Tag: SF/F

Review – Authority

Posted February 26, 2015 by in Reviews / 3 Comments

Cover of Authority by Jeff VanderMeerAuthority, Jeff VanderMeer

Coming after Annihilation, this book seems to make so much more sense, to be begin with. There are still aspects of mystery, confusion, and not just around Area X — there’s missing time, people who haven’t even been to Area X seeming contaminated by it, etc, etc. But the horror is muffled, the adventure is muffled, and instead it becomes more of a spy story, a sci-fi story. Still a mystery story, but a different kind of drive to the narrative.

Don’t kid yourself for a moment that’s actually going to work out by giving you answers. There are some answers, but they ask questions of your own. VanderMeer carefully avoids really ever explaining what is causing what is happening; I can only hope that we get some more on that in Acceptance. It’s driving me a little nuts not to have even a working theory, because I don’t even trust the evidence.

Still, if you’ve read Annihilation, you know what you’re signing up for fairly well. It’s still really weird. It’s still intriguing. It will still make you yelp “what the hell!?” at your ereader screen/the page of the book. Or the audio, if there’s an audio version. (I’m trying to imagine the right narrator for it. The right casting could really add to the creepiness.)

With most books, I’d adjust the rating down from what I gave the previous book, but since I think the three are working together to build the atmosphere, the mystery, and it’s unlikely anything will be irrelevant, I’ll leave it at a sort of overall rating of 4/5, with just a note that I didn’t like it as much as the first book.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Rose Garden

Posted February 17, 2015 by in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of The Rose Garden by Susanna KearsleyThe Rose Garden, Susanna Kearsley

I didn’t have to read much of this to realise that Susanna Kearsley’s work is going to be the perfect replacement for the comfort reading I got all the way through in the last two or three years (Mary Stewart’s romance/adventures). It has the same sense of place, the beautiful descriptions of landscape, and the same sort of heroine: female, curious, about to be swept up in bigger events than she’d ever have expected. And better: this is explicitly fantastical, where most of Mary Stewart’s books were more mysteries, sometimes with hints at fantasy.

And better again, whew, we don’t have first cousins getting married at the end.

It does start off with kind of a slow pace, and Eva is only rarely involved in actual action, despite the backdrop of free trading and other such types of derring-do. And it is indeed a romance, so the ending is a happy one for most of the characters (though there’s a sadder note, too, with Eva’s sister’s husband; I was glad there was some closure at the end of story with him as well, even if it was a sadder story), and there’s plenty of romance going on — not just for Eva, but in the background. And yeah, I think Fergal and Daniel take the time travelling woman a little too lightly. They’re curious, but not curious enough to feel realistic. They both just decide to protect her right away.

But I enjoyed it anyway: it has a great atmosphere, and the writing flows well. It’s a bit like The Time Traveler’s Wife, I guess, in that I wouldn’t want to examine how the timeline works too closely lest it fall apart, but it was the ideal fluff, and it had enough substance that I cared about the characters.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Adventures of Monkey Girl and Tiger Kite

Posted February 16, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of The Adventures of Monkey Girl and Tiger Kite by Kai SchalkThe Adventures of Monkey Girl and Tiger Kite, Kai Schalk
Received to review via Netgalley

This is a very short ebook — I’m not sure how long in words or pages, but it was a very quick read. It’s pretty fun and refreshing, in that it has a diverse cast with Chinese and LGBT characters, it’s a superhero story dominated by female characters, and it takes none of these things too seriously — even the teenage crush, which may or may not come to something, but turns out not to be as important as friendship anyway.

It is a very brief story, the more so because it includes flashbacks to the background of the characters, but all the same, it’s cute and fun. I did feel that with a more mature writing style, it might have felt like more; you can pack so much into a short story if only you know how.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Moon Over Soho

Posted February 13, 2015 by in Reviews / 7 Comments

Cover of Moon Over Soho by Ben AaronovitchMoon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
Review from August 12th, 2011

I found Moon Over Soho more compelling than Rivers of London, somehow. It was a bit unputdownable, which is a quality I’ve been missing in my books lately, so that’s nice. Yeah, Peter’s led round by his dick here, too, and fails to think about things because he’s too busy having sex with them, and yeah, he’s got serious manpain over Leslie, who he also makes do all his menial work, but… The plot moved at a decent pace, and set up some plot threads which will no doubt be ongoing.

It still reminds me of the Dresden Files, and I’m still not enamoured of the treatment of the female characters, but it didn’t irritate me as much as I expected — I think I’ll continue reading this series. (Mind you, I didn’t give up on the Dresden Files right away, so there’s still time for it to annoy me.)

