Damocles by S.G. Redling is a charming but flawed twist on first contact stories, the twist being that, in this case, the humans are the aliens who are landing on a faraway planet after a long period of cryogenic sleep. They are attempting to trace the origins of a mysterious message from an ancient race that claims to have originally seeded the Earth. Upon landing, the small human team discovers a humanoid race called the Dideto and becomes the subject of intense study.
August 14th, 2013. Stefan Raets´s rating: 2 | S.G. Redling | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
Devin Jones is nearing the end of his sophomore year of college when he signs on for a summer job at Joyland in Heaven’s Bay, North Carolina in 1973. Joyland is an old-fashioned amusement park, not anything near as big as a Six Flags and definitely not anything like a Disney park. It’s staffed by a changing cast of college kids every summer, but has a backbone of old carnie folk, including Lane Hardy, who runs the Carolina Spin, that is, the ferris wheel, and Rosalind Gold, who acts the part of Madame Fortuna and thinks she might have the gift of the sight in real life.
August 12th, 2013. Terry Weyna and Jason Golomb´s rating: 4.5 | Stephen King | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Nate Tucker needs a new place to live and it needs to be cheap. When a co-worker recommends a place that’s inexpensive and close to work, Nate thinks it’s too good to be true. That’s because it is. After Nate moves in, he starts to notice some weird stuff going on — glowing mutant cockroaches, the light in his kitchen that turns into a black light no matter what kind of bulb he inserts, the elevator that never works, all the padlocks on apartment 14. There’s a lot of strangeness going on in Nate’s new home,
July 8th, 2013. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Peter Clines | Audio | SFF Reviews | 6 comments |
The Last Full Measure by Jack Campbell
Jack Campbell, a retired U.S. Navy officer, is best known for his military science fiction novels which he writes under the pseudonym Jack Campbell (the LOST FLEET series) and his real name, John G. Hemry (STARK’S WAR, JAG IN SPACE). With his latest offering, a novella called The Last Full Measure, he brings his military mind back down to earth.
In this alternate history, the U.S. government no longer upholds the constitution.
June 26th, 2013. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3 | Jack Campbell | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Fall of Arthur by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fall of Arthur is another one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s unfinished works made available to the public via his son and editor, Christopher Tolkien. Between its unfinished nature, its form (alliterative verse in Old English style — though not actually in Old English), and its brevity, the book is really mostly, perhaps solely, of interest to diehard Tolkien “completists” or those with a semi-academic interest in the form.
The poem, as mentioned, was never finished.
June 20th, 2013. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | J.R.R. Tolkien | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill
The Beautiful Land, by Alan Averill, is one of those books that I could mostly enjoy as I go along thanks to some snappy dialogue and likable main characters placed in some interesting situation, but always with the nagging feeling in the back of my head that things just aren’t holding together as they should be, that the whole underlying structure is just a little shaky and were one of those moments of witty repartee to suddenly go awry,
June 19th, 2013. Bill Capossere and Stefan Raets´s rating: 3 | Alan Averill | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Reading Strange Magic made me think deeply about a number of issues I doubt Gord Rollo intended me to be thinking about. I wasn’t pondering whether good and evil are entirely human or whether there is a supernatural agency at work in some forms of evil (and good); I wasn’t thinking about addiction, its causes and cures; I wasn’t thinking about the redemptive power of love. Instead, I was thinking about whether a book can be considered good when it has a decent story but is poorly written,
June 10th, 2013. Terry Weyna´s rating: 2 | Gord Rollo | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Magic Highways: The Early Jack Vance Volume 3 by Jack Vance
Subterranean Press continues collecting the early works of Jack Vance with Volume 3, titled Magic Highways, which was released last month (the previous editions were Hard-Luck Diggings and Dream Castles). Magic Highways includes a 6½ page introduction by editors Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan and 16 “space adventures” which Jack Vance wrote during the decade from 1946 (when he was 29 years old) to 1956.
May 31st, 2013. Kat Hooper´s rating: 4 | Jack Vance | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer
Red Planet Blues, by Robert J. Sawyer, is a sci-fi noir novel a la Raymond Chandler set, unsurprisingly, on Mars. More specifically, in New Klondike, the domed city built during the time of the Great Martian Fossil Rush (thus the name Klondike), sparked when the pair of explorers who had found “Alpha” — the motherlode of pristine and incredibly rare Martian fossils — died without having revealed the fossil bed’s location. The rush was on to be the first to find it,
May 27th, 2013. Bill Capossere´s rating: 2.5 | Robert J. Sawyer | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Best of Joe Haldeman edited by Jonathan Strahan
Stories by Joe Haldeman are always a good things and Subterranean Press has recently put out this “Best of” collection edited by Jonathan Strahan. The hardcover book has 504 pages and includes a general introduction by Joe Haldeman and 19 of his stories. Each story also has a short introduction which reveals some insight into its crafting — perhaps where the idea came from, or some trouble he had writing or placing it, or how he did his research, or his interactions with his agent or editor.
May 23rd, 2013. Kat Hooper´s rating: 4 | Joe Haldeman, Jonathan Strahan | Hugo Award, Nebula Award, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
Would you believe that this was the first time that I ever read it? SO glad that I finally caught…
LOVE The Big Front Yard!
Always my pleasure, Marion! And Part 2 of this review should be appearing soon....
Kevin S,if you live in the USA, you win a Fan Lit T-shirt (please specify 1st and 2nd preferred sizes)…
He's one of my favorites of the Pulp Age writers. Thanks for sharing these tales!