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Into the Wardrobe: Grimbold’s Other World, by Nicholas Stuart Gray
“… Raised by a farming couple, he’s a dreamer, poet and storyteller who acts as the village goatherd. He is kind and likes to be useful. Sick at home one night, he’s visited by a talking cat who asks for his help, tells him how to ask the fire to cure his cold, and takes him across into the night-world to free another boy who’s trapped in a bad situation. …”
Book Review: USURPATION by Sue Burke
Unlike in Semiosis with the colonization of Pax and discovery of rainbow bamboo, humans on Earth are too familiar with their surroundings, too occupied with global turmoils, and too full of assumptions based on Terran life to give much deep thought to imports and immigrants from Pax such as the rainbow bamboo plant. The humans of Earth don’t realize the plant is sentient …
Interview with K.V. Johansen, by Paul Weimer
“Now, with The Wolf and the Wild King, I’ve done something I’m calling high fantasy, an older term not used so much any more, but to me it suggests a subtly different flavour of secondary world fantasy from epic — a world more mysterious, less explained; more folkloric roots showing through the moss, more things half-seen in the shadows. “
Short Fiction Review: October 2024
My favorite stories from October feature characters who care deeply for their local community, for communities across the world, and for their planet itself. In “Hot Hearts” by Lyndsie Manusos (published in Lightspeed Magazine Issue 173), a headstrong woman is determined to terraform a lifeless rock into a world that
Comics Review: Penultimate Quest
Let’s start with the element that surprised me the most: Penultimate Quest is absolutely not a comedy. Going in clean, with no more information than what’s on the front and back covers, I was expecting much more of a genre parody than actually appears. I could make a case for the book as satirical, but it’s not the ha-ha kind of satirical; while there’s genre deconstruction taking place, its expression is far more tragic than comic. This is not a “Mornin’ Ralph” “Mornin’ Sam” send-up of adventuring as a grind.
Book Review: Wheel of the Infinite, by Martha Wells
I urge readers who only know Wells for her wonderful Murderbot science fiction novels to give Wheel of the Infinite a try. It features Maskelle, a middle-aged, self-exiled priestess returning to the capital of the Celestial Empire for her Koshan religion’s most important rite.
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