follow normative narrative structures; they draw from sources as various as fairy tales, kitchen sink realism, heist […]
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Malvolio’s Revenge by Sophie Masson I’ve read plenty of Sophie Masson’s novels and enjoyed them all, but I’m fairly certain that Malvolio’s Revenge may end up being my favourite. Though Masson usually writes straight-out fantasy stories, this is a more of a mystery with a few supernatural trappings thrown in. The book’s title is a […]
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Numbers Don’t Lie by Terry Bisson In 2005, Tachyon Press published three of Terry Bisson linked novellas in one volume, called Numbers Don’t Lie. This short, fun book follows Irving, a Brooklynite lawyer, and his genius best friend Wilson Wu on a series of adventures. Wilson is a six-foot-tall Chinese American polymath; he is a […]
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Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi Tom Stein is a young Hollywood agent who used to think that his clients were hard to handle. That was before Tom’s boss assigned him to represent the most important client any agent has ever had to deal with — the first aliens to contact the human race. […]
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John Constantine, Hellblazer: All His Engines by Mike Carey (writer) & Leonardo Manco (artist) There are so many options available to the reader who wants to meet John Constantine for the first time. He was created by Alan Moore in his groundbreaking run on Swamp Thing (Moore’s entry into American comics). Another good place to […]
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Blue November Storms by Brian James Freeman The “Lightning Five,” so called because of their prowess on the football field, has reunited twenty years after a tragedy sent one of them away — so far away that the other four all thought he was dead. Adam simply calls Steve one day out of the blue […]
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The Book of Lost Souls, Volume 1: Introductions All Around by J. Michael Straczynski (writer) and Colleen Doran (artist) I am so pleased I picked The Book of Lost Souls up off the shelf at Oxford Comics in Atlanta, Georgia. Though I am familiar with the writer, J. Michael Straczynski (often referred to simply as […]
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Godland: Hello, Cosmic! Volume One, Issues 1-5 by Joe Casey (author), Tom Scioli (artist) & Bill Crabtree (colors) Godland is a fun, and funny, story about Adam Archer, an astronaut who gains super-heroic powers during a mission to Mars. It’s a playful comic, and even though its playfulness is based on a parody of older comics, knowledge […]
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The Tulpa by Ardath Mayhar Araminta Palomer is the daughter of an elderly wealthy businessman and his second wife. Minta has been sheltered for all her life, living in the family mansion which is surrounded by high walls and patrolling Doberman Pinschers. She has a governess and is driven to town only rarely for shopping. […]
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Inside Job by Connie Willis I have a goal of eventually reading all of the major SFF award winners, including novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories, so that’s why I picked up Connie Willis’s Inside Job when I saw that it was available on audio. Inside Job won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in […]
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