Tag: SF/F

Review – Rogue Planet

Posted November 30, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Rogue Planet

Rogue Planet

by Cullen Bunn, Andy Macdonald, Nick Filardi

Genres: Graphic Novels, Horror, Science Fiction
Pages: 133
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Salvage vessel Cortes tracks the Lonely Orphan, a planet with no star system to call its own. Somewhere on this hostile rock is a payload fit for a king. To attain it, though, the crew of the Cortes must brave razor rock, poisonous vapors, treacherous footing, and... the most mind-numbing horrors imaginable. Struggling to stay alive, they are beset at every turn by horrors from their own nightmares. Now, they have discovered that they are not alone on the planet, and the other inhabitants welcome them... as sacrifices to an elder god.

Stranded on a vicious, murderous, seemingly intelligent planet, the crew of the Cortes must reevaluate what it truly means to survive, and what they are willing to do in order to spare their own lives.

Cullen Bunn’s Rogue Planet is a fairly predictable sci-fi/horror story: a group visit a planet where they should, in theory, be able to get rich quick, led in by a beacon… and of course things go messily wrong, with gore and horrors a-plenty.

I didn’t think it stood out among that sort of genre, with the characters having little to make them jump out; the art was okay, but didn’t particularly impress me with “hey, that looks really neat” or “that’s gorgeous” or even “that’s a whole new way to make something look gross”.

It wasn’t bad in any way, I don’t think, just… fairly run of the mill if you’re an SF/F reader. I’d been hoping for something a bit more innovative, I suppose! I think it could be fun if you’re less versed on the tropes of the genre, since it’ll come as a bit more of a surprise.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Cold Clay

Posted November 28, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Cold Clay

Cold Clay

by Juneau Black

Genres: Crime, Fantasy, Mystery
Pages: 208
Series: Shady Hollow #2
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

It's autumn in Shady Hollow, and residents are looking forward to harvest feasts. But then a rabbit discovers a grisly crop: the bones of a moose.

Soon, the owner of Joe's Mug is dragged out of the coffeeshop and questioned by the police about the night his wife walked out of his life—and Shady Hollow—forever. It seems like an open-and-shut case, but dogged reporter Vera Vixen doesn't believe gentle Joe is a killer. She'll do anything to prove his innocence ... even if it means digging into secrets her neighbors would rather leave buried.

Juneau Black’s Cold Clay is another reasonably cosy mystery in the same vein as the first book: if you didn’t enjoy that, then you won’t find yourself charmed by this one, and if you did enjoy the first one, it’s likely your thing unless the conceit is wearing thin for you already. For me, it wasn’t: I was ready to suspend my disbelief once more, readily engage with the world in which a raven runs a bookshop and a moose a café, and get mildly outraged that the police bear would arrest a hard-working honest moose.

If that all sounds ridiculous, it may not be for you, but the book treats it as obvious (aside from a brief introductory page in which it advises not to get caught up on the how of it all), and it doesn’t get played as ridiculous. Really it’s just about people, except they happen to have some animal traits. Here and there I was annoyed that they didn’t use their animal traits a bit more (flying’s all very well, but some of you have noses, why did nobody ever hunt down a quarry by scent?), but mostly I just suspended my disbelief and settled in to enjoy.

I say it’s a “reasonably” cosy mystery because… I’m never entirely sure where the boundaries are on this one. Murder seems, by definition, pretty uncosy — but a lot of mystery fiction is really about that closure at the end, and saying “everything is going to be okay now”, which is profoundly cosy. Your mileage may vary, but I think this one qualifies.

As far as the actual plot goes, once again I was a bit ahead of the game and identified the culprit quickly, but watching Vera get there was entertaining as far as it goes. I could’ve done without the relationship drama between Orville and Vera — really, kids, just communicate! But all in all, I enjoyed myself once more, and quickly grabbed the next book in the series, the short stories, and the fourth book as well for good measure. I’m having fun.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Ogres

Posted November 25, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Ogres

Ogres

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 102
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Ogres are bigger than you. Ogres are stronger than you. Ogres rule the world.

It’s always idyllic in the village until the landlord comes to call.

Because the landlord is an Ogre. And Ogres rule the world, with their size and strength and appetites. It’s always been that way. It’s the natural order of the world. And they only eat people sometimes.

But when the headman’s son, Torquell, dares lift his hand against the landlord’s son, he sets himself on a path to learn the terrible truth about the Ogres, and about the dark sciences that ensured their rule.

I found Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Ogres took me a surprising amount of time to read, despite the length of the book. It’s a pretty unpleasant place to be, in a very believably human way — one which I don’t always care to spend my leisure time dwelling on.

I did enjoy the sting in the tail of the story. I hadn’t worked out who the narrator was (if indeed it was anyone important), so that was interesting. I like second-person POV when it’s done well, though I know others hate it, and I think it was… okay, here. Sometimes it didn’t feel right, when it dug too much into the interior life of Torquell, but mostly I thought it worked. If it’s a pet peeve of yours, though, this won’t be for you.

