Guest Post: Tremontaine: Ending the Story By Racheline Maltese
Tremontaine, a serial fiction project set in the world of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, is coming to the end. Racheline Maltese of the Tremontaine Creative Team gives her thoughts and reflections. After four seasons, Tremontaine, a serial fiction project set in the world of Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, is coming to the end. As someone who has worked on it since the beginning, since before it was even definitely a real thing, this is filled with feelings both of sadness and success.
Book Review: MJ-12: Endgame by Mike Martinez
The MJ-12 series (MJ-12 Inception, MJ-12: Shadows) comes to a successful conclusion in Mike Martinez’s MJ-12 Endgame, where a plot by Lavrentiy Beria to take control of the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death will help decide the fate of Variants across the world. MJ-12: Endgame does not waste any time in dropping us into the world of Mike Martinez’s MJ-12 ‘verse, an alternate world where people given superpowers by two mysterious vortexes at the end of the second World War are recruited into the intelligence agencies of the USA and the USSR to covertly thwart the plots and plans of the other side.
Book Review: Daughters of Forgotten Light by Sean Grigsby
Sean Grigsby’s Daughters of Forgotten Light uses a ’70s movie sensibility for the story of a women’s prison in SPAAACE and the story of their struggle to survive and escape their fate. On a distant planet reached by a wormhole, a colony has been turned into one for unsocial women. Unsocial men are easy to handle—put them into the army and have them fight for the dwindling resources and living space on a world that has tipped decisively into a rapid onset Ice Age. But unsocial women? Well, they aren’t suitable for the army, or so the United Continent of North America thinks, and so to reduce the excess population of such undesirables, they are sent off to the colony. Every so often, food ships send food to the colony.
Book Review: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera combines a love of popular music, Eurovision and a space science fiction sensibility in the grand tradition set by novels like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes were once THE punk band in music. But a death, a breakup, a failed career as a soloist, and Decibel Jones’ post Absolute Zero career is in the toilet. Pity that now that the aliens have arrived, Decibel Jones is the last hope for humanity. The aliens have a test, you see, to determine if a species is worthy of joining the galactic family, or should be blasted into oblivion—whether they can perform decently at the Metagalactic Grand Prix, a song and performance contest that the galactic civilizations put on every year as a way to channel energies that once caused the galaxy to erupt in interstellar war.
Book Review: Gift of Griffins by V.M. Escalada
Kerida Nast, bound to the Griffin Weimerk, and desperately trying to save her kingdom from invasion, returns in Gift of Griffins, sequel to Halls of Law. Gift of Griffins introduces a new major character even as the plight of Kerida and her allies and friends deepens under the boot of overseas invasion. When last we left Kerida Nast, unwilling magic user, Talent, she had gained some semblance of a fragile alliance with a new Luqs, ruler of her country, with the exiled inhabitants of the tunnels beneath the mountain range that keeps the invading forces from overrunning the rest of the land, and forged a connection to the griffin Weimerk. In Gift of Griffins, V. M. Escalada continues that story as Kerida seeks to fulfill the entirety of the Prophecy and unite her country behind Jerek to try and drive the invaders out.
Guest Post: Finding the Dark by Rachel Caine
Today on Skiffy and Fanty, Rachel Caine, part of the Dead Air team, a podcast/serial story collaboration she is doing with Gwenda Bond and Carrie Ryan, tells us about finding the darknes in thrillers and what her new project has to offer. I started reading my dad’s books when I was, well, old enough to figure out where he kept them, which was way too young. Some of them were what would be euphemistically called “men’s adventure” today; James Bond-type books, only with more sex and violence. Some were horror. But I most remember the opening of one of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels … a book about a murderer backing a woman into a corner in her apartment, and relentlessly slashing back and forth at her like a sideways pendulum. It haunted me. I couldn’t get it out of my head, no matter how much fun space exploration science fiction I read, or high fantasy, or historical novels (all of which I loved).