I read it more or less all in one go — in three sessions, in one day — so that’s definitely a bit better than the first book, which took me seven reading sessions over just over a week’s time. So if you were only planning to pick up Moon Over Soho if it was better than Rivers of London, showing that bit of improvement, well, it does.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Tempting the Gods

Posted February 12, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Tempting the Gods by Tanith LeeTempting the Gods, Tanith Lee

I keep thinking I haven’t read any Tanith Lee, but I think this is my third now. She has an interesting writing style: lush, rich, layered. Insinuating. I’m not always a fan of the darker themes that seem to run through her work (I disliked White As Snow because of the rape theme, for instance), but I can’t deny how lovely her writing is. Sometimes it’s a little too much, like a cake that’s too dense and too sweet. It reminds me a bit of Catherynne M. Valente’s work, though more solid.

As you can tell, her language is tactile, sensual; you can’t help describing it as a physical thing.

Some of these stories were just right for me, though. I loved ‘Death Loves Me’, ‘After I Killed Her’ and ‘The Lady-of-Shalott House’, for instance. She does enchantment so well, weaves the plots of her stories so carefully that you can almost see the solution before you get there, and yet it doesn’t feel predictable. Just right.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Sailor Twain

Posted February 10, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Sailor Twain by Mark SiegelSailor Twain, Mark Siegel

I wasn’t a fan of the art at first, and the main character remained kind of distractingly comical-looking for me, but it grew on me. The charcoal look is great, suits the setting perfectly, and for all that Sailor Twain himself looks a little odd, some of the characters are beautifully done. Including, of course, the mermaid. Funnily enough, I read this just the day before I read Brubaker’s Fatale: Death Chases Me, and the whole enchantment aspect seemed pretty similar; a shared theme bridging two dissimilar graphic novels.

The mythology… I could wish it was delved into a little more. We get what we need to know and no more, and I still had plenty of questions — it felt like the rules were made up for the story, rather than the story bending to the rules, which is a pet peeve of mine, really. You’ll always convince me more easily by writing out your rules and then constraining your story within them.

It’s a very quick read, for all that it looks really chunky, and some of the character backstories are really interesting. I don’t know, though; I found myself wishing for more depth, in the end.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Rivers of London

Posted February 6, 2015 by in Reviews / 13 Comments

Cover of Rivers of London by Ben AaronovitchRivers of London, Ben Aaronovitch
Review from July 1st, 2011

I first came across Rivers of London on the Kindle store, and downloaded the sample. I was intrigued by the first chapter, and put it on my wishlist. A friend or two read it, and finally one lent me his copy. He thought I’d tear through it in one go.

Not quite true, as it happens. Oh, all in all, I think it took about two hours to read, but sometimes a few days would go by without me reading more. It reminded me a lot of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books — which is not really a compliment, coming from me. They were similar in tone, and something about the narrators was similar. Thankfully, I didn’t pick up on the same type of waves of misogyny — sorry, I mean chivalry — but I wasn’t entirely happy. Do guys really think with their dicks to this extent? Leslie was, most of the time, a great character — and then I was left feeling rather like she’d been there as a plot device all along. To fill in that role, of Pretty Polly, who is a silent onlooker and untroubled when wooed by a murderer…

Not a great start for women in this series, particularly with the nubile Beverley eventually used as a hostage, and then the whole thing ending with vagina dentata…!

To some extent, it depends what happens to Leslie now. Is she just the instrument for trowelling on Peter’s manpain? Or the exposition tool to help Peter figure everything out? Or will she have a plot of her own?

I will be reading Moon Over Soho, though I did think Rivers of London also had a few problems with pacing, but I won’t have the same tolerance with it. I do like the idea — actual, officially sanctioned members of the constabulary dealing with supernatural events — and I do love a good crime story when it falls together reasonably well.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Trigger Warning

Posted February 5, 2015 by in Reviews / 14 Comments

Cover of Trigger Warning by Neil GaimanTrigger Warning, Neil Gaiman

It’s difficult to rate a book of short stories, for me. They can be so different from each other, so that one is totally to your taste and another is not. Throw in some poetry too, and there’s even more opportunity to leave people cold (I don’t know many people who aren’t picky about poetry). So the good, first: this is pretty typically Gaiman’s work, wry and dark and twisted, rich with implications and things lurking in the shadows. His stories all flow well, so that it all leads logically on to the ending (which is not to say that the endings are predictable, though familiarity with Neil Gaiman’s imagination might give you a pretty good idea).

