Monday, April 30, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Semiosis by Sue Burke



Semiosis is a book dedicated to an interesting central idea - what if humans had to deal with plants who were actively intelligent and who tried to manipulate humans to act in ways beneficial to the plants themselves?  As the author put it in a post on John Scalzi's blog, this is simply an extreme version of what happens in real life, where modern plants have evolved in ways to encourage other animals to treat them in beneficial ways.  Taking place on an alien world, the book follows a colony of humans trying to learn from the mistakes of Earth, only to encounter a world where the plants seem to be deliberately taking actions - such as growing poisonous fruit and messing with human crops - in order to manipulate the humans, who are well out of their comfort zone.  The result is a piece of particularly interesting SciFi.

More after the Jump.


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Thursday, April 26, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman


So I actually found my way to Rachel Hartman's Seraphina a bit backwards.  Earlier this month I read and LOVED her latest novel "Tess of the Road" (Review Here), which I gave one of my rare perfect scores.  Tess of the Road was my first experience with Hartman's work, but actually takes place in the same world as "Seraphina," although it's a stand-alone work which doesn't require prior knowledge to work at all.  Still the references in TotR, as well as simply how much I loved that book, made me instantly want to read Seraphina and its sequel, so I immediately took them out of the library.

Seraphina is seemingly targeted at a little younger age group than TotR, not dealing at all with the same adult subject matter, but it's still excellent and sweet at times, while dealing with some more serious subjects such as racism and xenophobia, to some extent.  It's not a perfect book - but it contains excellent characters, a solid oft unpredictable plot, and a pretty interesting world, so it contains much to recommend.  Again, if you're looking for a more mature fantasy work, this may not be your thing, but if you're interested in an interesting world of humans and dragons in a tense coexistence, this is a pretty good book to try.


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Wednesday, April 25, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley




The Blue Sword is the other classic fantasy novel written by Robin McKinley set in the fictional fantasy country of Damar (The Hero and the Crown, which I reviewed HERE, is the other).  The Blue Sword was published before The Hero and the Crown and is set hundreds of years after that novel, so while readers who have read THatC first will enjoy some references, this is obviously a stand alone work and no foreknowledge is necessary.  And it's a pretty enjoyable stand alone novel, again due to its charming heroine.

It's not quite as good as The Hero and the Crown though, in my opinion, with it in a few ways being a simpler story.  That's not a huge knock, since I loved that work.  Like that work, this is not really a story with a grand epic plot - you should not be expecting epic battles here, despite the presence of magic and swordplay.  But what you should expect is a wonderful heroine, who is absolutely delightful in her courage and steadfastness despite a world that seems determined to keep throwing her into new unexpected situations at every turn.

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Tuesday, April 24, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner





Swordspoint is a pretty good short novel that was definitely ahead of its time when it was published back in 1986.  It's a low fantasy novel - there's no magic at all and the only fantasy elements are that this is a world in a fictional city with an archaic setting - I was going to say 1600s-1700s setting, but the setting is seemingly a mix of time periods: there are no guns (but fireworks are known) and swords are common, and there is nobility but there is also some amount of voting for political office, etc.  More importantly, it's a story where all of the stakes are small and personal - this is not a story about saving the world, it's about a swordsman who finds he and his lover caught up in a game of nobles, with both their lives and their honor at stake....and nothing else.  It's arguably a romance novel to an extent (the author describes it as a "fantasy of manners"), and as mentioned above, it was definitely ahead of its time in that the romance in question was Male-Male despite the book being published back in 1986.

And well, Swordspoint does this incredibly well.  Our main protagonist, the best swordsman in the world Richard St. Vier, isn't ever seriously challenged in terms of his skills (that title is in no way false), which isn't a problem because this isn't a story about some fateful duel with big stakes.  This is his story about a man who simply wishes to live for the challenge of a good sword fight and to live with his lover whose suicidal tendencies he finds so intriguing.  It's not an action book - despite what the name might imply - it's a book about manners and honor and love.  I'm describing this poorly, I know, but hopefully the long review will explain better why I enjoyed this book so.


