Book Review: Everfair by Nisi Shawl
Approximately nine years ago, while browsing a local library’s new release section, I came across Filter House. A short story collection by Nisi Shawl, its description and critical blurbs promised rich literary fantasy from a talented and distinctive voice that was new to me. Reading it, I realized that promise was no exaggeration. Filter House is significant in both its quality and its revelation of a culturally non-dominant perspective (particularly within the SFF community). Nominated for a World Fantasy Award and winning the James Tiptree Jr. Award, Shawl’s collection did not go unnoticed within the critical community. Yet, I somehow felt unfulfilled after completing the collection. I had no regrets reading it; I appreciated it. But it still baffled me in its unfamiliarity and its thematic focus. Its Otherness required contemplation, attentive to the subtle graces of Shawl’s writing and listening to her viewpoint. For me, one read-through wasn’t sufficient to fully experience it.
Book Review: The Stars are Legion by Kameron Hurley
I came to Kameron Hurley’s work early, getting a copy of God’s War back at the beginning of her career, and following her work and worlds since. Sometimes I’ve had questions or issues with her work, but throughout, the “blood, bugs, and brutal women” that have been a hallmark of all of her worlds and characters have sustained my reading interest and been a welcome expenditure of my reading time. It was thus with great anticipation that I picked up The Stars Are Legion, the new Space Opera from Hurley. I started this review and continue to engage with the author on a metatextual as well as a textual level because her work responds to that sort of analysis. No writer is separate from her creation, but some writers are very intimately connected to what they write, how they write, and why they write as they do. Hurley falls into this camp. So, I went into the novel with expectations that there would be strong female characters, violence, perhaps worldbuilding that might frustrate me a tiny bit, and a harsh and high contrast verse that engages my senses. In photography terms, instead of a placid and straightforward landscape or portrait, Hurley’s work pushes pixels in both directions, sometimes discordantly, to deliberate and eye-arresting effect.
A Book by Its Cover: The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
Morgan Filchberger is the last 911 Dispatcher to be promoted to Detective after floppy-armed robots replaced the entire workforce. Anyone else might be bitter about that, but Morgan has failed the Department of Uniformed Detectives Exam five times. Now, he’s living the dream: the pay is good and he gets to tell his high school buddies that he’s a real badass. That is until members of the Irradiated Blue Man Group start showing up dead and partially digested in the streets of Orlando. With Captain Northrup Wilkinson and the union representative of the IBMG breathing down his neck, Morgan wonders if he’s really cut out for the detective life… Enter Felicia Guffman, a smartmouthed rookie slash amateur thespian with a penchant for unfinished Greek tragedies and Morgan’s new partner. If there’s one thing Felicia does well, it’s propping up mediocre (male) members of law enforcement to make them look good. Call it a gift. Or a curse. Whatever you call it, Felicia has been putting her talents to use since graduating from the Louisiana Academy of Detective Youths four years ago. And a bunch of dead glowing blue guys aren’t going to keep her from making a name for herself, even if she has do it by making Morgan into a hero before exposing him for the fraud that he is.
Book Review: Wilders, by Brenda Cooper
Author Brenda Cooper describes herself as a futurist and as being passionate about the environment, and you’d better believe she’s dead serious about it. Which is to say that, unlike most of the books I’ve gotten to review for Skiffy and Fanty this month, Wilders is many things, but fun isn’t one of them. Like so much ecological science fiction (or ecopunk, if that’s a thing? I’m pretty sure it’s a thing), Wilders is written in deadly earnest. Look elsewhere for lighthearted escapism. Refreshingly, though, unlike a lot of books I’ve stumbled across in this genre, Wilders manages not to get too preachy. Herein, Cooper works under the assumption that her readers are proficient singers in the choir, and proceeds to focus on telling us a story rather than trying to persuade us that wilderness matters, that the environment matters, that extinction hurts us, etc., etc.
Guest Post: Switching Between Lanes, by Stephanie Burgis
I think that every writer who’s ever read publishing advice online has probably come across at least one article on the importance of “branding.” Apparently, to be really smart, writers ought to be figuring out the one thing that they’re best at — or the one thing that connects the most with potential readers — and then sticking to it no matter what, so that fans will know exactly what they’ll get from every new novel by that author. I know I sound a little snarky in that description, but I’m actually not arguing with it as a strategy. I’m sure that it is a smart, practical way to build a successful career. Unfortunately, I’ve never been much good at sticking to my own lane. There are too many wonderful genres that I love as a reader, and I get frustrated whenever I try to shut out all but one of them in my writing life. Before I sold my first books, I published dozens of adult f/sf short stories, and I drafted full-length novels for both adults and kids. Then my first agent, back in 2005, took me on with an adult historical fantasy manuscript, and it felt like my first big step onto the publishing ladder. Aha! I’m almost there!
Book Review: Children of the Different by S.C. Flynn
Stories dealing with those often-painful transitions of adolescence dominate mainstream young adult fiction. On the genre side of the fiction divide, post-apocalyptic settings contain characters constantly beset by external dangers, characters that simultaneously must struggle to adapt themselves to their civilization’s collapse. In both cases these tales combine peripheral threats with internal struggles, shaping varying degrees of character growth and/or plot development. Thus, it’s fitting that S.C. Flynn combined aspects from both sides of young adult fiction’s spectrum in his debut novel Children of the Different. Though comprised of many familiar elements, the novel is aptly named. Flynn’s story feels fresh and intriguingly different. With inspirations from analytical philosophy and biological metamorphosis, Children of the Different explores the transformation of his young characters into adulthood within post-apocalyptic settings that merge science fiction and mythical fantasy.
