Interview: K.D. Edwards on his debut Fantasy novel, THE LAST SUN
K.D. Edwards’ debut novel, The Last Sun, is now out from Pyr Books. The author very kindly answered my questions about the world and characters of The Last Sun.
Book Review: Bookburners Season 3
With the publication of an omnibus edition, the Bookburners, one of the serial stories from Serial Box, comes to officially cap its third season and prepare the ground for the fourth. Bookburners is hardly the only serial from Serial Box, as the release of this third omnibus joyfully coincides with the release of omnibus editions of Tremontaine Season 3, and ReMade Season 2.
Comics Review – A Weird Beat in the Motor City: ABBOTT #1 and 2
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’m shining a spotlight on a new series that debuted in January, 2018, and that, as I predicted in the Skiffy & Fanty Looking Back, Moving Forward: The 2018 Edition podcast, checks absolutely all my boxes: Saladin Ahmed and Sami Kivelä’s Abbott. (This review contains spoilers!)
Book Review: Jade City by Fonda Lee
In an alternate world where a small island carries both a magical material and the scions who can wield it, the aftermath of a world war that consumed and wrapped up even the island is a tricky and dangerous time. The city of Janloon on the island of Kekon is a fraught place, with the clans that helped liberate the island kingdom from foreign occupation now the temporal behind-the-scenes powers that rule Janloon and the island of Kekon itself. After years of quiet small scale conflict, however, a change in leadership of the No Peak clan provides their stronger rival, the Mountain Clan, with a chance to push and push their advantage, to do to the No Peak what they have done to several of their smaller rivals already—to conquer it.
Horror Review: Penny Reeve on Victor LaValle’s The Changeling
“When you believe in things you don’t understand you suffer” Stevie Wonder’s words serve as the epitaph to Victor LaValle’s The Changeling; accurately summing up the ensuing 431 pages wherein we’re introduced to a genre-defying novel that mixes horror with the fantastic and monsters both real and imagined come a-knocking.
Book Review: Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden
Artificial Intelligences, Gods and Goddesses, tailored viruses gone wrong, mind-expanding drugs, political and social turmoil and more, all in a near-future South Africa, is the matrix where Nicky Drayden embeds an assortment of disparate and diverse characters in her debut novel Prey of Gods. The author’s penchant for mixing a variety of characters and a variety of genre elements that do not seem to match together or work together at first makes the novel one of the most intriguing and unpredictably diverse novels I have read in 2017. There are a number of threads and plots and stories going on through the novel in what at first appears to be a discordant tangle, but in truth is a layered and complex story that eventually comes together. The author slowly allows the silos of stories and characters and their individual genre elements to come together and mix, and recombine in the latter portions of the novel. It’s probably easiest to describe the individual silos and what’s going on, one by one, as a sense of what Drayden is trying to do in the novel.
