Book Review: The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander
Brooke Bolander jumps from stories to novellas with The Only Harmless Great Thing, her #Tordotcompublishing novella. The novella is a strongly affecting and moving story that proves that her emotional strengths in reaching an audience do translate from her short stories to novella length. Brooke Bolander first came to my literary attention with “Our Talons can crush Galaxies”, her Nebula and Hugo nominated story in Uncanny magazine that mixed Gods, revenge and a very sharp, short package. When I heard that Bolander was writing a novella that was an alternate history that involved the radium girls, a part of history I only had the vaguest notions about, I was thus intrigued. What could and would the author do at novella length in an alternate history? I was not sure, but I wanted to find out.
Book Review: The Binti Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor
Binti is a prodigy among her people, the Himba, in a mid-future world constructed by author Nnedi Okorafor. Binti’s desire to go the finest University in the galaxy breaks all sorts of norms. Binti’s like that, though, breaking norms and boundaries as she finds her way to the University, back home, and what happens thereafter. Binti’s story is told in Okorafor’s Binti, Binti: Home and the finale of the trilogy, Binti: Masquerade.
Book Review: The Armored Saint by Myke Cole
Suffer no wizard to live” Myke Cole is known for his service in the military, being the endless butt of jokes from Sam Sykes on twitter, Trigger Discipline, being a breakout star of the CBS TV show Hunted and writing modern fantasy about how the military would deal with the Return of Magic to the world (The Shadow Ops series). With The Armored Saint, Cole expands his oeuvre in the writing sphere to secondary world fantasy.
Book Review: The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune by JY Yang
Releasing books in a series in quick succession is nothing new. An author sells multiple volumes, already written, which come out in relatively short order with each other. It is far far less common, however, for a publisher to release multiple works by an author at the same time. It’s even rarer to have a pair of twinned works, who inform and influence each other. In The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune, two entangled novellas have been released by a new talent on the SF scene, JY Yang.
Book Review: The Harbors of the Sun by Martha Wells
I’ve made no bones of the fact that I am a fan of Martha Wells. I’ve read her work, in toto, since the nineties, starting in those days when I took a look at Nebula and Hugo nomination lists and took them as straight-up reading guides. Her Ile-Rien Nebula-nominated novel Death of the Necromancer introduced me to her work, then, and I moved forward from there. The Cloud Roads, in 2011, started a new universe for her. A world with many humanoid species living in a welter of civilizations and cultures, current and past. A world where two species above all were focused. The Fell, ravenous, destructive and dangerous shapeshifters, their Flights devastating to all, a threat to any and every community. And then there were the Raksura, a shapeshifting species far, far more benign to their neighbors. A species rich in culture and internal society, a matrilineal culture built around courts ruled by Queens, with their consorts and a couple of subvarieties of the species providing a rich social environment. One problem the Raksura have is that their more aggressive flying forms have more than a passing resemblance to the Fell, and so with few exceptions, the Raksura treat with other species in their humanoid form secretly, or not at all. Into this mix, enter Moon…
Paul Weimer’s Month of Joy: Sometimes Image IS Everything
27 years ago, I remember seeing commercials for the Canon Rebel film camera, with tennis player Andre Agassi saying “Image is everything”. And since the Internet remembers and stores everything, that thirty-second commercial from 1990 is on Youtube. Go ahead, watch it. At the time, I thought “Well, that’s dumb. Photography is dumb. Image is not everything, substance is. How shallow, how banal.” Heck, I didn’t even know what an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera was. Cameras could…change lenses? Who knew?
