Wednesday, July 31, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: City of Bones by Martha Wells




City of Bones is one of the first novels written by Martha Wells, one of my favorite SciFi/Fantasy authors around these days, and is one of her few stand-alone works.  It's also one of the last works by Wells that I hadn't already picked up, so it's been on my list for a long time - especially since Hoopla has it available in audiobook format.  Wells is a master at writing worlds with fantastically different settings, as well as characters who start out as interesting and only grow more so throughout, and I strongly recommend practically all of her work to anyone looking for something new.

City of Bones, despite being an earlier work (her second wholly original novel), shares all of these excellent traits.  Featuring a dessert fantasy world with leftover relics from missing magical predecessors laid about, a protagonist who's part of a genetically altered species that's discriminated against, and forces both magical and otherwise for everyone to push through, it kept me absorbed right from the start.  It may not be my favorite Wells work, but well...it's pretty great, and that's a damn high standard that Wells sets with her bibliography, and someone new to her work wouldn't do wrong starting here.

Note: I read this as an audiobook, and the reader is very strong as usual....but it means that I'm guessing as to some of the spellings of names and such, so apologies for any errors below.  

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Monday, July 29, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Dragon Republic by R.F. Kuang




Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on August 6, 2019 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.

 The Dragon Republic is the follow up to R.F. Kuang's debut novel, The Poppy War (Review Here), easily one of the strongest novels of 2018.  It was also one of the most brutal and dark novels by its end, being based upon real life events that took place during the Sino-Japanese wars, with a new fantasy bent.  I am not a fan of grimdark books that are dark for the sake of being dark, but Kuang used her fantasy parallels to real life events to powerful ends to a satisfying if incredibly dark conclusion, leaving a reader breathless by the story's end.

So The Dragon Republic has a lot to live up to as the follow up to The Poppy War, and it doesn't quite manage to pull it off, although it's still compelling through the end.  Whereas the first book dealt with the atrocities of the Sino-Japanese wars as its base, this book has parallels to the effects of Western Imperialism/Colonization, with the fantasy equivalent of Westerners showing up to ostensibly aid some of the parties in the conflicts/rebuilding that result from the end of The Poppy War.  Any readers who were shocked and surprised at what happened in the last book will almost certainly not be here, but the feeling of dread I felt instead was nearly equally as powerful, as the book's great characters try to find a way forward in the face of having perhaps nothing left. 

Trigger Warning:  Rape, War Atrocities, and Genocide.  The First Book in this series was based upon the Sino-Japanese Wars (particularly the second one), and as such analogous events occured in that book and those are referenced here.  This book deals with the after effects of this and parallels to Western imperialism in China, where the atrocities aren't always as overt...but they're there, so again, fair warning.

Warning: Spoilers for The Poppy War cannot be avoided below.  If you intend to read The Poppy War unspoiled, stop here.


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Saturday, July 27, 2019

Reviewing the 2019 Hugo Nominees: The Hugo Award for Best Series




Hugo Award voting opened at the start of May and continues through the end of July - just next week!  For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon.  As I did the last two years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.

Other Hugo Award Looks:
My Picks for Best Novel:  See HERE.
My Picks for Best Novella:  See HERE.
My Picks for Best Novelette:  See HERE.
My Picks for Best Short Story: See HERE.
My Picks for The Campbell Award for Best New Writer: See HERE.
My Picks for the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Novel: See HERE.

The Best Series Award is the youngest True Hugo Award (the Lodestar Award doesn't count apparently), having come into existence 2 years ago, with the award going both prior years to Lois McMaster Bujold: first for the Vorkosigan Saga and then for her World of the Five Gods.  This year Bujold isn't on the ballot, so we're definitely going to have a brand new winner.

I admit, I wasn't going to actually make a post on this award, since unlike last year, I didn't expect to actually make much of a dent in reading a significant part of each nominee -  the nominees include 30 (maybe more if I miscounted) novels, multiple novellas, and many many pieces of other short fiction.  But in the end, I managed to read just enough of each nominee to feel comfortable voting for the award....although I have some misgivings about the way this award works that still color my judgment.

More on that and my actual picks below the jump:

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Thursday, July 25, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Shadow Fall by Seressia Glass




Shadow Fall is the third and currently final book in Seressia Glass' Shadowchasers series, after Shadow Blade (Review Here) and Shadow Chase (Review Here).  I'd rather enjoyed the first two books in the series - which features an urban fantasy setting in which our main characters have ties to the Ancient Egyptian Gods (although other gods exist too!).  Neither of the first two books really struck me as truly great, but both were well done and fun reads with enjoyable characters, so I was happy to move on from the second book to this one pretty quickly.

