Yes, yes, Mad Max: Fury Road in space, very queer, very feminist, lots of kickassery. But also lots of plot holes and people being very bad at their jobs. The rag tag team of scrappy rebels can perhaps be forgiven, since they are a rag-tag team of scrappy rebels and have limited training and resources … Continue reading Seven Devils (2020), by Laura Lam and Elizabeth May
Equinox (2022) by David Towsey
As an SFF connoisseur, I have often been faced with the following paradox: Although it is usually the conceit of a book that draws me in, books that succeed rarely do so because of the conceit alone. No matter how grand 'lesbian necromancers in space' might sound, Gideon the Ninth is a masterpiece because of … Continue reading Equinox (2022) by David Towsey
Rendezvous with Rama (1973), by Arthur C Clarke
This post is doing double duty. The first part is simply a review of the book in the title. The second part is a rant. I shall use headers appropriately so you don't get lost. Part 1: The review As I have discussed previously, I am perpetually disappointed by golden age or silver age SFF. … Continue reading Rendezvous with Rama (1973), by Arthur C Clarke
Half a Soul (2020), by Olivia Atwater
Some books just work. They set out to do a thing, and they accomplish the thing they set out to do so simply and completely that--even if you might find yourself inclined to pick nits in the assignment itself--you cannot find it in yourself to object to anything in the book's fulfillment of the assignment. … Continue reading Half a Soul (2020), by Olivia Atwater
The Murder of Mr Wickham (2022), by Claudia Gray
The Jane Austen industrial complex is a mighty, sprawling domain: beyond the endless movie adaptations,1 we have multiple societies, costume festivals in Bath, literally thousands of works of fanfiction on Archive Of Our Own, some of which have made the jump to being traditionally published. This subset of published Jane Austen fanfics, much like the … Continue reading The Murder of Mr Wickham (2022), by Claudia Gray
Vagabonds (2022), by Oskar Jensen
One of the most difficult parts of writing about the past is capturing the lives of the people--and yet, the lives of the people is often the thing that makes the past so fascinating to so many. What was it like to live back then? Vagabonds answers this question with a single-minded focus: It describes … Continue reading Vagabonds (2022), by Oskar Jensen
The Facemaker (2022), by Lindsey Fitzharris
I love the history of science and medicine. I also love voyeuristic gruesomeness about horrible things happening to people who are long dead, especially if it includes all the gooey details. They're skeletons by now, regardless of what happened to them, so I don't feel bad about it.
The Shadow Glass (2022), by Josh Winning
When I was young, I loved the movie of The Neverending Story. I watched it over and over again, but until I rewatched it as an adult (discovering in the process that it was a terrible movie) I retained very few details. Here are the details that I recall most vividly: The death of Artax … Continue reading The Shadow Glass (2022), by Josh Winning
Civilisations (2021), by Laurent Binet
Oh, what a perfection of alternate history this book was! Its brilliance comes in its ability to construct a sequence of events that are perfectly internally consistent, exquisitely aligned with the history of Europe, and also utterly topsy-turvy: Although the individual events are recognizable, they are remixed and reimagined into an alternate world that makes … Continue reading Civilisations (2021), by Laurent Binet
The Grace of Kings (2015), by Ken Liu
So, in summary: too many battles and too much sexism waste the ingenious world-building, and make me unlikely to continue with this series. It may be called silk-punk, but it does not belong to or define any subgenre that I can see. It is just another bog-standard over-testicled excessively enswordened doorstopper fantasy tome.
Damp Skunk 
