Category Archives: Science Fiction

Coyote Cowgirl by Kim Antieau

coyote-cowgirlReview by Ernest Lilley
This review originally appeared in SFRevu’s June 2003 Issue – It’s available for Kindle for $2.99, which is a steal.
Have you ever read Coyote Cowgirl by Kim Antieau? It’s about food, family, love, betrayal, shamanism and food. Did I mention the food?

Charles de Lint says it’s one of his favorite books, and I like stories about the southwest and that whole spirit in the land stuff so I thought I’d give it a try. But I was determined to take Charles de Lint’s opinion with a grain of salt. I mean, he’s a seriously good writer, but what does he know? What’s really good, it turns out.

The story is about a young woman in the southwest who’s the misfit in a family of cooks. She can’t cook, talks to a crystal skull, and in their opinion, is a few eggs shy of an omelet. Well, the skull did talk to her first, and  like lots of misfits, she gradually starts to understand that she would fit in just fine, if she could just find the right place, and listen to the right voices.

Especially the wisecracking voice of the family’s heirloom skull. The one that fits on top of the ruby encrusted scepter that her father brings out twice a year on festival days. The scepter she was supposed to lock up in the safe (with the skull), not leave out while dallying with cousin Johnny, (“he’s not really a cousin”) who takes the scepter to pay off a gambling debt.

While her parents take off on vacation, Jeanne takes off to track down Johnny, and the skull, which hasn’t talked to her since she was a child, breaks its silence to beg to come along. Bringing along the skull is good for Jeanne, because it’s attuned to the scepter’s vibrations and thus is able to guide her, and it’s good for us because the snappy repartee between the two adds a wry touch to the proceedings and consternation to the onlookers.

Her chase takes her to Vegas and beyond, to a mysterious temple on radioactive land, and off to Mexico where her supposedly dead grandmother is living. But the hunter may be the hunted as well, and people start disappearing mysteriously in her wake. All too soon, it looks like Jeanne is closing in on her goal, much to the reader’s dismay, but the past reveals itself to be mere prologue.

The story winds wonderfully on as she comes to grips with being psychic or crazy (whatever), cooking, love, and her place in the soup of life.

Coyote Cowgirl is a terrific read and one that crosses a number of genre boudaries, not the lease of which being rich fantasy and fine food.

Aubrey in Space: To Honor You Call Us

The author doesn’t hide the fact that he’s out to clone O’Brien’s Master and Commander in space, and the story’s strength and weakness lies in how closely he comes, right down to the stilted dialog and naval tradition. Which ironically, makes it both anachronistic and accurate. Oh, and fun.

Lest you think author H. Paul Honsinger is trying to slip one by you, he puts his intent on the board from the start: to take the Jack Aubrey character created by Patrick O’Brian from the deep blue to the deep black and create a series showing the master and commander as he might be in a future time and war. He’s not the first to channel heroes from the age of sail into the age of starships. Among others, Gene Roddenberry based James Tiberius Kirk in no small part on C. S. Forester’s naval hero, as did David Weber in Honor Harrington, who shares the character and initials if not the exact chromosomes.  It’s only fair that they should inspire others, as they both almost certainly were inspired by Edward Pellew, a captain in Nelson’s navy who eventually rose to admiral, brilliant at sea, but driven by the poverty of his childhood to occasional lapses of judgement ashore. Continue reading

Strangely Familiar – Under the Skin

Under the Skin channels Kubrick's disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerising the viewer in a vouyeristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansenn's character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

Under the Skin channels Kubrick’s disturbing sense of the alien, mesmerizing the viewer in a voyeuristic echo of the way Scarlett Johansson’s character lures her the loners she encounters to her.

I caught a showing of Under the Skin recently while visiting my nephew Jon at college in Austin. On the one hand he wasn’t in love with the minimalist science fiction flick, despite the exposure of Scarlett Johansson’s titular assets, but after walking back from the art house we saw it at to the co-op he’s living in, he allowed that it had managed to provide an hour’s worth of discussion. So that’s something.

Set in Scotland, both urban and rural, amidst pervasive mist and rain, Scarlett Johansson’s alien wrapped in human flesh prowls the streets, backroads, and beaches looking for unattached males to entice back to her place. When you put it that way, it sounds more like a serial killer movie than science fiction, and you can look at it that way too, because the challenge presented to the audience is to get inside the creature’s head to understand what’s going on. There’s no FBI profiler explaining the parameters that lump her victims into a tidy package which exposes the psychological underpinnings of the killer offered up. Instead, the script gives us as little information as possible, forcing us to watch the glacial flow of scenes intently so as not to miss the little clues. You will, by the way. Continue reading

Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley

Breakthrough by Michael C. Grumley
John Clay is a Navy geek working out of the Pentagon who gets a call to look into how a nuclear submarine could find itself suddenly fifteen miles off course while cruising in the Caribbean. Alison Shaw is a dolphin researcher working on machine translation to provide communication between us and our flippered friends. He’s not having any luck figuring out why that area is causing weird things to happen to ships, robots, and the ocean itself, while she’s having unhoped for success with her research, which maps the dolphin’s motions and sounds in situational context to enable two way communication. He’s Navy. She has a bad taste in her mouth from the last time the government appropriated her research, not to mention the Vietnam era dolphin bomb project. Naturally he winds up turning to her and her team to help figure out what’s at the bottom of the mystery. And why the ocean level is dropping, despite global warming. It’s not a bad read, and it’s not really mil sf, mostly. Call it a techo-thriller. Fans of Startide Rising (David Brin) and anything by Clive Cussler will like it pretty well. I gave it a 3 out of 5.