And Shadow Fall is definitely a very solid conclusion to the trilogy, although it does make me wish for more stories in this universe with these characters - the ending is satisfying but leaves the possibility open to such a continuation.  Given how long ago this series was published, I'm guessing a continuation isn't coming, but I'd definitely read one if it ever did: the main heroine as well as the rest of this world are well worth my time.  The book still has some of the same issues as its prior installments with regards to some of the minor characters, but overall, I do recommend it and the series to others who enjoy urban fantasy for sure.

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Wednesday, July 24, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: A Brightness Long Ago by Guy Gavriel Kay


Guy Gavriel Kay is not a new author - by contrast he's fairly well established in the genre to the point where I've had several people on twitter joke he's one of the few authors I mentioned reading they actually recognized.  But until A Brightness Long Ago, I'd never managed to read any of his works - his last released novel wasn't available at my library until recently and I just had plenty to read of other authors that I never got to him.  But somehow this latest novel of his, which got a few very good reviews in places I read, was available from the library pretty quickly after release, so I put it on reserve and finally got to give his work at try.

And I'm very glad I did, because A Brightness Long Ago is very very good and very different from much of what I've read before.  Set in a world based heavily upon renaissance-era Italy*, this is a book that basically does not really have a plot - this book is entirely based upon its characters, their interactions, development, and relationships.  And these characters are utterly fantastic throughout, driving me to rush through this book far quicker than I expected.  So yeah, this book is highly recommended, and this will not be the last Kay book I check out.

*Apparently this setting is a recurring one in some of Kay's works, and some characters recur.  As I've read none of those prior works (yet), I can say that no prior knowledge is needed whatsoever for this book.  
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Tuesday, July 23, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Shadow Chase by Seressia Glass




Shadow Chase is the second book in Seressia Glass' "Shadowchasers" trilogy, following up on her book, "Shadow Blade" (review here).  Shadow Blade was fun if unremarkable - an urban fantasy series taking place in Atlanta featuring Non-White protagonists, a world built in part upon Egyptian Mythology (with one prominent non Egyptian but still African God as well), and a classic battle between light and darkness.  Still, I'm a pretty big fan of urban fantasy, and while unremarkable Shadow Blade was well done, with a mythology I haven't read often, so I asked my library to consider buying the sequels.  And a few weeks ago, the NYPL did buy both sequels, so I took them out for a try.

And again, Shadow Chase is a pretty well done second book in the series.  The book expands the series' scope, leaving Atlanta for other parts of the world, further builds upon the developments and relationships between our characters, while continuing to tell a story of urban fantasy featuring beings out of Egyptian Myth.  The book ends with a payoff that's maybe a bit of an anticlimax, but it still all works to form a very solid urban fantasy novel.  So yeah, if you like the genre, this isn't a bad choice of series to pick up.

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Monday, July 22, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Red Waters Rising by Laura Anne Gilman




Red Waters Rising is the third book in Laura Anne Gilman's "The Devil's West" series* which now contains 3 novels, a novella (which follows this book), and a bunch of short stories.  I have mixed feelings about this series - the first book in it, Silver on the Road, is one of the first books I read back when I started to get back into reading 3 years ago, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  But the second book in the series, The Cold Eye, was a major disappointment to me, which soured me a bit on the series.  And for whatever reason (sales, I guess), this third book wasn't available at any library I had access to (even on inter-library loan), so I was unable to see if the series turned around until my library purchased the book recently.

*I recall from a while back that this was not intended to be a trilogy, but reading somewhere that sales had forced Gilman to end the series with this book.  So I'm not calling this the conclusion or the series a trilogy in this review, even though there doesn't appear to be any plans for new works in this universe as far as I can tell.

And well, while the setting remains fantastic, the main duo of characters remain interesting, and Red Waters Rising containing a setup for a plot that could go in interesting directions....this book is more like its predecessor than the first novel - in other words, a bit of a disappointment, particularly in its ending....which just happens without warning.  Again, I like so much about this world, which is a weird west fantasy circa 1800 in which The Devil has been keeping the US and other foreign powers out of the Louisiana Territory, which features not only human settlers (both of Native and not Native varieties) but also Magicians, Demons, and more dangerous beings.  But this book just expands the world only to do nothing with it, making it hard to recommend any reader go beyond the first book in the series.


