Book Review: All Good Things by Emma Newman
I was introduced to the writing and the work of Emma Newman by means of Between Two Thorns, an urban fantasy novel. I don’t normally read much urban fantasy as a general rule, but I was taken by the small stories Newman wrote in support of the novel and that world, and by the writer herself when she came all the way from the U.K. to attend a local convention here in Minneapolis. I was enchanted by her writing and her personality, and resolved to read all of her work henceforth. That decision led me to read more of the Split Worlds, as the series has come to be called, so I read Any Other Name and All is Fair, the second and third books in the series. When Newman, in conjunction with her husband, started Tea and Jeopardy, what is now a Hugo award-winning podcast, I started consuming that as well. Other writing efforts took the author’s time, and I started to read those wonderful SF efforts as well.
Signal Boost #18: Michael J. Martinez (MJ-12: Shadows) and Patrick Hester (Samantha Kane: Into the Fire)
http://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFSignalBoost18MikePatrick/Sandf–SignalBoost18–MikePatrick.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | Deezer | RSSIn today’s episode of Signal Boost, Michael J. Martinez, author of The Daedaelus Trilogy, joins Paul to talk about the second book of his Majestic-12 trilogy, MJ-12: Shadows. They discuss how truth is crazier than fiction and how that led to Mike writing a secret history instead of an alternate history. Then Patrick Hester, a Hugo award winning podcaster and Skiffy and Fanty Arch-Nemesis, joins Jen to talk about his urban fantasy novel, Samantha Kane: Into the Fire. They talk about how Patrick found the voice of Samantha Kane and how Into the Fire sets itself apart from most urban fantasy with its focus on family relationships. We hope you enjoy the episode! Note: If you have iTunes and like this show, please give us a review on our iTunes page, or feel free to email us with your thoughts about the show! Here’s the episode (show notes are below):
Book Review: STEEL VICTORY and STEEL MAGIC by J.L. Gribble
This Sunday I featured Steel Blood for my first offering in the ‘A Book By Its Cover’ series of humorous fake reviews. I haven’t yet read this third volume in J.L. Gribble’s Steel Empires series, but I have read the first two novels, Steel Victory and Steel Magic. Seems the perfect time to write real reviews on them. In the most general sense, at least one part of that Steel Blood cover-inspired ‘review’ is correct. The Steel Empires series is a fusion of many different genre elements that make it hard to precisely classify. Urban Fantasy/Alternate History is the publisher’s cover labeling, and indeed the series overall recalls elements of The Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris (the basis of True Blood), built into an alternate history world. But added into this melting pot one can also find dashes of post-apocalyptic SF and Steampunk. All of these elements don’t mix equally, or as successfully, but on the whole the two novels have character-driven and plot-driven fun that is as solidly written as the most popular urban fantasy series out there.
Book Review: The Masked City, By Genevieve Cogman
Universe-traversing Librarian Irene Adler and her assistant the dragon prince Kai return in The Masked City, second in The Invisible Library series following the titular volume in the series. After settling themselves in the Quasi Victorian world of airships, Fey nobles and derring-do, Irene’s life is, if not precisely stable and uneventful, at least predictable. Find rare books for the library in this alternate London, dodge machinations of local villains, spar with her bête noire, and get into adventure after adventure. Routine, right? Second novels, especially following on high-concept hot ideas like the interdimensional traveling library and librarians of Cogman’s series, are tricky. How do you keep the material fresh? How do you avoid the temptation to “do bigger, and more” as a easier substitution for the harder tricks of building on worldbuilding without making it unstable or unpalatable, and developing characters and their arcs in interesting and meaningful ways? The second novel in such writing is harder than the first, and for me as a reader, with the baseline established, I am looking for that growth and development, and read for it.
Book Review: A Little Knowledge by Emma Newman
Fourth in the Split Worlds series, and in some ways a brand new start after the original trilogy (Between Two Thorns, Any Other Name, All is Fair), A Little Knowledge by Emma Newman brings new opportunities, changes, and challenges to the characters in Newman’s urban fantasy world. Talking about those characters, their changes, and what Newman does with them is necessarily spoilery for the first three novels. This review assumes that you are all right with spoilers, or you have read the first three novels. Newman’s title “A Little Knowledge” seems to invoke the often misquoted line from a poem by Alexander Pope, “A little learning is a dangerous thing”. And that is definitely true of the three major protagonists in the novel. All of them have been raised to positions of power, with ideas of what to do with that power, but find that the actual application and use of that power for what they want and need to do is much trickier than they ever expected. Even in an urban fantasy world, there are no magic wands to wave.
Book Review: Breath of Earth by Beth Cato
In an alternate early 20th-century world where Japan and the US have created a powerful alliance, a secret geomancer struggles to protect herself and the city she loves from forces seeking to shake San Francisco to pieces in Breath of Earth, the first in a new alternate history fantasy series by Beth Cato. In the alternate world that Cato depicts, there is magic in the world, and the primary form of magic are those magicians who are sensitive to the movements of the earth. These geomancers not only can keep San Francisco tectonically stable, but can channel the bled off energy into a mineral, kermanite, whereupon that energy can be discharged to do work, to power vehicles and other things in the same way that a battery can. Thus, kermanite is an extremely potent strategic resource, and its acquisition and control is part of the reason for the Japan-US alliance. Even better, the novel shows the clear costs and dangers of geomancers. It’s a potent form of magic, but one that can cause not only destruction around the user, but actively be harmful for their health. There are also social costs to being a geomancer, a theme that Cato has explored previously in the Clockwork Dagger series.
