Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang, translated by Ken Liu
I really tried to give Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds (2020; translated by Ken Liu) a fair shake, pressing on even though I’d had problems with the book relatively early. And I think, given that I just about reached the halfway point (48% according to by Kindle), I did give the book a decent enough chance to win me over. But I just couldn’t push myself past that 50%, despite some intriguing ideas.
In the world of Vagabonds,
April 14th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 0.1 | Hao Jingfang | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Beneath the Rising by Premee Mohamed
If you’ve had the good fortune to read any of Premee Mohamed’s short fiction, you know it is strange, beautiful and often horrifying. In Beneath the Rising (2020), her first full-length novel, all these things are true. This adventure novel with tentacular monsters and evil Ancient Ones will sweep you along and get deeply under your skin.
Joanna Chambers, who goes by Johnny, is more than a genius and more than a prodigy. She might be a miracle.
March 31st, 2020. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | Premee Mohamed | Horror, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine
I’m of mixed feelings on Anthropocene Rag (2020), by Alex Irvine. On the one hand, the writing is often quite strong, and the novel has a creative, imaginative flair to it in many moments. On the other hand, its episodic nature didn’t fully work for me, and I can’t say the novel fully met its rich potential. Still, its strengths outweigh its weaknesses, and there’s often a true pleasure in reading it.
The story is set in a post “Boom” America,
March 30th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Alex Irvine | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats by James Patrick Kelly
In James Patrick Kelly’s novella, King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats, we visit a backwater planet called Boon where humans live with uplifted dogs and cats.
Our protagonist, Gio Barbaro, is the clone of the man who created the government, called The Supremacy, generations before. Gio’s job is to maintain the family’s position and power in the senate.
The Supremacy, though, is losing control as dogs are walking off the job and cats are forming unions.
March 23rd, 2020. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3 | James Patrick Kelly | Audio, Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
In his whimsical way, Charles Yu writes about the Asian-American immigrant experience in Interior Chinatown (2020). The story is about Willis Wu, a young man whose family lives in an SRO (Single-Room Occupancy Hotel) in the Chinatown of mid-20th century San Francisco. He’s the son of immigrants who came to America looking for a better life but who have been misunderstood, alienated, marginalized, ghettoized, and further discriminated against by an American government and populace that is always putting people into boxes and insisting that they stay there.
February 26th, 2020. Kat Hooper´s rating: 5 | Charles Yu | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
Black Leviathan by Bernd Perplies, translated by Lucy Van Cleef
Vengeance is a tale as old as a time, and female characters have been killed in order to set male characters off on a protagonist’s journey since well before there were refrigerators (almost before there was ice). But it takes a particularly audacious ambition to use Moby Dick as an explicit inspiration for a coming-of-age fantasy set in a world where sky ships hunt dragons and one captain becomes maniacally obsessed with killing one such dragon. And for a little while there I was thinking Bernd Perplies,
February 20th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Bernd Perplies | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
The Last Day by Andrew Hunter Murray
The Last Day (2020), by Andrew Hunter Murray, is a sci-fi thriller, though to be honest I found both elements (the science and the thrills) to be a bit slight and while it’s a highly readable work, I’d call it moderately engaging or tense.
The book opens some decades after “The Slow” (or “The Stop”), when the Earth’s rotation gradually declined then halted altogether, plunging half the planet — the “Coldside” into uninhabitable cold and darkness and the other half into a baking sunlit zone.
February 14th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3 | Andrew Hunter Murray | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Remembrance (2020) is a solid historical fantasy by Rita Woods that doesn’t quite meet its potential but is still well worth a read thanks to several strong characterizations and some vividly immersive historical scenes.
Woods moves us back and forth between three time periods. In modern times, Gaelle is a young woman who moved to the U.S. after the earthquake in Haiti, which is also where she lost her grandmother. Gaelle works at a home for the aged, where she is the primary tender of a mysterious Jane Doe woman who seemingly has no family or friends and neither speaks nor moves.
February 5th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Rita Woods | Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
I was a huge fan of Ken Liu’s first collection of short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, giving it a five out of five and placing on my “best of” list that year. His newest collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (2020), unfortunately didn’t hit the high notes as consistently as the first, though there are still several gems in the group.
Many of the stories are set in a time leading up to or following the singularity,
January 24th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Ken Liu | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Strange Exit by Parker Peevyhouse
Decades after the Earth was destroyed by nuclear war and its aftermath, a group of teens aboard an orbiting spaceship meant as a refuge are stuck in a VR stasis while their ship falls apart around them. Only if all them “wake up” and exit the VR simulation will the ship allow them to leave. One girl, 17-year-old Lake, has made it her mission to return again and again into the sim, despite the danger of getting stuck in there, to wake those still “living” there. She’s joined by her younger sister Willow in the form of a sim “figment” (her sister is lost in real life) and a young boy,
January 14th, 2020. Bill Capossere´s rating: 2.5 | Parker Peevyhouse | Stand-Alone, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | no comments |
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