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Monday, April 23, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson




The term "Message Fiction" is generally thrown as an insult by people who are closed minded at best and stupid and malicious at worst.  All stories have some sort of message, whether it be heavy handed or subtly placed within the narrative, and cries of "Message Fiction is bad" or that it is ruining the genre are pretty much always sour grapes by people who don't like fiction that conforms to their own perspectives.  So yeah, you'll pretty much never hear/see me use the term in a review on this blog, as whatever valid use the term might have has long been beaten out of it.

If I was EVER to use the term, New York 2140 would be the type of book where I would do it.  The book is one part science fiction - featuring a flooded New York City after Global warming has caused the sea level to rise 50 feet in the year 2140 - and a larger part screed against the current world financial system, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.  There is nothing subtle about this book - one of the 8 point of view "characters" who narrates each chapter is explicitly giving screeds about the financial and political system of modern capitalism, often in ways not connected at all to the main storyline, and this theme pervades much of the rest of the points of view as well.

It's certainly possible this could have worked still as a novel....but it doesn't here.  Several of the main characters are incredibly grating - though a few get better as the story goes on - and the leaps of logic needed to get from one area of the plot to the next are so large as to defy one's suspension of disbelief.  As a novel, this book is bad - the characters are at best decent (and often worse), the plot is bad, and parts of the book are so painfully written that it's hard not to skim to try and get past them.  If I hadn't wanted to read every Hugo and Nebula Nominated Work for Best Novel, I would have quit reading this book fairly quickly....instead I trudged through over 600 pages so I could make this review.  I would recommend against following my example.


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Thursday, April 19, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra





Markswoman was yet another book I wanted to like more than I did.  The book is a postapocalyptic scifi/fantasy genre story (as is common with this subgenre, elements of SF and Fantasy are so mingled here as to prevent this book from being distinguished as one or the other) that takes place in Central Asia (here known as Asiana) in a distant future.  More importantly, it's one where the mythology of the story is based not on an all-too-common European background, but more on the culture/mythology of southeast Asia (particularly Indian/Hindu mythology).  Add in a setting featuring Orders of female assassins (the "markswomen") enforcing justice in the world, and well, I really wanted to like this book.

Unfortunately, Markswoman has a lot of flaws.  The first in a duology (whose second book's publishing date is still unknown), Markswoman features a lot of worldbuilding but a plot that is incredibly simple and predictable, with characters who are pretty shallow at heart, absent maybe one or two.  Add a cliffhanger ending which is completely unsatisfying, the end result is a book which seems to waste all of that worldbuilding that could've led to something special.  The book isn't offensively bad, but it has little to recommend as a result.

Note: I read Markswoman as an audiobook, which is narrated proficiently. But having done so, I'm almost certainly going to get the spelling of various characters/places wrong, so forgive me where I do.

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Wednesday, April 18, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Stone Mad by Elizabeth Bear




Stone Mad by Elizabeth Bear

Stone Mad is a Novella-lengthed sequel to Elizabeth Bear's 2015 novel, Karen Memory (Review HERE).  You could attempt to read it as a stand alone, as the story is entirely self-contained here, but you'll appreciate the book a bit more (and understand the type of world we're in here) if you already have some attachment to the characters.  For that's where this novella really shines - I liked Karen Memory, but my main complaint was that the story got a little too over-ambitious with an expansion of the plot and didn't spend enough time with the main love interest.  Stone Mad by contrast, is all about the relationship between Karen and her wife Priya and is fantastic as a result.  It may still be a steampunk lesbian western to an extent, but this is a story about the two main characters and is just absolutely lovely and better for it.