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Thursday, July 18, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Upon a Burning Throne by Ashok K. Banker




Upon a Burning Throne is the second book I've read this year to be an SF/F adaptation of an old Indian/Sanskrit epic, The Mahbharata.  That first book was Sangu Mandanna's SF adaptation, A Spark of White Fire (Review Here), which I enjoyed a great deal, so I was interesting to see how a more fantasy-based adaptation would work.  So Upon a Burning Throne, which is exactly that: an epic fantasy adaptation of the epic, was something I have had on reserve for a while.

And, wow is it something.  I haven't read The Mahbharata, but wikipedia-ing suggests that it is a long and sprawling epic covering multiple generations and the machinations of many aspects of the divine.  And whereas A Spark of White Fire seems to distill a small part of that epic into a more concise beginning of a trilogy, Upon A Burning Throne does the opposite: it uses its background material to form the beginning of its own sprawling epic.  Is the result.....good?  Harder to say: it's certainly always interesting, but you shouldn't go into it expecting an ending that is conclusive in any way whatsoever.

More after the Jump.


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Wednesday, July 17, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Medusa Uploaded by Emily Devenport




Medusa Uploaded is the first in a SF series (trilogy?) by Emily Devenport.  I'd seen the book recommended on twitter a while back, but none of my libraries had the book, so I put it on the backburner....and then it popped up as a Hoopla audiobook.  So, months later, I took it out, to see how it would turn out. 

The result is uhhhhhh, bonkers.  The story jumps back and forth chronologically, with little rhyme or reason to such time-jumps, there are deus ex machinas throughout, and some character interactions are so over the top it's almost laughable.  And yet....I enjoyed Medusa Uploaded - it's certainly a mess that feels like the author had a billion ideas, refused to cut any, and tried to make it all work out, but it's a mess that never stops being fun and always has the reader guessing as to what will happen next.  It sure isn't boring, and a sequel is coming out this month (July).

Trigger Warning: The book features one sequence in which a noble family has a tradition of gang rapes, which is then discovered by our heroine via surveillance footage.  Nothing is shown or described, nor is the behavior glorified in any way, so it works and is believable, but if that's a problem for you, fair warning.


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Monday, July 15, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross




The Atrocity Archives is the first novel in Charles Stross' long-running series, "The Laundry Files."  Wikipedia describes the series as a combination of "Lovecraftian horror, spy thriller, science fiction, and workplace humor."  And that's a pretty accurate description of what's going on in this short novel, featuring a world where magic is powered by advanced mathematics, which has the potential to lead to nasty things from other worlds (Lovecraftian things) to enter ours if not used carefully.  The first book here introduces the British agency devoted to studying these phenomena and the agents who have to go out to deal with it - aka the Laundry.

And the result is fun.....but not particularly special?  I hadn't given the series a try until now since I have little interest in Lovecraftian takes, with notable exceptions (Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy for example), and my experience with Stross' Merchant Princes series had me mixed on his long term plotting.  But the series got nominated for Best Series this year, so I aimed to give the first two books a try: and again this first book is enjoyable and reads quickly, but never much more than that.  We'll see if book 2 is significantly better, but the first book isn't really anything particularly notable or awards worthy on its own.

Note: The first book contains a novella, The Concrete Jungle, so that is also reviewed in this post.


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SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia




The work of Silvia Moreno-Garcia has really gotten my attention over the past year, with several of her novels becoming quick favorites of mine.  I got an advance copy of Gods of Jade and Shadow and loved it (my review here), and that novel was the third work of hers that I'd read with just fantastic characters and relationships.  So having finished that novel, I quickly looked for anything else by her that I hadn't read in my library's ebook collection, and lo and behold, there was Signal to Noise, her debut novel.

And Signal to Noise is excellent - a story broken up into two time periods  in Mexico City, following two characters as magic changes their relationship in the past and as they meet once again after years apart in the present.  Once again, this book features prominently the relationship between a pair (and to a point, a trio) of characters, whose feelings for each other are apparent to the reader but not to them.  And while that could be annoying if written poorly, Moreno-Garcia writes them perfectly, as the annoying teens, and then the grown adults, that they are, so that everything makes sense, and it works pretty fantastically.  Oh and did I mention the magic based upon music?

Yeah, this one's pretty great in the end.


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Thursday, July 11, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Unraveling by Karen Lord




Unraveling is a stand-alone short novel by author Karen Lord which is advertised as being based on Caribbean storytelling (Lord is from Barbados).  The book is set in the same modern-esque world with fantasy elements as her earlier novel, Redemption in Indigo (which i have not read), and is sort of a whodunit in which a human woman is tasked by Angels to work with a few immortals to try and discover the person truly behind a scheme of killings.