It all feels a little simplified and fable-like — a political fable, told with serious bias (and intentionally so; I don’t mean that I’m accusing Tchaikovsky of anything here, I’m talking about it as an in-world object).

Altogether, enjoyably put together, but not something I entirely enjoyed the experience of reading.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Shady Hollow

Posted November 23, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Shady Hollow

Shady Hollow

by Juneau Black

Genres: Crime, Fantasy, Mystery
Pages: 208
Series: Shady Hollow #1
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

The first book in the Shady Hollow series, in which we are introduced to the village of Shady Hollow, a place where woodland creatures live together in harmony — until a curmudgeonly toad turns up dead and the local reporter has to solve the case.

Reporter Vera Vixen is a relative newcomer to Shady Hollow. The fox has a nose for news, so when she catches wind that the death might be a murder, she resolves to get to the bottom of the case, no matter where it leads. As she stirs up still waters, the fox exposes more than one mystery, and discovers that additional lives are in jeopardy.

Vera finds more to this town than she ever suspected. It seems someone in the Hollow will do anything to keep her from solving the murder, and soon it will take all of Vera’s cunning and quickness to crack the case.

Juneau Black’s Shady Hollow fell into my hands right when I needed something to restore my faith that I actually enjoy reading and don’t just do it because I always have. In theory I was still fascinated by books, but in practice everything seemed a bit tedious — and then I came across Shady Hollow from someone’s Top Ten Tuesday blog post, and decided… I’ll just give it a chance.

In the end, it’s basically a mystery story like so many others… except that the characters are all animals. Our heroine is a fox, the police detective is a bear, the medical examiner is a snake, and the guy who sells everyone coffee is a moose. If you stop too long to wonder about it, you’ll get jolted out of the story — how does a raven turn the pages of a book, or a moose serve coffee? But you can just settle in and enjoy what there is, and the way the animals’ abilities occasionally give things a bit of flavour (like Lenore’s ability to fly), and the way the various different animals interact.

(And of course, of course, a beaver runs the sawmill. Of course.)

In the end, the mystery didn’t surprise me much, and I was a bit disappointed that while abilities like flight are used, it doesn’t mention scent at all. Vera’s a fox! There’s surely some degree of ability to track there — and Orville too!

But mostly I just had fun, and breezed straight through the book, and felt immensely grateful it fell into my paws — sorry, hands — right now.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The One Hundred Nights of Hero

Posted November 23, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The One Hundred Nights of Hero

One Hundred Nights of Hero

by Isabel Greenberg

Pages: 224
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In the tradition of The Arabian Nights, a beautifully illustrated tapestry of folk tales and myths about the secret legacy of female storytellers in an imagined medieval world.

In the Empire of Migdal Bavel, Cherry is married to Jerome, a wicked man who makes a diabolical wager with his friend Manfred: if Manfred can seduce Cherry in one hundred nights, he can have his castle -- and Cherry.

But what Jerome doesn't know is that Cherry is in love with her maid Hero. The two women hatch a plan: Hero, a member of the League of Secret Story Tellers, will distract Manfred by regaling him with a mesmerizing tale each night for 100 nights, keeping him at bay. Those tales are beautifully depicted here, touching on themes of love and betrayal and loyalty and madness.

The One Hundred Nights of Hero is a fun take on the Scheherazade-type story, in graphic novel form. I quite enjoyed the art, though a few of the female characters who were mentioned very briefly aren’t very distinguishable from other female characters who are mentioned briefly (which is really kind of ironic, given the strong feminist bent of the story — though I’m not very good with noticing small details, so this is probably partly on me).

It’s not terribly original, but it works, and I enjoyed reading it. I did find the lettering and colouring a little distracting at times: it’s all very deliberately quirky and stylised, and sometimes it’s difficult for me then to know where I’m supposed to be following the panels, or to make out the text.

This feels like I’m damning it with faint praise, but I enjoyed myself reading it, and I’d happily give it as a gift or recommend it to people. It just didn’t completely blow me away the way it did some others.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Three Kings

Posted November 20, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Three Kings

Three Kings

by Freydís Moon

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 154
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Ethan Shaw — lighthouse keeper and local witch — lives a charmed life in his chilly, coastal hometown. Blessed with a flourishing garden and a stable livelihood, Ethan can’t complain. But when his husband, Captain Peter Vásquez, brings home a wounded leopard seal after an impromptu storm, Ethan is faced with a curious situation: caring for a lost selkie named Nico Locke.

As Ethan struggles with the possibility of being infertile, insecurities surrounding his marriage, and a newly formed magical bond with a hostile, handsome selkie, his comfortable life begins to fracture. But could breakage lead to something better?

With autumn at their heels and winter on the horizon, Ethan, Peter, and Nico test the boundaries of a new relationship, shared intimacy, and the chance at a future together.

Freydís Moon’s Three Kings is a m/m/m romance where one of the protagonists (the character we follow most closely) is a trans man. Just to be clear up front since I think some people would find this difficult to read (for a bunch of reasons), the novella focuses partly on Ethan’s problems with conceiving, after months of trying to start a family with his husband Peter, and with his feelings of worthlessness as a result.

