Book Review: Girl Reporter by Tansy Rayner Roberts
Living up to the standards of your mother is no easy thing sometimes. Especially when you are Friday Valentina, daughter of Tina Valentina. Tina Valentina broke barriers as a girl reporter interviewing the Australian superhero Solar and breaking news about Australian superheroes for decades. To this day, Tina Valentina is THE Girl Reporter. That’s a lot to live up to. Living in the 21st century, instead of writing for outfits like Women’s Weekly, Friday has a YouTube channel where she covers superheroes in her own way, like mother, like daughter. Hey, she’s just gotten one million hits on her channel. Friday’s huge! She’s also grown up in a world where superheroes are real and a thing, and she is possibly the daughter of one, or at least all the gossip and tabloids suggest so anyway. Her mother doesn’t talk about that either.
Paul Weimer’s Best of 2017 and Award Eligibility Post
The year 2017. What a year, huh? Your humble correspondent was named the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund recipient. This means that I got to go on a subsidized trip to Lexicon, the 2017 New Zealand National SF convention, and Continuum, the 2017 Australia National SF convention. I’ve talked about it here, and on the podcast, and you can always still for a $7 donation get yourself a copy of the DUFF report. All donations go to the Fund so that in 2018, a NZ/AUS fan will come to the United States in a reciprocal trip to the one I took this year. The Down Under Fan Fund Report is eligible for nomination for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. I myself am Hugo eligible for Best Fan Writer on the basis of that report, the reviews you read here, and the reviews and articles I have at Tor, BN Sci Fi, and elsewhere. And Skiffy and Fanty is eligible for best Fancast. (SFF Audio, which I am also on, is also Hugo-eligible, by the way.)
Book Review: Windhome by Kristin Landon
An expedition to an alien planet goes horribly wrong, and the survivors try and find their way amongst a most alien culture in Windhome, by Kristin Landon. Forced quickly to survive with reduced numbers and a fear of what has occurred, the expedition’s goal to make contact with the locals and find evidence of aliens who have ravaged worlds, including the very world they have landed on, is the core of the plot. The heart of the book, though, is the social and sociological relations the three human survivors have with the tall furred aliens who live on the cold and heavily glaciated planet. Windhome is very much in the grips of an ice age, with continental glaciers having marched as far as they have in our own world’s most recent glacial maximum. The author does an excellent job with designing an alien species, the Anokothu, living on such a world, especially one that has recently suffered devastation and loss that has only narrowed the margins of safety and surpluses needed for life. The author provides some twists to their biology that inform and help drive the narrative. This is an alien society that is more egalitarian in some ways, but in other ways the values of the aliens are orthogonal to those of human and human society. They may be humanoid and look in the vaguest sense like humans, but the author makes it clear that they are simply not humans with funny rubber masks. This is also true of other species on the world, which have analogues to Earth animals, but definitely are not. Their riding animals, for example, may be used in the way of horses, but they are dangerous carnivores, and have to be handled carefully.
Book Review: Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden
Artificial Intelligences, Gods and Goddesses, tailored viruses gone wrong, mind-expanding drugs, political and social turmoil and more, all in a near-future South Africa, is the matrix where Nicky Drayden embeds an assortment of disparate and diverse characters in her debut novel Prey of Gods. The author’s penchant for mixing a variety of characters and a variety of genre elements that do not seem to match together or work together at first makes the novel one of the most intriguing and unpredictably diverse novels I have read in 2017. There are a number of threads and plots and stories going on through the novel in what at first appears to be a discordant tangle, but in truth is a layered and complex story that eventually comes together. The author slowly allows the silos of stories and characters and their individual genre elements to come together and mix, and recombine in the latter portions of the novel. It’s probably easiest to describe the individual silos and what’s going on, one by one, as a sense of what Drayden is trying to do in the novel.
Book Review: City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is as elusive and complicated as its main character, Nahiri. When we meet Nahiri, it is 18th century Cairo under tenuous French control. She lives in a poor section of the city, not far from the Necropolis. She’s a healer, a con artist, and a thief who is willing to rob places while the owners are away. And yet she has power and ability she herself does not quite understand, a nature that is fragile as is her position. This sets up the novel starting off, anyway, as a historical fantasy, a historical urban fantasy at that. The novel switches gears, however, when Nahiri accidentally summons a djinn. Soon on the run, Nahiri and the djinn, Dara, are traveling across the Middle East to a hidden city of the djinn, Daevabad. There, they encounter Prince Ali, already chafing under the reign of his father and the future reign of his brother, and a city on the edge of change, or destruction. We get intrigue, political agitation, ancient secrets and much more within the bounds of the city.
Book Review: Three Neo-Lovecraftian novellas from Tor.com Publishing
In the last two years, Tor.Com’s publishing division has been publishing novellas and novels engaging with elements of Lovecraft’s Mythos. With the body of Lovecraft’s work outside of copyright or at least in dispute, the Mythos has proven a fertile ground in recent years for authors who want to explore Lovecraft, react to it, make it their own. In Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin Kiernan, the author ties together elements of Lovecraft along with her own creation of the mysterious Signalman, a government agent of rather unusual provenance. Add in a mysterious contact in the vicinity of Pluto, a distinctive narrative voice, and a narrative told out of sequence. It’s Lovecraft as seen through a strong literary bent, which is perhaps 180 degrees away from Lovecraft’s Pulp homeground. And amazingly, for being everything that Lovecraft is not, it is unquestionably in dialogue and an addition to the Mythos. Kieran manages to bring the Mythos to literary fiction. Kiernan’s skills bring a whole new look at Lovecraft’s work. The Signalman as a character is a real star whose development and direction by the author makes him leap off of the page. It’s perhaps the less accessible of the new crop of Neo-Lovecraftian fiction of what I have read from Tor, meaning that I would not recommend readers from a SFF and Lovecraft bent start here. The unique voice and style are singular and are not really indicative of the form. This is a novella, though, that I would hand someone who was deeply immersed in literary fiction, familiar with its forms, and wanted to try something with a fantastic bent. In some ways, they are an even better audience than someone who has read Lovecraft and SFF. The other two novellas are on far more solid SFF ground, although with their own twist.
