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Book Review: The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky by John Hornor Jacobs

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The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky is a dark and intently written horror novella that shows the breadth of the author’s skill. A fictional South American Country. Two expatriates, an old poet with a long history of tangling with the autocratic regime that runs his homeland, and his young protege, a young college professor who is drawn to him, and his connection to their homeland of Magera. An unlikely friendship, a  manuscript telling awful secrets, and a compulsion to return to her homeland. These and much more are the elements of The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky, a literary cosmic horror novella from John Hornor Jacobs.

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Book Review: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

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Kameron Hurley starts 2019 off with a flash of light and a hell of a story. The Light Brigade, releasing March 19, pulls readers into a future where corporations run the world instead of traditional governments, and Mars is an active warzone. To fight against the Martians, soldiers are broken down into light, scattered into atoms and transported to the battlefield, where their powerful weapons and strict training take over. But when Dietz joins up and starts experiencing back drops that don’t match up with the rest of her field team, she begins to get a different picture of the war. One that doesn’t match what the corporations are telling them. A page-turner if I’ve ever seen one, Hurley strikes gold with this one. With a classic yet stunning take on science, love, and loss, The Light Brigade will follow you across the galaxy, and hit you in the gut as many times as it pulls you back to your feet with a (mostly) friendly hand.

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Book Review: New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color ed. by Nisi Shawl

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Anthologies are my favorite way of discovering new writers, and they’re my favorite kind of books to review for Skiffy and Fanty, but some are harder to review than others. I’m a white woman living in a red state in Trump’s America, so my opinion on these works is probably the last anybody would want, but at least I’m in a position to beat the drums and pass the good stuff on to you readers, and I’ll tell you what: there’s good stuff aplenty in these pages.

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Book Review: Ninth Step Station

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Ninth Step Station is an excellent collaborative effort which entertains and asks hard questions about crime, investigation, surveillance, and the future of technology in a well imagined near future setting. The locale is Tokyo in the 2030s. After an attack by China on Japan, much of Japan is under Chinese occupation, and half of Tokyo is held by them as well, with a border zone between occupied Japan and free Japan managed by ASEAN, led by the United States. Tensions are high in this divided Tokyo of the future. The peace seems fragile and ready to erupt at any moment, forces scheme to survive and thrive, and the day to day life of people on both sides of the divide is under constant stress.

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Korean Drama Review: Arang and the Magistrate

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Sometimes there are shows that fill you with excitement because they seem like they’ll give their female characters compelling motivations and genuine agency in the plot, only to completely disappoint you by reverting to the same old misogyny and conservatism found in any other show. Arang and the Magistrate was one such show for me. Although I enjoyed watching it in the beginning, I was left with bitterness at the end because the women in the series received such disappointing resolutions to their character arcs. (Warning ahead for spoilers!)

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