Category Archives: Reviews

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind by Jackson Ford

Teagan Frost is having a hard time keeping it together. Sure, she’s got telekinetic powers — a skill that the government is all too happy to make use of, sending her on secret break-in missions that no ordinary human could carry out. But all she really wants to do is kick back, have a beer, and pretend she’s normal for once.

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind
by Jackson Ford
ISBN 9780316519151
Posted 06/01/19 SFevu: http://www.sfrevu.com/php/Review-id.php?id=18447

Not only is this a kick-ass adventure with a spunky girl whose parents tweaked her genome to give her telekinetic, no…um…psychokinetic powers (like there’s a difference) but it’s got the only afterword I’ve ever enjoyed reading. Mostly because Ford roped his character into writing it for him (like we fell for that, Teagan.).

Teagan Frost can move sh*t with her mind. In order to stay out of government labs and/or dissection tables, she does super-secret work for them out of The China Shop, a ‘pretend’ moving company in LA. Except that some times they actually do moving jobs, because when you can take all the weight off a refrigerator, it makes it easier to carry, right? Just as long as you don’t let on.

One day after the usual mission impossible hijinks, the last person Teagan and the team scoped out turns up dead, and by dead we mean killed by someone who could clearly move sh*t with their mind. Except that as far as she knows, nobody else can do that and she’s pretty sure it wasn’t her. No, she’s totally sure. In fact, she doesn’t even have the strength to bend rebar around someone’s neck. Continue reading

Robots of Gotham by Todd McAulty

Review: A Robotic invasion has taken control of Manhattan, the United States is friendless and in tatters, Venezuelan war machines have taken over Chicago, and the list of countries not governed by AIs gets shorter every day. Hey. We saw all that coming. What we didn’t see coming was that when AIs rule the world, they’ll be just as good, bad, and ugly as the humans that went before them.

Todd McAulty’s debut novel explores a fragmented future where the world is just as divided up as ever, but AIs rule the land in very human ways. Some got themselves elected, some performed coup d’états, bloodless or otherwise, and some just bought the place out. AIs in humanoid bodies or full on war droid live side by side with humans as equals, though inevitably, some are more equal than others. Continue reading

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S. A. Corey

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

March 2019 New SF to Look For

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

SFRevu 2019 Hugo Short List for Short Fiction and John W. Campbell Award

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