Previous SFF Author: Hannu Rajaniemi
Among the places in which Cat Rambo’s 200+ published stories have appeared are Asimov’s, Weird Tales, Clarkesworld, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and her work has consistently garnered mentions and appearances in year’s best of anthologies. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, was an Endeavour Award finalist in 2010 and followed her collaboration with Jeff VanderMeer, The Surgeon’s Tale and Other Stories. Other collections include Near + Far, which contains the Nebula-nominated “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” Neither Here Nor There, and Altered America: Steampunk Stories. While Seattle-based, Cat often travels in her role as the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA.org). She lives with one spouse, a cat named Taco, and an inordinate amount of books.
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Because I got an ARC of Hearts of Tabat, the second book in Cat Rambo’s TABAT QUARTET, in 2018, I read it before the first book. I thought that would have a negative impact on my reaction to Book One, Beasts of Tabat, but as I was reading, my brain reset itself, and when I got to the end I was almost as shocked as if I hadn’t had some inkling what was coming.
Cat Rambo’s Hearts of Tabat (2018) is the second book in the Tabat Quartet. I love the beautiful, strange world Rambo has created here. I understood nearly everything that was going on in this book, so technically it qualifies as a standalone, but I see that reading the first book, Beasts of Tabat, first would probably have answered some questions and added richness to an already lush tapestry of a story.
Everything that made the Winter Gladiator Bella Kanto who she was has been stripped from her. She’s exiled from Tabat, the city she represented and loved, sent off to a distant outpost, guarded by a woman who hates her. Her only trustworthy companion is the dog who ran away from Duke Alberic at the quay and leaped aboard her ship at the last second. Bella doesn’t know who the dog is, but we do.
Bella not only faces the loss of all the trappings of her former exalted position.
You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo
You Sexy Thing (2021) is space opera, with no FTL chase scenes or space battles. Check the list of ingredients: a sentient bioship, space pirates, old feuds, at least one interstellar-conquest scheme, interesting non-human characters, a newcomer with secrets, and lots of cooking. It’s a foolproof recipe for entertainment.
All Niko needs is a Nikkelin Orb award from the food critic coming to the Last Chance, the restaurant she runs with the rest of her ex-military crew. Niko was a captain,
Devil’s Gun (2023) is Cat Rambo’s sequel to last year’s space-opera-with-chefs, You Sexy Thing. My first impulse was to label this book “fun,” but when I sat down to write this review, I had to evaluate that. It is a fun book, but for a fun book it contains a lot of sadness, distrust and bad decisions. The “fun” comes from the consequences of those decisions (in terms of conflict and action) and the strange,
Bull Spec is a print and electronic science fiction and fantasy glossy magazine named for its home of Durham, North Carolina. The word “Bull” seems to have become associated with Durham because of a tobacco factory in the city, which itself took the name from the picture of a bull that appeared on the label of a mustard that the tobacco factory owner believed was manufactured in Durham, England; it’s all very complicated, but at least we know that the magazine’s name is based on where it is published. The publisher, Samuel Montgomery-Blinn,
Apex Magazine is a monthly e-magazine that publishes two short stories, one reprint story, a nonfiction piece and an interview in each issue, together with the occasional poem. In the three issues I read, the reprint fiction tended to outshine the original fiction — which doesn’t mean the original fiction was bad, just that it couldn’t quite live up to the standard set by the well-chosen older stories. The interviews are thoughtful and generally go well beyond the usual topics, either to discuss the author’s work in considerable detail or to go into areas not normally explored in most interviews.
Helena Bell’s “Robot” is one of three nominated stories that originally appeared in Clarkesworld. It is a bitter story of a woman abandoned to the ministrations of a robot when she becomes ill. It is told in the second person as a list of commands and instructions by the woman to the robot. As much as the robot seems to be a blessing to this woman, she speaks to it as if she hates and resents it, even as she is forced to rely upon it as her disease — and the robot — eat her alive.
Issue 151 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies opens with “Rappaccini’s Crow,” by Cat Rambo that works with the mythology created by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his marvelous short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne’s classic tale is one of the finest American short stories ever written, so Rambo is setting a high bar for herself by recalling it to her readers’ minds. She clears the bar easily in this fantasy about a world at war over phlogiston, a power source that is, ironically, being depleted by the war for control of the stuff. The story takes place in a long-term care facility for soldiers injured so grievously that they can’t be patched up and shipped back out to the battleground.
Fantasy Magazine was folded into Lightspeed Magazine in 2012, but it came out of retirement in October 2014 for the Women Destroy Fantasy issue, one of the stretch goals of a Kickstarter for an all-women edition of Lightspeed. I was one of the contributors to the Kickstarter, and, as my review last week revealed, I greatly enjoyed the Women Destroy Horror issue of Nightmare Magazine that was another stretch goal of the same Kickstarter. I’m pleased to report that the fantasy issue is just as “destructive” and enjoyable.
Carrie Vaughn opens Issue 169 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies with “Sun, Stone, Spear,” a story about as different from her KITTY NORVILLE series as it seems possible to get. Two young women, Elu and the narrator, Mahra, have decided to leave their home village; Mahra seeks adventure, while Elu wishes to be the chief astronomer of any village in which she lands — not a position she is likely to get in her home village, where there are four apprentice astronomers ahead of her. Their travel to a new village is one frought with danger,
Our weekly exploration of free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. As the jumping-off point for this week’s SHORTS column, we’re reviewing several of the stories mentioned in BookRiot’s January 4, 2018 column listing good places to read online short science fiction, which Marion Deeds noted in her January 10, 2018 WWWednesday column.
“Red in Tooth and Cog” by Cat Rambo (2016, audio and text free at EscapePod, originally published in Fantasy & Science Fiction)
Renee is eating lunch in the park one day when her smartphone is stolen by a small,
SHORTS: Our column exploring free and inexpensive short fiction available on the internet. Here are a few stories we’ve recently read that we wanted you to know about.
“Head of a Snake, Tail of a Dragon” by Zen Cho (2018, free on the author’s website)
This short story is a delightful sequel to Zen Cho’s Hugo award-winning novelette, “If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again.” And both are free online, so win-win!
Jin-Dae is an imugi, a magical serpent that can — if it learns and grows in the right way — turn into a dragon.
Paper Cities by Ekaterina Sedia
Bring up urban fantasy nowadays and most readers will probably assume that you’re talking about such authors as Laurell K. Hamilton, Jim Butcher, Simon R. Green, Kim Harrison, Charlaine Harris, Sherrilyn Kenyon and so on, but in this new anthology from Senses Five Press, which is edited by Ekaterina Sedia, Paper Cities reveals that Urban Fantasy has actually been around for almost two hundred years and can be traced as far back as the Arabian Nights.
Previous SFF Author: Hannu Rajaniemi
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