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Book Review: Edge of Dark by Brenda Cooper

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When a set of post humans, the Next, long ago banished to the edge of their society’s solar system, start making aggressive moves down the gravity well, no one is safe from their maneuvers and machinations. Not Chrystal, living on the High Sweet Home with her four-part family, who is attacked by The Next. Not Nona, Chrystal’s friend, and descendant of the famous Ruby Martin of The Creative Fire, who would risk much to see to Chrystal’s safety. And not Charlie, Ranger on the ecologically devastated planet Lym. Post humanity clashes with humanity, and a solar system wide conflict is brewing, even as these three seek to find a way to survive the danger and find answers, for themselves, and each other. Edge of Dark is the first novel in the Glittering Edge duology by Brenda Cooper.

Blog Posts

My Superpower: Ken Liu (Grace of Kings)

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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 Ken Liu to talk about how the power of tax enthusiasm relates to Grace of Kings. My superpower is the ability to get readers excited about taxes. Taxes are critical in my silkpunk epic fantasy, The Grace of Kings. This is the story of two unlikely friends, a duke and a bandit, who join together to overthrow tyranny only to find themselves on opposite sides of a deadly rivalry over how to create a more just society. There are all sorts of cool things in it:  soaring battle kites and airships based on Chinese prototypes from antiquity; unyielding heroes, kennings, and litotes in the mode of Anglo-Saxon epics; magical books that read minds; jealous gods who are concerned with the value of Pi; a street urchin who becomes the greatest battlefield tactician of her generation and teaches women to fight in the skies; ladies and princesses who plot and fight alongside lords and princes; and giant water beasts who bring storms and tempests to human affairs.

Giveaways

Giveaway: The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

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What’s that?  We have two copies of Ken Liu’s much-anticipated new novel, Grace of Kings?  That’s right, and we’re going to give them away to two of our lucky listeners/readers. To enter, all you have to do is one simple thing.  Leave a comment on this post which answers the following question: If you could recommend one lesser known science fiction or fantasy writer to a friend, who would you recommend and why? That’s it.  The contest will run until 12 PM EST on Sunday (April 12th).  Winners will be announced on Monday. Have at it!

Blog Posts

Short and Sublime: March 2015 Round-Up

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March has been a month of unusual settings, stories of alienation and loss, and meditations on the nature of time. Tade Thompson’s “The Monkey House” (Omenana #2), dystopian horror, is a story about what it means to be trapped inside a system, and the horrors one must overlook to be a part of that system; what happens when the ability to ignore horrors both natural and fantastical is seized from you and you alone? The protagonist is an unreliable narrator — or is he far more reliable as a narrator than the characters that surround him? — and holds a banal job as a paper-pusher with an insidiously creepy company whose purpose is obscured. This dystopia is set not in the future but in the eighties and follows the Orwellian tradition while being rather Kafkaesque, but adds enough facets, from dark fantasy elements to the chronic illness of the protagonist, to create something entirely new.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Binary by Stephanie Saulter

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Several years after the events of Gemsigns (see my review here at Skiffy and Fanty), the integration of Gems into society has continued. The violent spasm of reaction to Gems in the form of the godgangs has given way, some years later, to society seeking methods to harness the talents the Gems have in modern society.  It hasn’t always been smooth, or easy, but society and people have started to move on and grapple with the consequences of the aftermath of the fateful Conference and the Declaration arising from it. As in Gemsigns, however, both Aryel Morningstar, leader of the Gems, and the industrialist Zavcka Klist find their paths crossing. However, rather than being overt adversaries, Klist has a proposition for Morningstar, an offer of a collaboration of talents and skills. Klist’s  proposition is  to use the power of a certain Gem to explore the infotech technologies that had been abandoned in the wake of the Syndrome over a century ago. That Gem, Harran, with extraordinary power to connect to computers on a fundamental level, might be just the Gem to lead the effort into exploring infotech, and safely.  However, when delving into computers, and ancient records, sometimes dark and long forgotten secrets are discovered. Secrets of the past of Aryel Morningstar … and secrets of Zavcka Klist as well.

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