Tag: SF/F

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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Review – Soulless

Posted February 1, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Soulless by Gail CarrigerSoulless, Gail Carriger

I originally read Soulless a while ago, and I didn’t know much about it — just that people found it a lot of fun. And I think I was still being snobby about overt romance in fiction, before embracing my love of Georgette Heyer and Mary Stewart (not that this is solely romantic fiction in that way, though it does share some of the features, like a plucky single heroine who is a spinster, etc, etc). Anyway, I thought it was kind of fun, but I wasn’t really prepared to enjoy it for what it was.

This time, I knew it was often ridiculous, would make me laugh, included a rather shocking amount of bodice ripping detail, etc. And I was prepared to enjoy it for that — and somehow that made it easier to focus on the bits of world-building around that: hive politics, pack politics, human politics, the changes Carriger’s made to history to fit in vampires and other supernatural creatures. I guess in a way it stays disturbingly imperialistic and so on — Victoria is queen, it’s a golden age, silly America is kind of backwards, etc. But really we don’t see much of the rest of the empire; it stays pretty parochial. Maybe the word should be territorial?

The mystery is terribly easy, though, especially the second time around. That’s not so much any actual clues as the fact that the author slaps a certain element into every couple of scenes. It’s not exactly subtle as a Chekhov’s gun.

Still, I’m happy to read this as light fun; as a friend said before, it’s a cream puff of a book. And that’s fine. And hey, the positivity of the sexuality between Conall and Alexia is actually pretty positive, and it’s nice that Carriger doesn’t milk angst out of it with too much obsessing over Alexia’s reputation, etc.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Prickle Moon

Posted January 29, 2015 by in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Prickle Moon by Juliet MarillierPrickle Moon, Juliet Marillier

Prickle Moon is a collection of short stories, most of them previously published but five of them new, and I knew I’d have to pick the book up someday because of that hedgehog on the cover. I love hedgehogs; just yesterday we rescued one from our garden which seemed too small to be out, and sent her off to a carer to spend the winter. Last winter we did that with a couple of hedgehogs; one of them died, but the second lived and was even strong enough to make a break for it. He tunnelled out with some friends and is now living under someone’s decking!

So mostly I got this for the title story, Prickle Moon, because I love my hedgehogs. Like most of the stories in this collection, it’s bittersweet; woven with loss and hope, awful tasks and finding your way through them. Some of the stories are fairytale retellings — Rapunzel, Baba Yaga — and some are new stories very much styled as fairytales, with very familiar motifs. Some of the stories are oddly modern, which jars against the more traditional and more fantastical ones. Marillier’s good at putting her characters into awful situations which require compromise with their morality, and then making it work out so that it isn’t so bad after all. She’s good at grief, and especially healed grief — the kind of grief you learn to live with and live in.

The collection also includes a Sevenwaters story. I haven’t read that series, so it took me a little while to get into it and pick up everything that was going on, but the joy in the ending, the hope, is not something you need to have read Daughter of the Forest and the other books to understand. Though, right now, I’m definitely in the mood to read more of Marillier’s work.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Goblin Emperor

Posted January 26, 2015 by in Reviews / 4 Comments

Cover of The Goblin Emperor by Katherine AddisonThe Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison

Yes, again already. I can’t really justify doing a whole new review for this, but I felt the need to at least record that I read it again and loved it just as much — loved the characters, giggled, got embarrassed for them, wanted to just high five someone when they did awesome things. This book is up there among my discoveries of Robin Hobb, Scott Lynch, N.K. Jemisin, Guy Gavriel Kay… I believe it’s Hugo eligible, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to vote again this year for the sake of this book.

Why do I like it so much? Well, here’s my original review; reading the book again, I was excited about the characters (as you can tell from my first paragraph), but also by the world Addison’s created. There’s stuff that’s like the Tudor court or Regency Britain; there’s a more Eastern influence on the religion; there’s steampunk; there’s all the politics, the elf families, the history with other peoples that is only touched on. There’s so much going on with the place of women, the place of queer people in the court, racial difference… and it’s not as if this is a utopia where everything is just as we would wish it, but it’s a world undergoing change with some people meeting it, some people trying to hold it back, some people quietly unaware…

I like a lot of the things it doesn’t show us face-on, too. The complexities of Setheris’ character, his relationship with his wife; Maia’s father, and the fact that despite his neglect of Maia, his court love and respect him; the lot of the more common people which we only glimpse by hear-say; the Great Avar’s court and his relationships with his family. While it’s a rich world, it goes much more for immersion than for infodumping. And if you begin it confused, well, so does Maia; he’s been kept away from most of this society for most of his life, so he’s in the same boat.

I can understand, objectively, that this book is not for everyone. Even some people whose tastes I share quite closely. Subjectively, though, if you don’t like Maia and his struggles, I don’t know if we can be friends.

(I’m joking. I think. Mostly.)

Rating: 5/5 with bells on

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Review – Unlocked: An Oral History of Haden's Syndrome

Posted January 25, 2015 by in Reviews / 1 Comment

Cover of Unlocked by John ScalziUnlocked: An Oral History of Haden’s Syndrome, John Scalzi

This novella gives a lot of the background for Scalzi’s latest novel, Lock In. I was in kind of a reading funk, so I thought I’d try reading something short to whet my appetite for Lock In — or just fiction in general, really. It worked for me: I know what effect Scalzi is going for, and he manages to hit the sweet spot between being too technical and too much like a documentary, and offering glimpses of character (like the President) and an idea of the kinds of things in play when you get to Lock In.

He gets the form pretty well, and while I don’t know much about the technology he suggests, I didn’t see anything completely impossible about the biological aspects of Haden’s syndrome. It pretty obviously draws on the Spanish flu of 1918 and the roughly concurrent encephalitis lethargica epidemic. There are separate diseases which produce the effects Scalzi posits for Haden’s syndrome, he just has them combined — with a suggestion that they have been deliberately combined.

Overall, it can be quite a dry read if you’re not interested in that kind of background, but I am. Still, it’s lacking in real narrative and urgency because of the post-facto documentary nature of it.

Rating: 3/5

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