I just finished an eARC of Tiamat’s Wrath and gave it 5 stars on Amazon and Goodreads. I never give anything 5 stars, and maybe after I detox I’ll want to drop it back to 4 stars, but really, it was great. Writing, characters, plot, sciencey stuff, galactic politics. All really well done. Thoughtful but accessible, not a combination we often get in SF.
Also, not the place to start the series or even this three-book arc. Continue reading
If you didn’t grow up when Saturday TV was flooded with grainy black and white science fiction from the 1950s you may not know just how rich a decade it was. There were amazing stories about our future in space, like Destination Moon! tales of warning about the danger of giant mutant bugs in Them! (or leeches, as it turns out), tales of the end of the world (When World’s Collide) and time travel stories (World Without End) and the retelling of classic tales in new media, with robots (Forbidden Planet, 1956). Continue reading
March comes in like a lion with Ancestral Night, a new space opera from Elizabeth Bear, but it doesn’t leave meekly, padding out off the page with Fluffy’s Revolution by Ted Myers and a tale of uplifted animal revolution. We also have to wait until the end of the month for the much-anticipated eighth Expanse novel, Tiamat’s Wrath by the Arisian fusion known as James S.A. Corey. And there’s more, a lot more, in between.
It’s not like I don’t have a pile of SF already, but Every month I root through the publisher’s catalogs, review sites, and my Amazon Advanced Search to find noteworthy new science fiction, so I might as well share my research with you. It’s interesting to note which sites agree with each other on noteworthy books. Continue reading
My friend Sam Tomaino, who I long ago tapped to do short fiction reviews for SFRevu, has come up with a 2019 Shortlist for Short Fiction and the John C. Campbell award. It’s up at SFRevu.com with his reviews of each at: 2019 Hugo Short List for Short Fiction and John W. Campbell Award by Sam Tomaino
I was pleased to see several from authors I like on the list, including Geoff Ryman for his “The Constant Narrowing” and Aliette de Bodard for her The Tea Master and the Detective. Much as I liked the Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (a Hugo winner and at the time of this writing, #1 Best Seller in Chinese Literature), I can’t help but wonder how much Chinese SF is enough? Strike that. Good SF is good SF and I’ve enjoyed a number of the stories Sam came up with, including Luo Longxiang’s “The Foodie Federation’s Dinosaur Farm”.
For those of you who can’t wait, Here’s the list with just titles, pub, and author (but I urge you to check out Sam’s full piece here with his comments): Continue reading
Brave New Truthful World – Douglas E. Richards latest novel wonders “What if you could pop in a contact lens that told you if someone was lying?” What if everyone did?
The world isn’t as bad as they say, author Douglas E. Richards tells us. Sure, there’s a lot worth worrying about, but with all the spin doctoring on both sides of any issue, it’s nearly impossible to make an informed decision about what to do to fix what’s actually broken.
But what if you couldn’t get away with lying? What if everyone saw the world through truth colored (contact) lenses? Wouldn’t that be great? Veracity is the author’s attempt to make that case, hung on an action plot where the bad guys are trying to suppress lie detectors that are ubiquitous, infallable, and so easy to use that they drop below your conscious awareness, leaving you with the sure knowledge that you can tell if someone is truthing (green flash), lying (red flash), or carefully walking the line (yellow flash). Continue reading