The bad: I did find it a mite too familiar. That might partially be because I read the introductions to each story first — always something of great interest to me, but it does flavour how you’re going to experience the story. Secondly, Neil Gaiman’s poetry pretty much doesn’t do it for me. And thirdly, the opinions on “trigger warnings”, from which Gaiman took his title, were… fairly typically as though he had not actually discussed them with anyone. I’m a big advocate for them, and I think most quibbles against them are nonsense; sure, life itself doesn’t have trigger warnings. And? Why should that stop us from giving other people notice when we can? “Here be bad things” is something, but triggers are so different for different people… Stick a label on the story like you do nutrition information on food: not everyone will read it, but those who can benefit from the additional knowledge and preparation. And not “this product may contain nuts, soy or dairy products”, but “this product does contain nuts” or “this product was manufactured in a factory which also processes nuts”. Actual, precise information about common triggers. It’s not going to cover every eventuality, and we can’t pretend it will, but it would make sense to try.

And not just by saying “these stories end badly for at least one person in them”.

All in all, that sounds very critical. I did enjoy reading the stories, though, and I think Gaiman does clever things with the form. I’m just a bit too used to his kind of cleverness.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Lock In

Posted February 4, 2015 by in Reviews / 6 Comments

Cover of Lock In by John ScalziLock In, John Scalzi

I generally find Scalzi’s work fun, very readable, but maybe not too thought provoking, not too serious. This managed to combine that sci-fi fun feel with serious issues of disability politics, racial politics, gender — well, all kinds of identity politics, really. It helps to read Unlocked if you’re not very good at picking up context quickly, though I don’t think it’s necessary; it gives you a lot of background, and even a starting point for imagining the characters.

I would actually be interested in listening to the audiobook for this, because Scalzi avoided stating a gender for Chris Shane. Thus, there are alternate readers — Will Wheaton and Amber Benson. The existence of the two versions meaning that I don’t really consider this a spoiler! Particularly as it’s not germane to the plot: it’s a thing outside the plot that will affect your reading, because you’re almost inevitably going to choose which gender you assign to the narrator in your head unless you’re used to queer communities. Personally, I chose to read Chris Shane as female if I could. I ended up reading them as something more nebulous: if you grow up spending most of your time outside your physical body (in the Agora or in a threep, it doesn’t matter which), are you going to think of gender in the same way as embodied people do? I don’t think we can answer that with modern technology, but I think the answer might be no, and that’s how I read Chris.

In a way, this fits right into a tradition with Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, which is a mystery as much as it’s a sci-fi story, and which relies intimately on both elements to make the full story (rather than being a mystery story that happens to be in a science fiction world, or vice versa). And because one character is walking around in an artificial body and the other isn’t, and with some of the political issues. (Ask me another day how I react when Hawking says a robot uprising might destroy humanity, everyone reports it as news, and nobody wants to listen to the sci-fi fan in the corner yelling “Isaac Asimov got there first!”)

Ahem. Anyway, Scalzi keeps his lightness of touch here, despite all the issues that he explores; it remains intensely readable, a page turner, and something that can suck you in enough that you forget about your surroundings. And I love that it’s based on all sorts of real situations: some people are ‘locked in’, we are finding solutions like the ones here for them (my New Scientist this week has a cover story: “Out of the Twilight Zone: Portable mind-reader gives voice to the locked in”), there were epidemics like this before (the closest analogue being the flu epidemic closely followed by the sleeping sickness epidemic)… These are not concerns only relevant in a hypothetical science fictional world.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Ghost King

Posted February 3, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Ghost King by David GemmellGhost King, David Gemmell

Okay, generally I find Gemmell’s books to be fairly fun; standard fantasy, with enough interesting characters, twists or references to keep me interested. And you’d think this one would be especially so, since it’s basically about King Arthur (albeit as a young boy). Maybe it’s the fact that this was one of the earliest of Gemmell’s books (as far as I can tell from publication dates), but it really, really didn’t work for me. There was that same moreishness about it in some ways, but I kept getting distracted by the tone, which bounced all over the place. Serious teenage crushes to slightly ridiculed slave/master relationships in a single bound… It’s great that there’s a disabled protagonist. It’s great that in that sex scene between him and the slave, she feels that she has control over the situation.

It’s less great that one encounter with the maimed comic relief hero is enough to cure her of her fears and trauma about rape, but that’s a personal bugbear of mine. One good experience doesn’t cancel out one bad experience, people! It’s something like a one-to-five ratio, more like!

Anyway, maybe it was that irreverent tone that got to me. The liberal mixing of mythologies (a guy was a proto-Arthur figure, he was also Ares, there might be a link intended with Cú Chulainn, throw in some Babylonian mythology too, and a dollop of Gemmell’s own mythology as well…) really didn’t work: it’s not that I’m fundamentally opposed to it (hell, if you dig into it, that’s exactly what J.R.R. Tolkien did), but it didn’t work. It felt thrown together.

I’m not gonna read the sequel; it’s due back at the library anyway, and may the next borrower have more joy of it.

Rating: 1/5

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