Rating: 4

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Blue Book: The story of a famous alien abduction

Blue Book (Volume One) by James Tynion IV (script), Michael Avon Oeming (art), Aditya Bidikar (letters)

Blue Book is the true-life story of Betty and Barney Hill, a couple who claimed to have had an UFO encounter in the summer of 1961. While driving late at night, the young couple encounters a space ship, and then aliens abduct them, do experiments, and return them to their car within about two hours. All of this is narrated by Tynion in his script and shown through excellent black, white, and blue art by Oeming.

September 30th, 2023. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4 | Comics | SFF Reviews | 1 comment |

Light Chaser: Can two humans put the universe right?

Light Chaser by Peter F. Hamilton & Gareth L. Powell

2021’s Light Chaser novella is a collaboration between Gareth Powell and Peter F. Hamilton. This fast-paced story actually spans centuries, featuring a functionally-immortal woman, Amahle. The sole occupant of her AI controlled lightship, Amahle, the titular Light Chaser, is one of many of her kind, who travel a “circuit” of human-occupied planets, collecting the memory collars selected families wear for generations. In return, Amahle provides carefully chosen wealth and trinkets, careful never to provide something that might allow the stable (or stagnant) societies on these worlds to make any kind of leap forward in technology or political thinking.

The Secrets of Insects: A retrospective of Kadrey short fiction

The Secrets of Insects by Richard Kadrey

Before he published the SANDMAN SLIM series, Richard Kadrey published short fiction in various markets. Several of those stories have been collected in his latest book, 2023’s The Secret of Insects. The earliest story in here, “Horse Latitudes,” appeared in Omni in 1992. The most recent story, “Candy Among the Jades,” is original to this collection. The Secrets of Insects is a retrospective of Kadrey’s short fiction.

I’ll provide the Table of Contents,

The City Inside: An exquisite, complicated puzzle

The City Inside by Samit Basu

For the first 22 pages of Samit Basu’s The City Inside (2022), I didn’t have a freakin’ clue what was going on. I followed Joey (Bijoyini) Roy around her parents’ house, as she interacted with her intrusive “wellness system”—think very needy FitBit on steroids—as she talked to her parents about the Years that Can’t Be Discussed, as she dodged her performative adolescent brother, who was constantly auditioning for a place in the Flow. I understood vaguely that social media was a big thing,

Circumference of the World: I like it

Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

Once upon a time in the ancient era when childhood was about to bleed into pre-adolescence, we used to question if someone “liked” another person or “liked liked” them, our eyes wide in anticipation of the stressed or unstressed response. For the past half-dozen or so novels I’ve read by Lavie Tidhar, the reply each time was a no-brainer: a breathy, intense, “I like like.” With his newest, Circumference of the World,

Devil’s Gun: Rambo’s restaurant space opera cooks up more fun

Devil’s Gun by Cat Rambo

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,

September 1st, 2023. Marion Deeds´s rating: 4 | Cat Rambo | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

Batman: One Bad Day: The Riddler #1: Dreadful Reins

Batman: One Bad Day: The Riddler #1: Dreadful Reins

In Batman: One Bad Day: The Riddler #1, “Dreadful Reins,” Tom King and Mitch Gerads create a wonderful one-shot, a stand-alone story told in just a little over sixty pages. This story won an Eisner in 2023, and certainly deserves recognition. In this comic book, the Riddler is introduced as a man who is very powerful, though his power over others is never fully explained. One day he walks up to a random businessman, pulls out his gun, and shoots him in the head point-blank.

August 24th, 2023. Brad Hawley´s rating: 4 | Comics | SFF Reviews | no comments |

House of Odysseus: Leaves me eager for the final book

House of Odysseus by Claire North

Claire North’s THE SONGS OF PENELOPE trilogy of Greek reworkings offers up three queens (Clytemnestra, Helen, and Penelope) and three goddesses (Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena). The first book, Ithaca, centered on Penelope and Clytemnestra, and was narrated by Hera in a fiercely, sharply wry voice. House of Odysseus (2023) picks up shortly after the close of book one and (wholly unnecessary spoiler alert for the old as dirt storyline) the death of Clytemnestra at her son Orestes’ hands.

August 17th, 2023. Bill Capossere´s rating: 4 | Claire North | SFF Reviews | no comments |

Skin and Bones: “I’m looking through you….”

Skin and Bones by Thorne Smith

Up until recent years, I could have counted on the fingers of one hand the books that have made this reader laugh out loud … and I still would have had a couple of fingers left over. Those three books – all of which make me chuckle today, just thinking about them – are, chronologically, Harry Harrison’s undeniably funny Bill, The Galactic Hero (1955), Eric Frank Russell’s hilarious sci-fi adventure The Great Explosion (1962),

Medusa’s Sisters: A bitingly insightful feminist viewpoint

Medusa’s Sisters by Lauren J.A. Bear

Every now and then my reads fall into a pattern, the most recent being a trio of reimaginings of Greek tales. Medusa’s Sisters, by Lauren J.A. Bear falls in between the other two in terms of the reading experience, with engaging characters, good narrative voices, a moving close, and a nice refocusing of the ancient story of Medusa and Perseus (rather than of Perseus and Medusa).

Bear begins, well, at the beginning (after an excellent opening that gives us right away the classic Perseus-Kills-Medusa moment,

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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