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.

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Book Review: MJ-12 Shadows by Michael Martinez

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Syria, in the Middle East, is full of turmoil. Violence, political chaos, powers outside the region meddling and backing various factions and individuals, only enflaming and extending the conflict. The government there is on the edge of collapse, as outside agencies and internal struggles threaten to destroy Syria entirely. Good people trapped in a horrible situation that there seems no way out of, and everything even the United States tries to do just makes it all worse. A novel detailing the modern-day tragedy there? Sadly, no. The year is 1949, and we are in the midst of an alternate history, a history where the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War was marked by the emergence of paranormally gifted individuals, individuals who are scooped up by the espionage apparatuses of the United States and the Soviet Union, as the game of espionage takes a fantastic turn.

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Book Review: Buried Heart by Kate Elliott

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All good things must come to an end, and with Buried Heart, author Kate Elliott brings to a conclusion the YA Court of Fives trilogy. Talking about plot developments in the third and final volume of a trilogy is difficult and perhaps foolish to try, so I will instead discuss the essential theme of this volume, one that has been slowly surfacing through Court of Fives and Poisoned Blade, but here gets its full fulminating flowering: Revolution. In Buried Heart, Efea’s oppressed status, something that the author has been delineating from the very first chapter of Court of Fives, comes out in full force. Of course within the potential revolution of Efea against the tyranny that holds it is the struggle of powers around it, and the struggles of the current royal occupants to hold the throne against kin and family. The first two novels, which suggested that Jessamy, the Spider, would be subsumed into that dynamic entirely, prove to have been a false flag. In the third volume, Jess finds herself caught between father and mother, her lover and her land, and must make often difficult choices as the people of Efea struggle to reclaim their freedom.

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“What I did on my Summer Vacation”, or how an accident caused me to be the 2017 DUFF Fan Fund representative.

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One of the hats I’ve picked up and worn this year is to have been nominated and won the 2017 Down Under Fan Fund. As a result of that, I am currently the Fan Fund Administrator, and as a result I attended Lexicon and Continuum, the National Science Fiction conventions of New Zealand, and Australia, met fans and writers from the Antipodes, and got to see some of the countryside as well. But I sense you may have questions, and I am here to answer them. What’s a Fan Fund? Even in the early days of SF Fandom, fans communicated across the globe. A couple of fans pooled funds in the 1940s for some transatlantic exchanges between England and the US, bringing fans together, sharing our love of SF. These exchanges led to the formalization of the exchange, the Trans Atlantic Fan Fund (TAFF), in the 1950s. In alternating years, a fan travels from North America to Europe, and a fan travels from Europe to North America. The goal is to attend conventions, meet fans, and exchange knowledge and love of science fiction. In the days before the internet, where slow postal exchanges of fanzines meant that knowing what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic was a slow process, TAFF helped bring fans face to face.

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Book Review: Blackthorne by Stina Leicht

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Eledore has fallen! In the wake of the near-genocidal attack on the already plague-ridden kingdom, the remnants and survivors of the attack by the Acrasian Empire have several pressing problems. First, the Acrasians, now that they have smashed the Kingdom, consider the flinders to be easy pickings. Kainen hunted for sport, territory conquered, a proud kingdom ruined. Worse, the remaining Kainen polities, like the Waterborne Nations, and Ytlain, have to deal with this new political reality, and Eledore’s fallen status means that its people must often go cap in hand to their brethren, and suffer and bargain for what they once could ask for freely. Even more of a problem is the problem that Eledore has stood athwart for centuries and no longer can: The otherdimensional, eldritch problem of the malorum. Now that the gates are opening and malorum are coming through, the survivors of Eledore are under literal siege from this threat. Not that the Acrasians are as well off as they might be. Yes, the great victory against the Eledorean menace has occurred. But in the wake of that victory, the local and resident nonhuman population, overt and covert, have been restive. Some have even been seeking escape from the Regnum, to get beyond the borders of a state slowly and inexorably tightening into Caesarism. Besides the high level political problems, seen only at a distance and remove, the street-level problems of life in the Regnum are multiplying. The malorum are now a looming threat on the streets of Novus Salernum itself. 

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Book Review: Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood by Marie Brennan

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A woman appears out of nowhere, with no memory of who she is.  She is bound to a task by a spell she cannot escape, as if she were a summoned demon (and perhaps she IS, she doesn’t know). The woman, even her name eluding her, makes her way on a perilous journey to obtain what is needed for a band of rebels to overthrow a tyranny. The woman remembers skills, certain very useful skills, even if things like her name and what she is elude her memory. She may not know who she is, but she can climb, travel through wilderness, and fight. Her story to find out what she is, who she is and what she was are intertwined with the quests she has been set, and later, undertakes on her own. Cold-Forged Flame and Lightning in the Blood, Tor.com novellas, begin to tell the story of a summoned spirit, an Archon, an Archon who learns that her name, or at least part of it, is Ree.

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Book Review: The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis

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A pair of intriguing, antagonistic characters, steampunk airships, a dry sense of humor, and feats of derring-do are at the heart of The Guns Above, a debut novel by Robyn Bennis. The novel’s strong focus on the action beats as well as the main characters marry a sense of character along with large helpings of crunchy detail to a finely honed level. Lieutenant Josette Dupre is the first female airship commander in Gandian history. She is determined, ambitious, intelligent, strong-willed, and has a delightfully dry and snarky sense of humor. She’s also keenly aware of the precarious nature of women in the Signal Corps, and her own command an even more tenuous position. At the beginning of the novel, she is convinced that she has lost her command after the destruction of the Osprey, even in service of stopping an enemy advance. Thus when she instead is given the brand new but experimental, cantankerous, and ill-designed airship Mistral, she will not allow a command, even of a potential deathtrap, to be taken from her. In a real sense, the novel is a story of the relationship of a commander to her new airship, with all the pitfalls and joys of that, especially as it turns to be a trial under fire.

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