Blog Posts

Blog Posts

Book Review: The Ark by Patrick S. Tomlinson

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Bryan Benson is one of the lucky few, one of the 50,000 or so humans left in the universe. A descendant of those who built and escaped on a generation ship fleeing a disaster for Earth undreamed up by even the imagination of Irwin Allen, Benson is an ex-sports hero, and now a detective. On the last bastion of humanity, slowly approaching their goal of Tau Ceti, there isn’t a lot of work for the detective  beyond the usual sort of petty crimes one expects. The margin and tolerance for anything greater just isn’t there when all of the species is in one boat, literally. So, when Benson is handed a missing person case  that may not be a missing person, or even an accidental death, but rather a murder, the ex-sports hero will have to become a different sort of hero.

Announcements and Errata, Awards Season

2016 Awards Season (Hugos, etc.): All the Eligible Things from a Year of Skiffy and Fanty!

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It’s that time of year again.  The time when we all show up in a big arena and fight each other with sticks and used socks and the leftover contents of Darth Vader’s fridge for the supreme honor of winning an award. OK.  So that’s not true.  But it is awards season, which means we do have to release a practically mandatory big post of all the stuff we discussed or created that happens to be eligible for something in 2016.  So, here it is:

Blog Posts

Book Review: The Empress Game by Rhonda Mason

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Space Opera machinations, a Princess and Prince on the run, and vicious combat both in and out of the ring mark the plot of Rhonda Mason’s The Empress Game. I’m a sucker for Traveller-style Space Opera, with multiple star-spanning empires and kingdoms and republics, politics between different worlds, intrigue and adventure on far-flung worlds. The Empress Game provides us with an Empire that seems to dominate a swath of the galaxy, but is not alone in its suzerainty. It is the intersection of those polities, or on the boundaries of them, that rich and interesting characters and story can occur.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Planetfall by Emma Newman

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A colony on an alien planet was founded by a religious visionary inspired by a mysterious incident on Earth to create an expedition to the distant world. A 3-D printer repairer and expert in recycling, Renata Ghali is an important member of the small, fledgling colony. And with that visionary in God’s City, communing with God, Ren is one of the remaining pillars of the community, keeping it together. She also has terrible secrets, public, about what is really going on the colony and what happened when the colonists first arrived. Even more so, Ren has strong secrets about herself, that until now she has managed to keep from the colony. But the arrival of an unexpected visitor to the colony from without is the inciting incident that may upset the unsteady equilibrium that Ren has going. Planetfall marks a change from fantasy to science fiction for Split Worlds author Emma Newman.

Blog Posts

Book Review: The Middle Ages Unlocked: A Guide to Life in Medieval England, 1050-1300, by Gillian Polack and Katrin Kania

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“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” — L.P. Hartley The conceptions and misconceptions of what medieval life was really like influence our perceptions of who we are as people, and the fiction and worlds that we create. There is a real struggle within certain sectors of the SFF genresphere about the fiction based on the world within what I call the “Great Wall of Europe”, fantasy with the viewpoint and a setting firmly grounded in conceptions of what Medieval Europe was like. Be it George R.R. Martin’s Westeros, or Kate Elliott’s Wendar and Varre, or a hundred others, Medieval Europe is, for a lot of writers and readers, THE setting to base their fantasy upon. However, many other writers get basic facts about Medieval Europe unintentionally wrong, further accentuating and perpetuating stereotypes and misconceptions about the Medieval world and mindset when they plug those misconceptions into their fiction, and those misconception are reinforced as misinformation about the real Medieval Europe.

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