Wednesday, October 10, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Novella Review: In the Vanishers' Palace by Aliette de Bodard




Full Disclosure:  In the Vanishers' Palace was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley in advance of the novella's release on October 16, 2018 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way (if I'd not liked the book, I just would not have reviewed it). 

   In the Vanishers' Palace is the newest novella from SF/F author Aliette de Bodard (who I've previously reviewed on this blog here and here).  The author described it as "dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast where they are both women & the Beast is a dragon, inspired by Vietnamese myths" and to some extent, that's a pretty accurate summation of what you're getting here.  But that's an oversimplification that doesn't do justice to the story.  What this story definitely is though is an utterly charming and wonderful novella that I quite wholly recommend.


Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Severance by Ling Ma




Severance is a really interesting short novel, one that reminded me of a few other novels in the very basics of its plot and its plot structure but definitely felt unique in how it approached this plot.  On the surface, it's a post-apocalyptic piece of scifi, set after a disease called Shen Fever wiped out most of the world, with the story alternating between following our protagonist, Candace Chen, before the fall of society and afterwards.

What makes this different from some similar plot setups (for example, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven comes to mind) is that the disease in question isn't simply some plot device for starting the apocalypse.  Instead, the concept of Shen Fever - that it makes its victims obsessed with constantly repeating an ordinary part of life over and over until they die - is contrasted with the ordinary lives of people in general, both before and after The End, to create a rather interesting dynamic.  The result is a post-apocalyptic novel with some interesting thoughts about our lives today, although I still felt this short novel (just under 300 pages) is probably slightly too long.

Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, October 8, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Clockwork Boys by T Kingfisher




Clockwork Boys is the first of a duology of short novels by T Kingfisher (which for those who don't know, is children's fantasy author Ursula Vernon's adult fantasy pen name).  For those unfamiliar with Vernon/Kingfisher, her fantasy works exhibit an incredible amount of imagination, often resulting in some pretty unique combinations of ideas, with wit and humor even in some stories that can get pretty dark.

Clockwork Boys is pretty much exactly that - a dark (though not TOO dark) fantasy story featuring a series of DnD like characters (A Paladin, a Rogue, an Assassin, and a Monk) on a suicide mission against a foe that has seemingly been unstoppable.  It's very enjoyable....but also very much half of the story to be told, with the second half clearly saved for the sequel.  Still, for the price it is online ($4.99), it's worth a look:


Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, October 5, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust




Some good books are straightforward and pretty easy to review.  Bad books are also fairly easy to review (most of the time) because it's easy to point out their flaws and leave it at that.  And then there are books which are simply....out there, doing a whole lot of crazy things at once, succeeding-at least some of the time, resulting in a pretty strange reading experience that leaves you with a lot to think about and you with some confusion over whether or not the book is good or not.

The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad is one such book, if you couldn't tell from the title.  While sometimes its narrative is pretty straightforward (usually when our main hero is telling the story) for large parts of the book it is utterly all over the place - with different characters talking and describing things in very very different ways, as if the book was being spoken aloud instead of just being text (that there is no audiobook version of this book is both ironic and kind of appropriate, as it would ruin a large part of this effect).  Oh and the book is incredibly nerdy, with references up the wazoo to nerd culture - it's not exactly a Black version of Ready Player One - the nerd culture references are more incidental than a specifically important part of the plot - but I guess it's kind of close.

More after the Jump

Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Wednesday, October 3, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Born to the Blade (Season 1) by Michael Underwood, Malka Older, Cassandra Khaw, and Marie Brennan




Born to the Blade is one of the newer "serials" from Serial Box Publishing.  For those new to Serial Box, it is a publisher that, rather than publishing novels, publishes "seasons" of novelette length of stories written by a group of authors that combine to make one long story, as if each story is an "episode" of a TV Show, with new episodes coming out every week during a season.  I've really enjoyed one Serial Box series - Bookburners - and had mixed results with some of the other, so I was curious about Born to the Blade when I saw it was written by a bunch of writers I've enjoyed in other works.

And for the most part I enjoyed Born to the Blade, although the season ends just as it's getting really interesting and wasn't completely satisfying.  It creates a fantasy world where the world's powers live on islands in the sky and where magic is crafted by skilled wielders of blades who carve sigils to various effects and where diplomacy between the world's powers is ostensibly done by duels with such blades.  And it contains people whose birth place's provide magical birthrights that alter their very beings in different ways, adding even more variety to this world.  Add in some interesting characters, each with their own agendas and rarely fitting into categories of "good" or "evil" (although there are some clear good and bad guys), and you have a very interesting story that I look forward to reading more of in a second season.

Note:  With the exception of Bookburners Season 3, I've generally not read Serial Box seasons as intended, binging them as if they were novels instead of episodes of a TV show.  Same thing for me here, so keep that in mind: my experience may not be quite the intended one.     
Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: In the Labyrinth of Drakes by Marie Brennan




In the Labyrinth of Drakes is the fourth book (of 5) of Marie Brennan's Memoirs of Lady Trent, which follow Isabella, Lady Trent, as she travels the world to study Dragons.  I've said before how much I've enjoyed this series (which got a "Best Series" nomination in last year's Hugo Awards), and I'd previously noted that the series had seemed to get better with every additional book.  The series through 3 books had become maybe a bit formulaic (though again, I enjoyed that formula), but In the Labyrinth of Drakes actually mixes up that formula quite a bit - and the result is the best book in the series so far.

As you might expect, the fourth book in a series is not the best place to pick it up, and that's definitely the case here - this book heavily picks up plot threads from the prior three books and a character from book 3 returns and plays a major role here and new readers will miss quite a lot.  But this book pays off those older plot threads in spades, and its final 40% just made me incredibly happy when I was listening to it (as an audiobook) in the car.


Read more »
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, October 1, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Cold Fire by Kate Elliott




Cold Fire is the second book in Kate Elliott's Spiritwalker trilogy after the series' first book, Cold Magic (Review Here).  I liked Cold Magic a bit, but it was a bit slow at first and involved an incredible amount of worldbuilding, such that while the plot eventually moved on a pretty great pace (I couldn't put it down in the second half), it was almost hard to absorb everything the book was throwing at me.  Cold Fire's story picks up immediately after Cold Magic and makes damn good on all that worldbuilding, even as it expands the world further, taking us from an alternate version of Europe to an alternate version of the Caribbean.

This is the fourth completed series by Kate Elliott that I've had the pleasure of reading (Jaran, Crossroads, Court of Fives), and Cold Fire continues a trend from those series:  The second book is at least as good as the first, if not substantially better.  And Cold Fire is really good - our main character and her love interest remain excellent and interesting characters, some of the secondary characters previously only given small mention are expanded in interesting ways, and the plot surprises on numerous occasions.

Note: If it wasn't obvious from the above, you will be endlessly confused if you start the story here instead of with Cold Magic.  Don't do that.

More after the Jump:


Read more »
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)