Book Review: We Ride the Storm by Devin Madson
We Ride the Storm has author Devin Madson introduce us to the start of a fantasy epic where a tottering Empire’s spin toward disaster is seen through the eyes of a Princess, a warrior, and an assassin with a most unusual gift. Princess Miko of the Kisian Empire is an untenable position. Descended from the Otako family, she has an uneasy relationship with Emperor Kin Ts’ai, who usurped the throne and is attempting to cement his power. Formally she and her brother are of the Emperor’s family, but the Emperor is surely aware that there are many, even years later, who would flock to an Otako banner. Keeping her autonomy, keeping the chances for her brother alive, and avoiding a purge runs through Miko’s days. When a promise of marriage to try and cement a peace with the dangerous Chiltaens to the north might end Miko’s freedom forever, Or help destroy the empire should the marriage contract fail. In the meantime, Rah e’Torin, a Levanti exile from the steppe and grasslands his horse riders are from, has a problem, too. His exile, with a group of loyal men and women, have led them into a desolate land to the south, with few signs of Chiltae, their destination. There are stories of former Swords of the steppe coming south to act as mercenaries and riders for the Chiltae, but as the food and water dwindles, Rah and his followers might think they are making a mistake. And when they do meet the Chiltae, their status and role, and the fate of those who migrated before them becomes dangerously, painfully clear.
Paul’s Twitter Book List
It all started with this tweet by Paul: https://twitter.com/PrinceJvstin/status/1242909634316447746 And then the likes piled up…
Book Review: The Unspoken Name by A K Larkwood
Portals. It had to be Portals.
Best of 2019 and Award Eligibility Post
2019: Umm, yeah. Let’s instead talk Award Eligibility first and then get to the best of 2019. I am eligible for BEST FAN WRITER, for my work at BN Sci Fi (now sadly closed) Tor.com, Skiffy and Fanty and Nerds of a Feather. I write and publish in a number of places, I do wonder sometimes that no one realizes my prolific output because it is all over the place. And of course, quantity does NOT have a quality all of its own. And there are people who do more, and are more. Me, I just plod along here. Anyway, besides blog posts, reviews and the like, I also do podcast like things. I am of course a central member of the Skiffy and Fanty Show, a central member of SFF Audio and also participate in Juliette Wade’s Dive Into Worldbuilding. All three of those are eligible in the BEST FANCAST category.
Guest Post: KV Johansen on The Last Road
Off the Map: How Small Things Create Depth in Space and Time by K.V Johansen I’ve always been fascinated by maps of places both real and imaginary. Blame The Hobbit and Shepard’s endpapers for The World of Pooh. But it’s not the map that gives a world its breadth and depth; that sense of space, and of time, too, in a story is created in other ways. Middle-earth, a place and a collection of myths and legends and epics never quite finding a final form, had been evolving for years before The Hobbit was sucked into it and what had started off as a children’s fairy-tale adventure struck roots down into something deeper, to grow into the unexpected, The Lord of the Rings. That sense that there is so much more off the map, casting long shadows into the story, is what gives The Lord of the Rings a part of its power. In 1955 readers had no way of finding out anything more of Beren and Luthien, of Gondolin, of Morgoth, of Ungoliant or Thingol, Elbereth or Erendil, beyond a few references: a song, a poem, the narrator’s mention of “some say …” as though of course you, like the characters, will have some faint familiarity with these ancient tales. Readers, before the publication of The Silmarillion, didn’t know that those stories existed as more than a whisper in the author’s mind, and for the story at hand that didn’t matter. What mattered was that their shadows were cast into the present action, the shape of them touching and affecting the unfolding story, and that those fragments and references gave the world a history, an internal frame of reference known, in various forms appropriate to their experience, to the characters.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Planet of Exile
Today on Mining the Genre Asteroid, I take you to a Planet of Exile. Last time on Mining the Genre Asteroid, I discussed Ursula K LeGuin’s first novel, Rocannon’s World. This time out, I stay in LeGuin’s Hainish universe and take a look at another early novel of hers set in that verse, Planet of Exile (1966). I look at how this novel extends and builds upon Rocannon’s World, and how it lays foundations for more of the Hainish universe. It is also a rather nifty “under siege novel” that keeps the strengths of character and worldbuilding we saw in Rocannon’s World.
