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Mining the Genre Asteroid: An Elephant for Aristotle

Cover of an Elephant for Aristotle, featuring a man and woman in antique costumes, with an elephant and soldiers in the background.

“… This reinforces the clear point of view that De Camp promotes in the book, and that is one of multiculturalism and diversity being good things for people to experience and for polities to have. Time and again, having a wide and diverse group, or tribe, or nation is superior, clearly, to monoculture alternatives.”

Book Review: The Cost of Power: Return, by Joyce Reynolds-Ward

Cover of The Cost of Power: Book One: Return, by Joyce Reynolds-Ward. Orange-gold lettering against a dark red background, with gold decorations on the borders.

Gabe and Ruby’s story is the heart of The Cost of Power: Return, by Joyce Reynolds-Ward. Their story in this iteration, looking at the oeuvre of the author, is to be one of a series of futures/worlds in a multiverse of stories revolving around the Martinieres in general and Gabe and Ruby as well.

Book Review: Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham

Cover of Age of Ash by Daniel Abraham: Book One of the Kithamar trilogy. Features a woman's face superimposed onto a city map.

This is not a non-fiction book, there definitely is a protagonist and her name is Alys.  But in a real way, this novel (and I am going to venture, the entire series) really has the city of Kithamar as its real protagonist and telling Alys’ story is a way to tell part of the story of Kithamar.

Book Review: The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

Cover of P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, featuring a dark-skinned woman wearing dreadlocks, a gold cat mask and black leather gloves, holding a pair of swords crossed across her chest.

In all, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a lean and mean novella that goes down like liquid fire and leaps through the reader’s mind like dancing across rooftops in Tal Abisi.

Review: The Warden by Daniel M. Ford

Cover of The Warden, by Daniel M. Ford, featuring a female figure apparently casting some kind of spell on a cloaked figure, amid a wilderness that's partly dark and partly pink.

… So, once things do kick off, we get a lot of fun action sequences, a main character learning to do better and learning to adapt her city and courtly ways to the wild frontier, to tackle a problem far bigger and dangerous than she imagined, and torn between wanting to stick it out and wanting to decamp for other climes. …