Blog Posts

Blog Posts

Short Fiction Review: August 2018

/

Over the past several months, I’ve been using this column to spotlight my favorite new short stories. In particular, I’ve been attempting to spotlight work by new writers and/or writers with marginal identities. This month, I’m going to try something slightly different. Rather than spotlight short stories, I’m going to spotlight publications. Why? I was able to read a lot of short fiction over the last month, and there’s a lot of good work that deserves attention. In particular, this last month, most of my favorite stories appeared in these three publications: Nightmare Magazine (for the horror addicts), Anathema: Spec from the Margins (for those of you who love superb worldbuilding), and Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was, a new anthology of queer urban fantasy.

Blog Posts

Book Review: HEARTS OF TABAT by Cat Rambo

/

Cat Rambo’s name should be a familiar one to any SF and Fantasy fans reading short fiction. Beyond publishing fiction in numerous premier outlets she also co-edited Fantasy Magazine (until its merger with Lightspeed) and served as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America. For me, Rambo’s stories fell into that category where I’d come across her name in a table of contents with pleased familiarity, but not that excited anticipation of a story that I would all but be guaranteed to love. Though always admiring her talented writing, I tend to connect with, and appreciate, her stories through a spectrum that runs from adoration to unaffected.

Daughters of Forgotten Light by Sean Grigsby Cover
Blog Posts

Book Review: Daughters of Forgotten Light by Sean Grigsby

/

Sean Grigsby’s Daughters of Forgotten Light uses a ’70s movie sensibility for the story of a women’s prison in SPAAACE and the story of their struggle to survive and escape their fate. On a distant planet reached by a wormhole, a colony has been turned into one for unsocial women. Unsocial men are easy to handle—put them into the army and have them fight for the dwindling resources and living space on a world that has tipped decisively into a rapid onset Ice Age. But unsocial women? Well, they aren’t suitable for the army, or so the United Continent of North America thinks, and so to reduce the excess population of such undesirables, they are sent off to the colony. Every so often, food ships send food to the colony.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Ignite the Stars by Maura Milan

/

Everyone has heard of Ia Cocha. The Rogue of the Fringe, The Sovereign of Dead Space, The Blood Wolf of the Skies; Ia goes by many names and is always a thorn in the side of the Olympus Commonwealth. The popular comic books paint Ia as a buff, white man. No one is expecting a scrappy Asian girl. The Uranium War finished a bit over a year ago and Ia has been on the run. Unfortunately, the Commonwealth has finally caught up with her. Captured by General Adams, she is given a heart implant to keep her in line, then taken to Aphelion—the Commonwealth’s premier academy for the Royal Star Force. Ia might have been a thorn in the side of the Commonwealth, but no one can deny she has skills, and General Adams hopes to find a way to make use of them in his favour. Ia knows that’s never going to happen. She bides her time while she waits for her brother to rescue her, attending Aphelion’s classes and gathering as much information on the secret facility as she can.

Blog Posts

Book Review: Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

/

Catherynne Valente’s Space Opera combines a love of popular music, Eurovision and a space science fiction sensibility in the grand tradition set by novels like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes were once THE punk band in music. But a death, a breakup, a failed career as a soloist, and Decibel Jones’ post Absolute Zero career is in the toilet. Pity that now that the aliens have arrived, Decibel Jones is the last hope for humanity. The aliens have a test, you see, to determine if a species is worthy of joining the galactic family, or should be blasted into oblivion—whether they can perform decently at the Metagalactic Grand Prix, a song and performance contest that the galactic civilizations put on every year as a way to channel energies that once caused the galaxy to erupt in interstellar war.

Blog Posts

Comics Review: SF&F Webcomics Roundup

/

Welcome to the latest instalment 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, rather than focus on one work, I’m going to go wide. Following up on an aside in an earlier column, I want to do a quick-hits, roundup kind of post that looks at the SFFnal webcomics that I’m currently following, why they’re great, and why I hope you’ll read them too. (These reviews contain spoilers!)

Scroll to Top