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Book Review: CATCHING TELLER CROW by Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina

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The Aurealis Awards are Australia’s premier juried award for speculative fiction and were presented today in Melbourne. I had the privilege and delight of being part of the jury for the Best Young Adult Novel category. That particular award went to Catching Teller Crow by Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina. I wanted to share a bit about this fantastic book, but please note the opinions here are my own and do not reflect the rest of the jury or the Aurealis Awards at large. Catching Teller Crow follows Beth Teller, who died in a tragic accident several months ago. Since then, she has been helping her father, a police investigator who is struggling to cope with his grief. His boss has sent him to a rural Australian town to oversee a case in which a children’s home burned down, claiming one adult victim. It should be a straight-forward job, something easy to facilitate a return to work for Michael Teller after his bereavement. But of course it’s not, as the Tellers discover when they begin interviewing Isobel Catching, a teenage witness.

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Mining the Genre Asteroid: Rocannon’s World

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When I say the words “Ursula K Le Guin and her work,” your first thought is probably either Earthsea or The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed. Or maybe you think of “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”. LeGuin’s oeuvre, however, is far more than those works. Even within the Hainish verse, there is a host of other in-universe work that Le Guin has written — work that doesn’t get as much attention or play today as The Left Hand of Darkness, the Hainish Cycle’s shining star. The point of this ongoing column is to tell you why works such as this are worth your reading time and attention. Today. In our contemporary moment. And so, in today’s Mining the Genre Asteroid, I’d like to discuss Le Guin’s first published novel, Rocannon’s World.

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Comics Review: Why aren’t we all talking about how awesome MOONSTRUCK Volume 2 is?

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Welcome to the latest installment of my comics review column here at Skiffy & Fanty! Every month, I use this space to shine a spotlight on SF&F comics (print comics, graphic novels, and webcomics) that I believe deserve more attention from SF&F readers. This month, I want to take a look at a new original graphic novel that definitely deserves more attention than it has received. That graphic novel is Moonstruck Volume 2: Some Enchanted Evening. Warning: this review contains spoilers!  I continue to be puzzled by how completely Moonstruck fell off our collective SFFnal radar; the early issues were received with so much enthusiasm that I initially wondered if the series was so prominent and successful that it no longer needed the spotlight this column attempts to give. But then? Online conversations about Moonstruck subsided. I don’t recall seeing much discussion of the conclusion of the first storyline or the release of the collected volume that compiled it, which I suggested voters consider for a Hugo nomination this year.

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#Booktube – Catching up!

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Hey everyone! So, because we’re terrible at cross-promoting things, we keep forgetting to post our #Booktube episodes here on the blog. As such, here is every episode that we haven’t shared with you. Future episodes will hopefully be posted in a more timely fashion, although we can’t actually guarantee that. Another way to make sure you don’t miss these is to sign up for our newsletter OR just go subscribe to our channel on YouTube! We’re really hoping to get to 100 subs so that we can get a unique url! These are in the order we posted them, not by show (because they do occasionally reference one another!)

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Book Review: A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE by Arkady Martine

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Yes, Paul Weimer already delivered a ‘squee-tastic’ review of Arkady Martine’s debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, here earlier this week. But this novel is so notably brilliant that it’s worth fueling that hype with even more squee. Martine’s debut includes nearly all of the elements I would potentially look for in a great science fiction novel, balancing each of them to hit so many positive notes that I suspect other readers will find it just as elegantly captivating. Until now, I’ve never gotten to read a new release and think: This deserves to win all of the awards. I cannot fathom anything else coming this year to approach this level of achievement. Compared to Paul, I’m not as broadly read in the genre, and I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t even read Dune! I did, however, grow up adoring the novels of Asimov, and the space opera setting of A Memory Called Empire immediately drew my thoughts to his linked series. Martine takes the philosophical and political-historical intellect underlying the best of Asimov and refreshes the out-of-date social and cultural perspectives of his works. Several others have also drawn comparisons to the more modern Imperial Radch novels by Anne Leckie. While I liked Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, the narrative voice of Martine’s novel and the themes addressed through its plot resonated even stronger with me.

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Book Review: A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE by Arkady Martine

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Last year, I read a debut author’s space opera that was hyped by many as the Next Big Thing. Comparisons to Dune were explicitly made. The text showed that the author clearly was writing in conversation with Dune, trying to catch that magic about a big broad space opera by focusing on the life and times of a protagonist destined to have an enormous impact on their universe. But for me, that novel fell down on a number of fronts and was an enormous disappointment. This is not that book. This book steps into those shoes, attempting to capture that Dune magic, and walks miles in them. And for me, it succeeds where that other novel failed. This is A Memory Called Empire by debut novelist Arkady Martine. A Memory Called Empire is a dazzling space opera involving a Byzantine plot that immerses the reader in a fully realized world with a cast of interesting characters.

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