More after the Jump:

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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton





The Queens of Innis Lear is a fantasy take (and a more feminist take) on Shakepeare's classic tragedy, King Lear (if you couldn't guess from the title).  The book is still a tragedy, but, in addition to adding major fantasy elements (magic is extremely important), the story adds a lot more depth to the story and characters from the original play.  The book takes a play with many completely unsympathetic characters - some of whom are paper thin - and makes nearly everyone three dimensional and believable - even the ones who don't get much page time.  This is a really well written book.

Did I like this book? That's a tougher question to answer - and I probably lean towards no.  The book is probably a bit too long (near 600 pages, and it feels it) and, as befits a tragedy, is not a happy one - but a lot of that sadness comes from some characters making really stupid decisions.  But it's certainly a very interesting book overall, and I'm not sorry for reading it.  If you like Shakespeare adaptations or are interested in a very well written character-driven tragedy, The Queens of Innis Lear is worth your time.

Note: I hadn't read King Lear prior to reading The Queens of Innis Lear, and that wasn't a problem in any way (I read the wikipedia summary).  Having skimmed through the original text since reading this adaptation, I would say it's not really necessary to be familiar with the story before reading this book.  Also, for this reason, I'm not going to be going too in depth in the specific changes made to the original story in this review.  

 More after the Jump:

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Monday, April 16, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson




Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach is a short novel that tries to deal with a lot of ideas - time travel, ecological reconstruction, body chemistry manipulation, body part replacement, ethics of killing people who may not exist, issues of capitalism affecting the attempt to improve the public good, etc etc etc.  There's a lot going on in this book, and I can see how some people and some critics might really enjoy the ideas being explored here.

Alas, I'm not one of those people, as there simply wasn't enough space to put all of these ideas in this book, make a coherent plot, and get me to care about the characters enough to make me really interested in the outcomes.  It's not a bad book per se, but I wound up finishing each chapter, and eventually the book itself, and just thinking to myself "huh, that's it?"

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Thursday, April 12, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Art of Starving by Sam J Miller



The Art of Starving is yet another YA genre novel that has been nominated for a bunch of awards (for both the Norton Award and for the new "Not a Hugo" Award for Best YA Novel).   The book falls into the Fantasy sub-genre of books where it's not clear how real the fantasy elements actually are - for the most part - and I don't mean this in a negative way - this is a YA coming of age story of a semi-closeted gay high school boy with an eating disorder.  The Fantasy elements come from the powers the protagonist - Matt - seems to obtain when starving himself (hence the title), but it's not even clear to the protagonist (who tells the entire story in First Person) whether or not those powers are real.

In this way, and a few others, the book reminded me quite a bit of Paul Cornell's novel "Chalk," which also featured a protagonist seeking revenge and possibly the invocation of magical powers in an otherwise normal reality.  Both books could be quite brutal to read at times, as their protagonists suffer.  Still, the books are very different, but at the same time, some of their differences I think are worth examining as a good way to show why I didn't quite love The Art of Starving - both books eventually wind up with major climaxes involving their fantasy elements, but The Art of Starving's feels less earned and then fizzles out, unlike that of Chalk.  Whereas Chalk seems to know where it was going in the end, The Art of Starving seemed to me like like it couldn't figure out how it wanted to get from it's critical plot points to its ending, and that made this coming of age story go from potentially great to something lesser.   I can see why this book was nominated for Awards, but as a result I can't quite endorse it winning those awards (though I expect it to do so).

Note: I read this as an audiobook, so if I get some names and spellings wrong, that's why.  The audiobook reader is particularly good, so it's definitely worth getting in that format.

More after the Jump:


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Tuesday, April 10, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman




Tess of the Road is my book of the year* so far in 2018.  As the eponymous heroine of this book tells asks another character: "Have you ever experienced something so far beyond words that you couldn't explain it?"  That's how I feel about this book, a story about a young woman, burdened by guilt and shame over a tragic past experience, feeling pressured by people who don't understand, who tries to find some answer or just some....thing to hold on to by walking along the road.  It's a story with a main character whose hurt is so real but also so many other characters who have their own responses and ideas that I was simply enthralled.  This is a book that dares not to have a single answer, and to refuse not to commit to any particular answer that comes up, and it is basically perfect as a result.

