Click on stars to FIND REVIEWS BY RATING:
Recommended: 
Not Recommended: 
The Remnant by Charlie Fletcher
“No more hope. No more heroes.”
The Remnant (2017) is the third and final book in Charlie Fletcher’s OVERSIGHT trilogy. You need to read the first two books, The Oversight and The Paradox, before opening this one, or you’ll be hopelessly lost. I’ll assume you have since I won’t be able to avoid some spoilers for the previous books in this review.
August 23rd, 2018. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Charlie (C.A.) Fletcher | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Set in an alternate 1920s world, MEM (2018) is a short novel about a woman who is the physical manifestation of a memory extraction process. If someone has a traumatic memory they want to get rid of, Professor Toutant can remove it. The memory then becomes a physical person who lives in the “vault” below the health center at a university in Montreal. (The vault is very similar to a mental or convalescent care ward.) Most of these “mems,” whose brains carry not much beyond the extracted memory,
August 22nd, 2018. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Bethany C. Morrow | Audio, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |
The Dragon Lords: False Idols by Jon Hollins
I rather liked Jon Hollins’ 2016 novel The Dragon Lords: Fool’s Gold. It was fun, it had heart, it was surprisingly insightful, and it was chock-full of wordplay and schemes in addition to epic battles and blood. Its 2017 sequel, The Dragon Lords: False Idols, inherited a lot of those traits but comes up short on the fun that previously enchanted me.
The situation is rather more serious this time around: our merry band of adventurers is scattered across the south and south-eastern reaches of Avarra,
August 17th, 2018. Jana Nyman´s rating: 3.5 | Jon Hollins | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Moons of Barsk by Lawrence M. Schoen
I was a big fan of Lawrence M. Schoen’s first entry in this series, Barsk: The Elephant’s Graveyard, and therefore was excited to pick up its sequel, The Moons of Barsk (2018). I have to admit to being somewhat disappointed, but despite suffering from a bit of a second-book slump, The Moons of Barsk does move the big story arcs along while broadening/deepening some characterization,
August 14th, 2018. Bill Capossere´s rating: 3.5 | Lawrence M. Schoen | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
The Book of Peril by Melissa McShane
Abernathy’s Bookstore is a powerful oracle, used by the community of mages to answer important questions and foretell the future. Its proprietor, Helena Davies, is a critical part of the bookstore’s oracular function: she takes augury slips of paper with questions on them from customers, wanders among the bookshelves until she finds a book that glows to her eyes, and sells the book to the customer as the answer to their question. The price for the augury is conveniently and magically printed inside the book on the title page,
August 10th, 2018. Tadiana Jones´s rating: 3.5 | Melissa McShane | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |
The Paradox by Charlie Fletcher
The Paradox (2015) is the second book in Charlie Fletcher’s OVERSIGHT trilogy. I loved the audiobook version of the first book, The Oversight, when I read it four years ago. Despite its crawling pace, I loved it for its grungy Victorian setting. The audiobook narration by Simon Prebble, an award-winning superstar of the audio world, was so spectacular that I titled my review “One of the best audiobooks I’ve read this year” and I said that I’d be picking up The Paradox as soon as it was available.
August 2nd, 2018. Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Charlie (C.A.) Fletcher | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Earth to Dad by Krista Van Dolzer
Eleven-year-old Jameson O’Malley lives with his mother, Mina, at Base Ripley, in a version of Minnesota that would be unrecognizable to current-day residents: there are regular monsoons, category six tornadoes are commonplace, and spending more than a few moments outside without a protective solar-resistant jacket will lead directly to sun poisoning. A deeply introspective and solitary child, Jameson’s passion is his JICC (Jameson’s Interplanetary Communication Console), a device his astronaut father helped to build before embarking on the long voyage to Mars, and which they use to send short videos to one another on a regular basis.
August 1st, 2018. Jana Nyman´s rating: 3.5 | Krista Van_Dolzer | Children, Stand-Alone | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |
The Future is Blue by Catherynne M. Valente
Fans of Catherynne M. Valente who especially love her line-by-line prose will be pleased with her 2018 story collection, The Future is Blue. Fifteen of Valente’s shorter works are showcased here. The title piece is a novelette. The similarity they share is the priority of narrative voice and prose above other story elements, even those of character and plot.
I recommend that readers who love Valente’s prose consider this book as a box of gourmet chocolates,
July 31st, 2018. Marion Deeds´s rating: 3.5 | Catherynne M. Valente | Short Fiction | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Paternus: Rise of Gods by Dyrk Ashton
Paternus: Rise of Gods (2016) is described in the first line of its Amazon page as being “American Gods meets the X-Men,” which isn’t a bad five-and-a-hyphen word summary, really. By the time you get to “Sumerian/Akkadian/Greek/Aztec/Norse/etc./etc./etc., gods are really all the same people and they’re the children of a guy who’s like Ego from Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2,” you’ve more than lost in brevity and wit what you’ve made up for in accuracy.
July 25th, 2018. Nathan Okerlund and Kat Hooper´s rating: 3.5 | Dyrk Ashton | Audio | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |
Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds
Elysium Fire (2018) is the sequel to Alastair Reynolds’ The Prefect (now renamed Aurora Rising to designate it as part of the PREFECT DREYFUS series), a complex and detailed police procedural set in the Glitter Band of his REVELATION SPACE series, set before the Melding Plague that destroyed the 10,000 orbitals that sported every conceivable political system, all run by real-time neurally-based electronic democratic voting systems that allow citizens to weigh in on each issue and decision on how to run their societies.
July 19th, 2018. Stuart Starosta´s rating: 3.5 | Alastair Reynolds | Audio | SFF Reviews | no comments |
Do it! One of the best things I've read in recent years.
This reminds me. I want to read Addie LaRue.
We’re in total agreement David!
I felt just the same. The prose and character work was excellent. The larger story was unsatisfying, especially compared to…
Hmmm. I think I'll pass.