Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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Look to Windward: Thought provoking SF

Look to Windward by Iain Banks

This is the first book I have read by Iain Banks — and it won’t be the last. His post-human vision of the very distant future, with its closer-to-perfect, but all-too-human AI, is not only plausible but a thought-provoker. And if you read science fiction, don’t you want something thought provoking? The alien cultures, the societal implications, and the use of technology were exactly that. Bucking the trend of throwing everything into a thousand-page tome, literary science fiction gets better in the hands of only a handful of other writers.


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Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero

Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero by Larry Tye

It’s hard to imagine that there is anything more to say about Superman than has already been covered in the slew of books published on the topic. But, since I’ve not read many of those books (though I have read a lot dealing with superheroes in general), I’m not the one to say how much new material Larry Tye covers in his retrospective entitled Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero (2012).


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The Kingdom of the Gods: Ends an engaging trilogy

The Kingdom of the Gods by N.K. Jemisin

The Kingdom of the Gods concludes N.K. Jemisin’s debut series roughly a century after book two, The Broken Kingdoms, by focusing on Sieh, who seems to be dying despite being a god. And, once again, the end of the world as we know it becomes a major plot point.

THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY garnered a lot of praise with each book. While I didn’t have quite the same level of response, I did find the series entirely engaging throughout,


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Dragon in Chains: An uncommon fantasy setting

Dragon in Chains by Daniel Fox

Most epic fantasy written in English has its basis in Western culture. While the worlds created in these books are not our world, they are generally recognizable: the use of language is comfortable, the foods are what we or our ancestors ate, the customs are basically familiar. Even mythological creatures look the way we expect them to, so that unicorns have horns and dragons have wings. When there are exceptions to these rules, the author is certain to provide an explanation, and the exception is often integral to the tale.


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Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology

Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology  edited by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel

Is there really any difference between post-modernism, interstitial fiction, slipstream and New Weird? Does anyone know? James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel try to outline the boundaries of slipstream with their anthology, Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, particularly by including a learned introduction and excerpts from a discussion that took place on the subject on a blog a few years ago. Ultimately, like so many things literary,


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Press Enter: Works on so many levels

Press Enter by John Varley

IF YOU WISH TO KNOW MORE PRESS ENTER ■

Victor Apfel, a lonely middle-aged veteran of the Korean War, gets a recorded phone call asking him to come to his reclusive neighbor’s house to take care of what he finds there. The voice promises that he’ll be rewarded. Victor would like to ignore the message, but he gets another call every 10 minutes. When Victor arrives at Charles Kluge’s house, he finds Kluge dead and slumped over his computer keyboard, so he calls another neighbor — a computer operator named Hal (har,


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Bayou Vol 1. by Jeremy Love

Bayou Vol 1.  by Jeremy Love

I read Bayou Vol. 1 while it was still available online via Zuda comics and was blown away.

This is the story of Lee Wagstaff, a little African-American girl living in the South in the 30’s. This alternate reality South is populated not only by the real people and tensions of our world, but by the gods and monsters bred by them. After Lee’s friend, Lily, a little white girl, goes missing and Lee’s father is wrongly beaten and imprisoned for it,


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Lost Everything: A quiet post-apocalyptic novel

Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery

Lost Everything, by Brian Francis Slattery, is a surprisingly small-bore and quiet post-apocalyptic novel. Where many deal with destruction on a country-wide or global scale and follow near-epic quests by some doomed or maybe-doomed survivors, Slattery takes his characters through a just-as-ravaged countryside but it all seems a little more domestic than the usual sort of end-of-the-world tale, a twist that is both the book’s strength and its weakness.

The world has seemingly been in the grips of ecological disaster,


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Orb, Sceptre, Throne: Esslemont’s most enjoyable MALAZAN book

Orb, Sceptre, Throne by Ian Cameron Esslemont

It has been a real pleasure to watch the development of Ian Cameron Esslemont as a writer. Both Night of Knives and Return of the Crimson Guard were solid offerings but burdened with problems of pacing and character, though Return of the Crimson Guard showed some improvement. Each seemed pretty clearly the product of a new author. Stonewielder, the third of Esslemont’s MALAZAN novels was a big jump forward in terms of quality and craft;


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SKULLKICKERS Vol. 1: 1000 Opas and a Dead Body

SKULLKICKERS Vol. 1: 1000 Opas and a Dead Body by  Jim Zub (author) & Chris Stevens (artist)

Note: Vol 1. collects issues #1-5

No one knows the names of these two monster slayers for hire. One is a dwarf who wields two short battle-axes and the other a big bald brute that carries an almost unknown weapon: a pistol. For the right price, this pair will do any killings you require. They can out-fight, out-drink, and usually out-smart most anything — man, beast, or creature. They are the SKULLKICKERS.


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Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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