But that description of Unraveling really only touches the surface of this book, and the book is less interested in the question of who is behind the killings in question than in the motives and actions of all the characters involved, and the circumstances of this world - a world in which different classes of residents/citizens of the City have different rights - that creates such motivations.  The result is certainly interesting, but the book is often very cryptic, sometimes downright confusing, and rereading old passages to try and figure out what's happening only helps somewhat.  I liked the end results, but others may find this work a bit too cryptic and all over the place for their tastes, with the non-linear storytelling being more than a little tricky to decipher.


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SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Storyteller by Traci Chee




The Storyteller is the finale of Traci Chee's fantasy trilogy which began with The Reader (Review Here) and continued with The Speaker (Review Here).  This is a trilogy that is about a world that has forgotten literacy, and of forces who seek to use the power of literacy for their own - sometimes good and sometimes evil - powerful ends.  I enjoyed the first book in this trilogy but wished it did a lot more with the setup, but the second book - The Speaker - really had me enthralled.  And so, The Storyteller wasn't going to stay on my list of "to be read" books for long and I had high expectations.

Does the Storyteller meet those expectations?  Yes and No.  On one hand, it's a hell of a story, which often goes to some very very dark places, and it's riveting throughout.  It also takes a story that already was incredibly meta - I mean the first two books featured a "Book" which contained the stories of every character within - and makes it even more Meta, in ways that in a lesser writer's hand could break the immersion of the story.  And yet, it works, and works really well.  Still, I'm not sure I particularly liked the way it ended, even if the journey to get there is excellently done.

More after the Jump:

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Wednesday, July 10, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Sharing Knife: Vol 2: Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold




Legacy is the second book in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Sharing Knife" series, which is her fantasy romance series.  It's actually the second half of what was meant to be a single book - with the first half being its predecessor "Beguilement" (Review Here).  Bujold is a much loved writer of the genre (I myself have read 21 novels and at least 6 novellas per last check of hers) and the first Sharing Knife book made it clear - unsurprisingly - that Bujold turning her talents to Romance was not going to result in any sort of letdown.

Legacy picks up right from where its predecessor left off - both in terms of series chronology and in terms of general excellence.  Bujold's characters and dialogue are always fantastic, and in the romantic couple of Fawn and Dag, she's Managed perhaps her best couple yet.  As the second half of what was once a longer book, this book deals with the couple's other family: Dag's mother and brother, as well as his greater community of Lakewalkers, who don't look too kindly upon Fawn as an outsider bride.  And it provides a satisfying ending as usual, while providing hooks for the next book (again split into two volumes) to come.

Note:  Like its predecessor (and nearly every Bujold work), I read this as an audiobook.  The reader is excellent and I do recommend the book in this format.  However, as a result of how I read the book, it's very likely I may misspell some of the names and terms of this book below, so apologies in advance.

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Tuesday, July 9, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: Unsung Heroine by Sarah Kuhn



Unsung Heroine by Sarah Kuhn:

Unsung Heroine is the latest in Sarah Kuhn's Heroine Complex series, which is one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years. For those who have somehow missed the series, don't start here, but with the first book Heroine Complex instead, but know that this is an absolutely fun series about a group of Asian American superheroines, fighting hilariously shaped demons in San Francisco, all the while trying to figure out their own personal and romantic lives (complete with sex scenes, fair warning).  Unsung Heroine is actually a break from the main trio of characters, and instead focuses upon side character, mixed-race bodyguard Lucy, and her relationship with another minor character.  It's probably the least effective of the series since it kind of feels duplicative of the first book to an extent, but I love the characters enough, along with the romance and comedy involved, that I don't mind too much.



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SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone




Max Gladstone is one of my favorite authors since I got back into reading a few years back, with his Craft Sequence containing two of my perfect score novels as well as two other really great novels that are close, and two other novels that are merely....good.  In short, his work has an incredible track record for me, and thus when it became clear that he was working on a novel that was not part of the Craft Sequence, I was pretty damn intrigued.  Empress of Forever is that novel, which takes Gladstone's skills into space opera/space-fantasy (this is far from hard sci-fi mind you).

And unsurprisingly, it's really damn good.  The book features a number of fascinating characters, a story that winds a long and windy path through various adventures, and a resolution that is truly satisfying at the end.  In a way, the way things play out reminded me a lot of Gladstone's last novel, Ruin of Angels - which is not a complaint - in how things aren't resolved via direct means: this is not a book about direct conflict, but rather one where the feelings and motives behind such conflicts and actions changes everything.  As with much of the best science fiction, it has a theme that pertains to our real world. and is easily worth your time.