*Not that this makes my prior book of the year (Mishell Baker's Imposter Syndrome) any lesser in quality.

Incidentally (to take a step back), this book is actually the third of Hartman's books set in the same world, after Seraphina and Shadow Scale, and characters (Seraphina is the main protagonist's half-sister) and plot details from those books are referenced in this one.  That said, I haven't read either prior book, and it didn't detract from my experience at all - again this is my favorite book I've read this year and my second perfect score of 2018.  So you can read this as a stand alone just fine.

Trigger Warning: The main character's backstory in this book involves rape.  The book does not spend long on the description of the act (it's not in fact revealed to be rape until very near the end of the book, in fact), and of course the driving force behind the main character's actions are her attempts to grapple with what happened, so there is nothing about it that is gratuitous, but I figure I should give fair warning given how high I'm going to be recommending this book throughout the rest of this post.  Still, I think this book, which is about a woman trying to deal with that very act, might still appeal to those who usually avoid books dealing with rape/abuse, but if it's a deal breaker to you, I understand.  

 More after the Jump:

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Monday, April 9, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley





  The Hero and the Crown is a classic YA/Children's fantasy novel written by Robin McKinley in 1984.  It's actually a prequel to her novel, The Blue Sword, though no prior knowledge of the first novel is necessary for this one (I haven't read The Blue Sword yet, though I reserved it after finishing this book) and the book is perfectly stand alone.  It's also fantastically joyous, even as its heroine deals with being an outcast and fighting through depression to be the hero that she wants to be.  I've had this book in my kindle library for a long time (I bought a women's SFF storybundle a while back and this was part of it) and I'm now kind of embarrassed I didn't get to it sooner.

  The Hero on the Crown is a short book (around 250 pages) made up of two parts - one part that's essentially a flashback to how the story got to where it begins in the first chapter and the second part that goes forward from there.  The book is mainly told from the perspective of its heroine, Aerin, but without warning will shift from paragraph to paragraph to sharing the thoughts of other characters as well - and despite this undoubtedly violating modern rules of writing a story, it totally works to create a delightful refreshing story.  The end result is that this book packs a lot into its short length to create a complete excellent story of a young woman who is nervous, afraid, and unsure at tunes but driven to act anyway despite all the naysayers.

  I'm just repeating myself at this point, so more after the jump where I'll try (and fail) to explain better:

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Saturday, April 7, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Tethered Mage by Melissa Caruso




  The Tethered Mage is the first in a new fantasy trilogy from Melissa Caruso, and it appears to be her debut novel as well.  The premise is interesting if not unique - in this fantasy world, those born with great enough magical power (whether it be as an alchemist, artificer, or most dangerously, as a warlock who can control elemental magic) have visible marks - mage marks - on their skin.  The powerful Serene Empire does not allow such mage-marked individuals to do what they will, drafting them (usually as a very young child) into service for the Empire.  The Empire calls these individuals "Falcons" and they are controlled by a magic wristband (a "jess") which ties these falcons to another person - a "Falconer" - who has the power to release or imprison the mage-marked's powers with a special command word.

  Such a setting could very easily be used to tell a story about the issues and morality of the use of power and control over other individuals for the supposed greater good, but while The Tethered Mage plays lip service to said idea, it's far more interested in being a normal fantasy thriller.  It's possible that this idea will be of greater concern in the sequel (coming out this month), but the end result is a fantasy novel that is merely solid rather than truly standing out.  The characters and worldbuilding are solid enough that I will check out the sequel to see if it improves, but for now, The Tethered Mage is simply a competent unspectacular start to a fantasy trilogy.

