Author name: Paul Weimer

Paul Weimer is a SF writer, gamer, reviewer, and podcaster and an avid amateur photographer. In addition to the Skiffy and Fanty Show, he also frequently podcasts with SFF audio. His reviews and columns can also be found at Tor.com and the Barnes and Noble SF blog. He is best seen on twitter as @princejvstin and his website.

Accelerated Growth Environment
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Book Review: Accelerated Growth Environment by Lauren C. Teffeau

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Accelerated Growth Environment is the newest SF climate fiction novella from Lauren C. Teffeau. Accelerated Growth Environment is the story of Dr. Jorna Benton. In a near- to mid-future, she is the principal scientist aboard the Climasphere, a mobile ecosphere that grows a variety of plants from different biomes. Its goal is to be a mobile nursery and a special, rapid growth environment, for plants being developed to try and help restore biomes all over the Earth. From the arctic to the desert, there is a wide variety of plants that are being developed and made ready for transplant into the world, all around the world.  It’s a big job with a big responsibility. But when things start happening to Jorna’s work, her slowly-revealed past appears to be catching up with her.

Cover of Jitterbug by Gareth L. Powell, featuring a silhouetted black rocketship against a red background with white grid planetoids, with tethered astronaut being dragged behind it against a black wake behind it.
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Review: Jitterbug by Gareth Powell

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Gareth Powell’s Jitterbug takes Powell’s talents for Space Opera and sets them into a Baxterian-like story of Big Dumb Objects, a starship crew, and the fate of humanity.  The fate of humanity and the universe is nothing new for Gareth Powell. He’s written plenty of large scale science fiction, be it Future’s Edge, with a destroyed Earth and alien artifacts, or Stars and Bones, with humanity on arks, or the Embers of Wars novels, full of Big Dumb Objects. But always, going back earlier to his Ack-Ack Macaque novels, it’s in the end about the characters, not all of them human, that really is the center of the story. In Jitterbug, however, Powell keeps his character focused style of novel and story, and enlarges the outside scale even more this time.

Masculinity in SF
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Book Review: Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future 

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Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men: No Plans for the Future  by Sara Martin is an academic study of several male authors and their relatively recent work. The book, in their own words: “Exploring a broad selection of writers and works, the fourteen chapters present a panoramic overview of men’s contributions to current SF and explore their slow but noticeable progress in the representation of gender. The impact of feminism and gender studies, and the demands of readers, have profoundly transformed men’s SF, which now presents far more caring and vulnerable male characters. The old stereotypes are being replaced by a collective reflection on how men and masculinity are changing, though the lack of a common agenda results in novels that, while exciting and often challenging, sometimes miss the chance to imagine a better, anti-patriarchal, pro-feminist future for men and for all human beings…”

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