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Thursday, July 4, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Fray by Rowenna Miller




Fray is the second book in Rowenna Miller's "The Unraveled Kingdom" trilogy, after last year's "Torn" (Which I reviewed here).  Torn was an odd book - it presented interesting issues about how race issues could be dangerously overlooked in a class conflict, only to punt on those issues for a standard fantasy with a romance plot between a noble and a common girl.  Even odder, the end result essentially seemed to argue that workers should trust the upper classes to provide incremental changes, with worker uprising only leading to harmful results - which did not seem to fit what the author was intending.  The book was solidly written despite this, so I was willing to give the sequel a try to fix the message, and to see where the characters went from there.

And Fray is better in this regard, telling a story that doesn't punt on the issues it raises (as much), with some well done and interesting characters, solid and interesting magic, and some definite surprises along the way.  It's very much a second novel in a trilogy - ending with a major cliffhanger for next year's conclusion - but it works in this regard as a middle episode should: expanding the world in natural ways, continuing to develop the characters, and posing new questions.  I'll be back for book 3, to see if the series can pull off a satisfying conclusion here.


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SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: King's Dragon by Kate Elliott




King's Dragon is the first in Kate Elliott's grand epic fantasy series, Crown of Stars.  Elliott is one of my favorite authors today, and Crown of Stars is the only series of hers that I'd yet to try out, mainly because it is Looooong - 7 books of 600+ pages each.  Elliott calls the series her "need to get my beloved Tolkien out of my system while commenting on and arguing with the things I think Tolkien didn’t do well or left out" series (quoting from her website), so yeah, it's a big commitment to get into.  But with my love of Elliott, I was going to get into it sooner or later.

King's Dragon, the first book in the series, is.....promising, if uneven.  The book is very slow at the beginning, and its backstory for its female protagonist is problematic (see trigger warning below) to the point where if I didn't have faith in Elliott, I'd probably have given up fairly quickly.  But the book turns into a satisfying beginning to a series, even if it very much cannot be read as a stand-alone, and the book's end game is far from clear.  I'll definitely be reading book 2, probably within the month, as soon as it gets here from my library at least.

Trigger Warning: Physical/Sexual Abuse, although the latter never is described overtly on page.  


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Tuesday, July 2, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac (Translated by Roy Kesey)




Translated fiction is a tricky thing - because not only is the reader having to deal with a story written from the perspective of a different culture - with its own norms and values - but the reader is not able to read the book in its original form, and nuances are often lost in translation, to say nothing of references.  This doesn't mean that translated fiction can't succeed - on the contrary, because works aren't as likely to get translated unless they succeed in their original country, they probably have a higher hit rate than normal fiction.  But at the same time, when they don't seem to work, I can't help but wonder how much of that is the translation rather than the author's fault.

All of which is to say that Dark Constellations rather frustrated me, and I wonder how much of that is the author's fault and how much is something being lost in translation.  This is a book that confused me, to the point where I'd have DNFed if it wasn't so short (216 pages per Amazon), and the end product just didn't make it seem like what I'd read had much point.  Honestly, I'd be even less sure of what I'd just read if it hadn't been for a few reviews I've read of this book.  So yeah, this didn't really work for me.

A short review, after the jump:

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Monday, July 1, 2019

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson




Love is the Drug is a YA near-future sci-fi novel by Alaya Dawn Johnson.  This is the book Johnson published before The Summer Prince (Which I LOVED - review here) and it actually won the Norton (Nebula) Award for best SF/F YA Novel in 2015.  So it was pretty inevitable that I was going to grab this book at some point, and when it showed up on Hoopla in audiobook form, I immediately put it on my list.

The result is a book that's definitely enjoyable, with a really strong main character and some solid side characters, such that I finished this rather quickly even for an audiobook.  It's not quite on the level of The Summer Prince - some of the aspects of the setting and the characters are a bit silly (and hilariously don't quite make sense based upon how the world works) - but it's a fun book which deals solidly with issues of race and class along the way.  There may be some minor pacing issues but overall the very solid characters make this one an enjoyable book worth your time, even if not a must-read.

Note: I read this as an audiobook, and the audiobook reader is generally good, although she doesn't do a great job at changing her voice/making it clear when the book leaves the main character's POV for end-of-chapter excerpts.  Still solid in that format tho.

More specifics after the jump:


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