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Thursday, April 5, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Strange Practice by Vivian Shaw





Strange Practice is an example of a seemingly growing subgenre of fantasy - the famous monster subversion genre.  Like say The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, this is a story where famous monsters (or at least kind of Monsters) are real, but as far more harmless beings than the stories would tell and as beings who simply would want to be left alone.  It's a story about a doctor to such beings - one Greta Hellsing - who tries to see to their needs, only to get caught up in something more dangerous.

Strange Practice is not just an example of the subgenre, but it's a pretty damn good one, and while not a story that is "light," it somehow manages to be a fun mix of light and dark elements.  The book's plot isn't phenomenal, but its main characters - the aforementioned Doctor, a human researcher, a demon, two vampires of different kinds - are lovely, especially when interacting with one another, and I can't wait to read more of their stories (a sequel is coming out later this year).  It's not an action story by any means (again, our heroine is a doctor) but a character story, and a really good one at that.  Definitely well recommended

More details after the Jump:

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Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Video Game Review: Trails of Cold Steel 2




Last August I reviewed The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, the fourth in the Trails (or "Kiseki" in Japan) series of JRPGs to come over to America.  As I said in that review (link here), the Trails in the Sky games (the first games in the series) are some of my favorite games I've ever played - excellent characters, a wonderful story, and excellent - oft challenging - gameplay that rewarded multiple playstyles.  So when the American publisher announced they were porting the Cold Steel games to PC, I was pretty excited, even though I don't play many games these days.

ToCS 1 was a game I wanted to like though more than I did.  The worldbuilding was excellent, but the constant school parts at the start of each chapter were grating and the characters weren't as great as in Sky, and the combat just didn't give me enough of that challenge I craved.  Still, I was intrigued enough to snag up ToCS 2 as soon as it came out earlier this year, and I've been playing it on weekends until I finished it this Saturday.  It suffers unfortunately with a lot of the same flaws as ToCS1, and remains a subseries of the overall Trails series that I can only recommend to dedicated JRPG lovers.


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Tuesday, April 3, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archive #1) by Brandon Sanderson





Despite having read over 250 books in the past 3 years, I've somehow never gotten to reading the works of Brandon Sanderson.  But in June of last year, Tor.com gave away a free copy of The Way of Kings, the first book in his Epic Fantasy Series the Stormlight Archive, so I've been meaning to rectify that in a timespan when I had a gap between when library books are due.  And when I finally had one, I decided to power through this 1000+ page book in order to see how I'd like a Sanderson series.

And I found that I enjoyed The Way of Kings but didn't really love it.  This is the first 1000 page book I've read since maybe The Dance With Dragons (there's been a few books close to 800 pages), and it really felt its length, taking a long time for events to play out as they were inevitably going to.  It also made a habit of ditching certain characters for long periods of time, which I'd forgotten how much I found annoying.  In that vein, it also goes long stretches of time - sometimes over 200 pages - with nary a female character to be found (something I've really noticed after all the other books I've read).  The end result is that I'm not sure I'll be continuing with the series even though I enjoyed this book overall.

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Monday, April 2, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Penric's Fox by Lois McMaster Bujold




Penric's Fox is the fifth published novella in Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric and Desdemona series, but it's the first to be published out of order chronologically.  It's actually a midquel, taking place between "Penric and the Shaman" and "Penric's Mission", and really serves as somewhat of a direct sequel to Penric and the Shaman.

For those new to the Penric stories, they follow Penric, a young man who accidentally becomes the host of a chaos demon in a fantasy world, when its previous bearer, a temple sorcerer, unexpectedly dies as she is traveling nearby.  Demons in this world can give the bearer the ability to use chaos magic (or uphill magic, at a cost), but have their own personalities, with older demons having multiple personalities, each one based upon the personality and experiences of a former host.  Penric takes the unusual - maybe unique - step of naming his demon Desdemona, and the banter between the two (counting Des as one being, which she really isn't) is a prominent feature of the series as he goes on various adventures.

Note:  You shouldn't start the series with this novella, but you could jump in right after Penric's Demon.  Still you'll be better off having read Penric and the Shaman as well prior to this one.


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