Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

Rating: 4.5

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Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planet

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey’s novel Orbital (2023) will, for some people, barely qualify (if that) as a novel, leaving them crying “Where’s the plot? Nothing happens!” And you know, I can’t argue with them. If you define a novel as a series of plot steps from a to b to c such that change occurs, then yes, Orbital probably won’t squeeze in under that definition. Its focus is less on “what is happening” and more on “what am I feeling about what is happening?” or “What am I thinking about while things are happening?” And if you’re looking for conflict or fleshed out and distinctive characters who are different at the end than when we first meet them,

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories: The eerie, the surreal and the beautiful

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott

I loved GennaRose Nethercott’s novel Thistlefoot, one of the best books I’d read in a long time, so I followed it up with 2024’s story collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories. This collection displays the beautiful, the eerie, the surreal, and the terrible, written in Nethercott’s precise, poetic prose that reminds me of the writing of Kelly Link.

The books contains fourteen stories.

Bringer of Dust: The worlds of the Talents collide

Bringer of Dust by J.M. Miro

2024’s Bringer of Dust, J.M. Miro’s second book in the trilogy of THE TALENTS, finds our survivors from Book One, Ordinary Monsters, scattered across Europe. Maybe “scattered” isn’t the right word, because their locations are purposeful, as they seek to find an orsine they can open, to return to the world of the dead and rescue Marlowe, the Shining Boy.

A quick review of the magic: Clanks can manipulate their own flesh,

January 28th, 2025. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4.5 | J.M. Miro | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Tegan and Sara: Junior High by Tegan Quin and Sara Quin (An Oxford College Student Review!)

Tegan and Sara: Junior High by Tegan Quin and Sara Quin (writers) and Tillie Walden (artist)

Sophia Waite is a second-year student at Oxford College and she is considering majoring in English and Creative writing and Psychology. Her home is Dartmouth, MA, where she lives on a small family farm about five minutes away from the beach. Sophie’s favorite writers include Jay Kristoff, Amie Kaufman, Jennifer Lynn Barnes, and Rick Riordan, and her favorite book is Nevernight. Her other interests include horseback riding, skiing, and writing.

You may or may not know the names of authors Tegan and Sara,

January 25th, 2025. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics, Young Adult | SFF Reviews | 2 comments |

The Voyage Home: Powerful, in a quieter fashion

The Voyage Home by Pat Barker

Amongst the flood of Greek myth retellings over the past number few years, three authors have stood out to me. Two are Madeline Miller and Claire North, the first for her fantastic Circe (not to mention the brilliant The Song of Achilles from a decade earlier) and the second for her excellent and just-concluded SONGS OF PENELOPE trilogy. The third is Pat Barker and her WOMEN OF TROY series,

The Spite House: First class cursed-house horror

The Spite House by Johnny Compton

Spite houses are real and I went down a shallow rabbit hole preparing for this review. With his 2023 novel, The Spite House, Johnny Compton takes on the concept of a house built solely to irritate and harass nearby landowners, and morphs it into something original and scary.

Eric Ross and his two daughters, Dessa and Stacy, are making their way through Texas, trying to keep under the radar. They have the normal concerns a black family in Texas would have,

Dorohedoro (Volume 1) by Q Hayashida (An Oxford College Student Review!)

In this column, I feature comic book reviews written by my students at Oxford College of Emory University. Oxford College is a small liberal arts school just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I challenge students to read and interpret comics because I believe sequential art and visual literacy are essential parts of education at any level (see my Manifesto!). I post the best of my students’ reviews in this column. Today, I am proud to present a review by Mandy Sun:

Mandy Sun is a second-year student at Oxford College and is majoring in Computer Science.

December 28th, 2024. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 3 comments |

The Great White Space: Black mountain side

The Great White Space by Basil Copper

For those of you who have read everything written by the great H. P. Lovecraft but are still hankering for another solid dose of cosmic horror and tentacled monstrosities, hoo boy, have I got a doozy for you! Although written four decades after the so-called “Sage of Providence” dominated the field of weird fiction in the 1930s, this book – Basil Copper’s The Great White Space – is such a convincing pastiche that all fans of the genre should be left happily grinning nevertheless.

Bury Him Darkly: Malice from the chalice

Bury Him Darkly by John Blackburn

Although it’s been almost 18 years since I last read English author John Blackburn’s first novel, A Scent of New-Mown Hay (1958), I still vividly recall several segments of the book, mainly due to the forcefulness of the writing therein. And really, with its plot conflating a female ex-Nazi scientist, deserted Russian villages, and a fungoid mutation that is slowly spreading across Europe, the book is inherently hard to forget.

Sunburn: Coming-of-age in Greece

Sunburn by Andi Watson (story) and Simon Gane (art)

Sunburn by Andi Watson and Simon Gane is a beautiful graphic novel that tells the coming-age-story of a girl named Rachel Collingwood, who is invited to Greece by acquaintances of the family. The story is unexpected, and the visuals are stunning.

The graphic novel starts off quietly in England as Rachel, complaining about her soggy toast, has breakfast with her family. Their meal is interrupted by a call from Dianne, wife of Peter Warner,

December 7th, 2024. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4.5 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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Recent Discussion:

Paul Connelly on Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planetFebruary 4, 2025
I really enjoyed this book. The lack of melodrama (as "plot") was a feature, not a bug, I think. Parts…
Bill Capossere on Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planetFebruary 4, 2025
good points Mariion-. I actually had meant to talk about the ham radio but the review was getting long (I…
Marion Deeds on Orbital: A moving elegy to our environment and planetFebruary 4, 2025
You got your review up before I could even write one. I loved this book--one of my favorite reads of…
SofiS on The Player of Games: A space opera about board gamesFebruary 3, 2025
Games are interesting. I love different games, but now I give preference to gambling ones. I found interesting reviews on…
Jinwoo Sung on Dorohedoro (Volume 1) by Q Hayashida (An Oxford College Student Review!)February 3, 2025
hey