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Book Review: Cracking the Sky by Brenda Cooper

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Quantum searching across timelines with a high powered, sentient computer. A little girl who is being raised by robots, and may be one herself. Danger and adventure on a wondrous construct connecting an icy world and its cold neighbor. Small squad operations against rogue corporations. Long-distance virtual reality riding of a young woman living in Mexico. All this and more are found in Cracking the Sky. Cracking the Sky, from Fairwood Press, represents the first science fiction-only collection of stories from science fiction, fantasy and futurist author  Brenda Cooper. The stories range throughout her oevure, selected from the last twelve years of her writing career. While Cooper is better known for her novels (see my review of Edge of Dark, for example), Cooper’s pen does take her into shorter forms. Indeed, some of the stories in this collection are short enough to be almost flash-fiction in length.

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Book Review: The Stories of the Raksura Volume Two by Martha Wells

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Through three novels and a previous collection of stories (Stories of the Raksura Volume One: The Falling World and The Tale of Indigo and Cloud), Martha Wells has built up an ever richer tapestry of tales of the Three Worlds, focusing primarily on her alien, shapeshifting and yet all too human race of the Raksura. Stories of the Raksura Volume Two: The Dead City and The Dark Earth Below continues in that tradition. Within, Martha gives us the two titular novellas as bookends to the book, and three stories in between. Also like the first volume, Wells gives us a variety of time frames in which the stories are set. Having contented herself with setting up the framework of Moon (our primary POV protagonist) in the three Raksura books (The Cloud Roads, The Serpent Sea and The Siren Depths), rather than always progressing the narrative forward in time, she has taken the tack of telling backstories, and side stories about the characters and the world. One of the stories, as detailed shortly, does not involve the Raksura at all. The richness of the peoples and creatures of the Three Worlds allows for amazing diversity in potential protagonists within and without of the Raksura themselves. The Raksura are her primary and overwhelming interest, and with good reason. However, there is nothing to prevent her from exploring other corners of her world.

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My Superpower: E.C. Ambrose (Elisha Rex)

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My Superpower is a regular guest column on the Skiffy and Fanty blog where authors and creators tell us about one weird skill, neat trick, highly specialized cybernetic upgrade, or other superpower they have, and how it helped (or hindered!) their creative process as they built their project. Today we welcome E.C. Ambrose to talk about how the power of hiking in the rain relates to Elisha Rex. In addition to being a novelist, I am also an adventure guide, and it was this second career which led me to a surprising super-power, one which, as a child, I would never have dreamed of possessing: hiking in the rain. One of the great joys of being a grown-up, and a self-employed one at that, is, in most cases, I can do whatever I want — or choose not to do it, and most of the time, it works out just fine. As a child, I had a great aversion to rain: I would hide in the toybox to avoid having to go out in the rain. But as an adventure guide, hiding in the toybox, no matter how appealing it sounds, is simply no longer an option. Adventure Camp doesn’t stay inside when it rains.

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Next Month’s Film: An Update and Change!

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As you may recall, we announced that our next film would be Last Night (1998) in our episode on Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic World (2015).  Unfortunately, due to some scheduling issues, David is unable to record in the next two weeks for that episode.  Since Last Night is his film selection, we’re going to move it over one month. The good news is this:  we’ll still have an episode.  My good friend, Jen Zink, has agreed to join me for a discussion about The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)! Here’s how you can watch that film: Netflix (STREAMING! WOOT!) YouTube ($9.99 in SD) Amazon ($9.99 in SD) VUDU ($9.99 in SD) Google Play ($9.99 in SD) So now you have no excuse not to see it!  If you have any comments or questions you want us to talk about on the episode, send an email to totallypretentious[at]gmail[dot]com or use our handy contact page!

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Book Review – Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine

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Imagine if the Royal Library of Alexandria had not been destroyed in flames. In Ink and Bone, Rachel Caine uses this alternate history speculation to craft a universe where the “Great Library” has survived and flourished through the centuries, expanded with satellite institutions around the world. The cultural influence and political power of the Library is significant, holding absolute control over written knowledge. Ownership of printed books is illegal, but Library-approved materials are ‘mirrored’ from the original texts through alchemy by Obscurists to personal blank ‘book’ instruments of Library design called Codexes.

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Book Review: Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells

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Alchemy-based magic gives a relatively mild supernatural flavor to what is otherwise a novel focused strongly on police procedural lines in Dirty Magic, a novel by Jaye Wells. Dirty Magic, the first in the “Prospero War” series, follows the story of Kate Prospero, police officer. The novel brings us to her story just as the scourge of dirty magic in her rust belt hometown takes a dangerous, and even deadly, turn. Genre mashups, or crossovers, are always a matter of balancing acts. Unless an author is truly ambitious, there usually is a dominant genre, and a secondary genre. Often for fantasy and science fiction readers, SFF is the dominant genre, with mystery, romance, or thriller elements as the secondary genre that is layered in. A relatively popular secondary genre as of late for layering into fantasy, especially urban fantasy, has the bones of the procedural. There are a lot of advantages for a writer to use elements of the procedural, especially in terms of structure and story beats, It provides authors a narrative framework to decorate with the genre elements, and everything else in the novel as well. Dirty Magic by Jaye Wells, then, runs with that last, as the secondary genre to her urban fantasy structure is most definitely police procedural. 

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