Review: The Ophelia Prophecy by Sharon Lynn Fisher

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empire of the ants

Not the cover, more’s the pity.

Don’t ask me why I decided to read an sf romance novel. I’m nowhere near being the target audience. Maybe I missed the last line in the helpful burb that might have steered me clear; “With their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other’s secrets and forge a bond of trust before a rekindled conflict pushes their two races into repeating the mistakes of the past. The Ophelia Prophecy is the thrilling new SF romance…” Really, that should have done it. But even though I’m not the audience, I’m pretty sure there is one out there for this carapace-ripper of a chimeric-biotech romance fiction. And I respect that, sort of.

Asha is one of a thousand or so survivors of a once proud people (genetically unmodified humans), now living in the city known as Sanctuary in the middle of the (Utah) desert whose boundaries are patrolled by their (chimeric mantis-human hybrid) conquerors. When her (computer hacker / archivist) father is taken by the enemy, she concocts a plan to follow him and do what she can (it gets muddy here) to save him. After having her memory wiped by hypnosis, she engineers her own capture by the enemy on patrol, who turns out to be their ruler’s son, which makes him the prince, who immediately falls head-over-carapace for her. Of course he does. She’s a twenty-something librarian from a small town in the Utah desert, which makes her totally hot. Well, totally con-hot at the very least.

Mankind created a host of human-animal crossbreeds a generation or two before the story opens, the most successful of which are the manti, a cross between the praying mantis and homo sap. It’s not clear that humanity actually tried to exterminate their creations, though they did round them up and dump them in Africa, which evidently pissed the bug-eyed-mansters off enough to wipe us off the face of the planet, with the exception of a small population in Sanctuary, and the few that didn’t get caught. And why, exactly are they letting the human city of Sanctuary survive? Not out of the kindness of their chitinous little hearts, I assure you.

Typical of many oppressed or formerly oppressed populations, the Manti work very hard to maintain their human characteristics. Their insect genes are dominant, so strict breeding control has to be maintained in order to keep the whole race from turning green and biting off each other’s heads during sex. The only thing keeping the manti from going totally buggy is regular breeding with genetically pure humans. Mwah ha ha.

Prince Pax  isn’t a bad guy. Sure, he’s been brought up to think of humans as glorified cattle, or breeding stock, but like any post-apocalyptic-oppressor progeny he’s come to think of them as almost human, or manti, as the case may be. Pax really wishes his hard-liner father would accept that there was room in the world for both races. The prince’s bug-like characteristics are pretty much invisible, by the way, except for his green eyes, incredible musculature and well, this is a romance novel, so expect some notable tweaks here and there. What either is or isn’t useful, depending on your point of view, is that some of the genetic tweaking in the manti leads to a very strong sex drive, one it would take a prince’s honor to sublimate.

Taken captive and without memory of how she went from archival researcher to girl on the run, Asha is whisked away by Pax in his AI controlled Scarab scoutship, and rather than heading back to bug central, like he’s supposed to, he heads for somewhere quiet where he can find out how both he and Asha’s memories are scrambled, and what to do about the whole biological mating drive thing.

For her part, Asha is going through all sorts of prisoner psychology stuff, really anxious to escape on the one hand, and more than a little attracted to the prince on the other. When they stumble across a renegade collection of humans, Ash has to make up her mind which side she’s on. Unlike the reader, she doesn’t know her mind was made up the moment she saw Pax, and keeps stumbling over herself trying to figure things out.

Ultimately, the pair will confront their inter-species attraction, as well as the fate of both humans and manti, but not without fighting it at every turn.

Time out for a little gratuitous etymology. No, not entomology, etymology.  I’d like to say a few words about the main character’s names, which is technically Onomastics, but who’s ever heard of that? First we’ve got Asha, “derived from Sanskrit (asha) meaning “wish, desire, hope”. Though I’ve found references to “truth,” as well. That’s obscure enough to be clever. Prince Pax, on the other hand, translates all to easily as “Prince of Peace,” which fits all too well. Snug as a bug in a rug for a guy who’d like us all to get along.

As I said, it’s not my cup of tea, and I can’t get over the feeling that it the author had made it either an Arabian Nights sort of fantasy or a hard-core biotech tale it would have had more credibility, but as it is the book relies on postponing the protagonist’s per-ordained passion to keep the plot going, and it’s just not enough to do the job.
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Our world is no longer our own.  We engineered a race of superior fighters–the Manti, mutant humans with insect-like abilities. Twenty-five years ago they all but destroyed us. In Sanctuary, some of us survive. Eking out our existence. Clinging to the past. Some of us intend to do more than survive. Asha and Pax—strangers and enemies—find themselves stranded together on the border of the last human city, neither with a memory of how they got there. Asha is an archivist working to preserve humanity’s most valuable resource—information—viewed as the only means of resurrecting their society. Pax is Manti, his Scarab ship a menacing presence in the skies over Sanctuary, keeping the last dregs of humanity in check.But neither of them is really what they seem, and what humanity believes about the Manti is a lie. With their hearts and fates on a collision course, they must unlock each other’s secrets and forge a bond of trust before a rekindled conflict pushes their two races into repeating the mistakes of the past. The Ophelia Prophecy is the thrilling new SF romance from Sharon Lynn Fisher, author of Ghost Planet
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