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]: 2011

The Inheritance and Other Stories: One person, two different authors

The Inheritance and Other Stories by Robin Hobb & Megan Lindholm

The Inheritance and Other Stories offers up one-stop shopping, collecting into one volume three stories by Robin Hobb and seven by Megan Lindholm. There’s no doubt these are two different authors, despite being the same person, and so there is a good mix of style and genre here. I’m a huge Hobb fan, believing her work to be substantive and subtle with world-class characterization and plotting, so I was pleased to see the Hobb stories set in one my all-time favorite worlds — that of the Liveship Traders / Rain Wilds.

Times Three: Three stories about time travel

Times Three by Robert Silverberg

Time travel is one of Robert Silverberg’s favorite themes and he gives us three of his best time travel novels, and an introduction to each, in the collection Times Three from Subterranean Press.

Hawksbill Station (1968) is about a camp for 21st century American political dissidents who are permanently exiled to… the late Cambrian era. Hawksbill Station is a stark and lonely place — it’s all rocks, ocean, and trilobites. With no meat,

The Adjustment Bureau: 57 minutes for $11… seriously?

The Adjustment Bureau by Philip K. Dick

Brilliance Audio has recently put Philip K. Dick’s short story The Adjustment Team on audio and they sent me a copy. This is the story that the movie The Adjustment Bureau was based on (and the name of the audiobook is The Adjustment Bureau). The story is 57 minutes of tension and psychological terror as Ed Fletcher gets to work late and accidentally sees The Adjustment Team “adjusting” his office building and its occupants.

Hamlet’s Father: Transparent political and religious argument

Hamlet’s Father by Orson Scott Card

Those of us who majored in English in college have all read Shakespeare’s Hamlet at least once, and we’ve all seen at least one performance. Some of us go to as many performances as we possibly can, enjoying every new spin on the old tale. I’ve seen at least three movies made from the play and seen it staged at least five times. I’ve studied the text of the play in detail, and one thing never changes: Claudius murders King Hamlet in order to bed the king’s wife,

Huntress: Noble characters, beautiful imagery, selfless love

Huntress by Malinda Lo

Huntress is a prequel to Malinda Lo’s debut novel, Ash, though the two books can stand independently. Huntress takes place several centuries earlier, in a time when the country’s culture was more analogous to that of feudal China.

In the past few years, a shift in the weather has resulted in famine. Then the Fairy Queen, who has long been out of contact with humans, issues a surprising invitation to her city, Taninli.

Entwined: A retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”

Entwined by Heather Dixon

Entwined is a retelling of the fairy tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” in which the King’s twelve daughters slip away to a mysterious underground realm every night and dance their slippers to ribbons. Heather Dixon chooses to focus mainly on one sister as the heroine: Azalea, the eldest.

At the beginning of the book, the Queen dies giving birth to the twelfth princess. Azalea and her sisters are heartbroken, and to make things worse, their stiff-necked father the King pushes them away in his own grief.

Geek Fantasy Novel: A gently satirical take on fantasy

Geek Fantasy Novel by E. Archer

Geek Fantasy Novel is aptly named: it is both a fantasy novel about a geek and a fantasy novel for geeks. In this humorous novel, E. Archer satirizes a variety of fantasy and fandom clichés but without losing sight of two important things.

1. The novel should still tell an engaging story, above and beyond the comic elements. That is, if there’s nothing to the book but jokes, it’ll wear thin pretty quickly. Archer avoids this trap.

Vegas Knights: Silly but fun

Vegas Knights by Matt Forbeck

The cover of Matt Forbeck’s Vegas Knights describes the novel as “Harry Potter meets Ocean’s Eleven,” but it may be slightly more accurate (if not quite as effective, marketing-wise) to replace Harry Potter with Lev Grossman’s The Magicians. Vegas Knights’ main characters, Bill and Jackson, are two college students on Spring Break in Las Vegas. Sounds fairly normal — except the topic of their studies is magic,

The Silent Land: Not as great as I’ve come to expect from Joyce

The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

Jake and Zoe are enjoying a ski trip in the French Pyrenées when, during an early morning ski run, they are trapped and buried alive by an avalanche. Miraculously, they manage to dig out of the snow and survive the ordeal, but when they finally make it back to their hotel, they discover that the place has been abandoned. What’s more, the entire village seems devoid of life. Has the area been evacuated, or is there something more mysterious going on? With no telephone or internet access,

The Illumination: Brockmeier never shies away from the hard questions

The Illumination by Kevin Brockmeier

[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.]

Two themes drive Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination. The first is a fantasy motif, placing this novel right on the line that separates the best fantasy from the genre-that-won’t-admit-it’s-a-genre, i.e., the literary novel.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

We have reviewed 8295 fantasy, science fiction, and horror books, audiobooks, magazines, comics, and films.

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