It also involves a selkie called Nico who is bad-tempered and distrustful, and can’t entirely be blamed for it, since he’s injured due to being caught in Peter’s nets. Ethan is a witch and uses his power to bring Nico back to life, forging a connection between the two of them — and over the following days, as Nico heals, another connection begins to grow. What’s enjoyable is that Peter and Ethan’s relationship is rock-solid, and they don’t bring in Nico as some kind of fix for their problems: they’ve got that covered, and this is just about their connection with Nico, as Nico, not as a stop-gap or a patch or anything like that.

It’s also worth noticing that there’s some dubious consent here — while everyone’s into one another and it seems inevitable that they’re going to explore it, they also accidentally take a magical aphrodisiac. They’re all happy about it and there are no regrets, but that’s an important theme here that I wouldn’t want someone to be startled by.

In any case, I found the book smuttier than I’d have liked, not because I’m being a prude, but because it feels like that slightly took the place of the three of them working through their awkwardnesses, getting to know each other, and forging something based on their personalities. There are hints that it can happen, that it will happen… but it doesn’t really happen here.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Yellow Jessamine

Posted November 18, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Yellow Jessamine

Yellow Jessamine

by Caitlin Starling

Genres: Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 140
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Powerful shipping magnate Evelyn Perdanu lives a tight, contained life, holding herself at a distance from all who would get close to her. Her family is dead, her country is dying, and when something foul comes to the city of Delphinium, the brittle, perilous existence she's built for herself is strained to breaking.

When one of her ships arrives in dock, she counts herself lucky that it made it through the military blockades slowly strangling her city. But one by one, the crew fall ill with a mysterious sickness: an intense light in their eyes and obsessive behavior, followed by a catatonic stupor. Even as Evelyn works to exonerate her company of bringing plague into her besieged capital city, more and more cases develop, and the afflicted all share one singular obsession: her.

Panicked and paranoid, she retreats to her estate, which rests on a foundation of secrets: the deaths of her family, the poisons and cures that hasten the dissolution of the remaining upper classes, and a rebel soldier, incapacitated and held hostage in a desperate bid for information. But the afflicted are closing in on her, and bringing the attention of the law with them. Evelyn must unearth her connection to the spreading illness, and fast, before it takes root inside her home and destroys all that she has built.

Caitlin Starling’s Yellow Jessamine is a horror novella, following a young woman who fell heir to her family’s estate and business after the tragic deaths of all her family. Evelyn Perdanu likes to tightly control her life, managing the business around the war that will all too soon come to her home, and managing her household according to her own (slightly eccentric) needs. Her solace is her garden, where the things she grows can both heal and harm.

Slowly, the extent of what she does becomes clear — in response to the sudden appearance of something like a new plague, which leaves people empty and catatonic, after a brief period of total obsession with Evelyn. It’s all very creepy and tense, both with the plague and with the fear of the enemy and the eventual death of the town, and the fear of being found out for what she’s done.

Where it failed for me is that Evelyn is hard to pity, since she’s ruthless despite her fragility. She thinks nothing of blinding a man, even as she’s supposed to be nursing him to health. Poison is an answer that comes easily to her hand. It’s hard to feel sorry for her — for me at least — given how culpable she is. Points for atmosphere, but the character didn’t work for me: just a step too far into her own private madness to ever seem sane and worth investing in as a reader.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Tread of Angels

Posted November 11, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Tread of Angels

Tread of Angels

by Rebecca Roanhorse

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 201
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Celeste, a card sharp with a need for justice, takes on the role of advocatus diaboli, to defend her sister Mariel, accused of murdering a Virtue, a member of the ruling class of this mining town, in a new world of dark fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse.

The year is 1883 and the mining town of Goetia is booming as prospectors from near and far come to mine the powerful new element Divinity from the high mountains of Colorado with the help of the pariahs of society known as the Fallen. The Fallen are the descendants of demonkind living amongst the Virtues, the winners in an ancient war, with the descendants of both sides choosing to live alongside Abaddon’s mountain in this tale of the mythological West.

I really enjoyed Tread of Angels. I was probably only partly on board, right up until the end, because it felt like the main character (Celeste) was being a bit stupid about something that was right in front of her face. It felt like everything was going to be just a bit too predictable — enjoyable, but not something that would stick in my mind. And then, at the end… consequences.

In the end, I still can’t give it five stars, because holy crap, Celeste, how are you so stupid? And how do you keep taking such terrible advantage of everyone around you? It’s a wonder you’ve managed any friends at all… That part didn’t quite make sense to me, because the profound selfishness of Celeste made me wonder how her friends hadn’t seen it.

But something about the ending surprised me; I don’t want to say too much, but it made me re-evaluate a certain character and decide that he probably was more interesting than I’d initially written him off as. The book from his point of view certainly would’ve been something.

In the end, it strikes a sad note, but it works really well.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Unto the Godless What Little Remains

Posted November 8, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Unto the Godless What Little Remains

Cover of Unto the Godless What Little Remains

by Mário Coelho

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 104
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

The internet is a lonesome god.

Liverloin is a fractured man, a collection of personas—artificial constructs of wants, fears and needs—created by underground science-artists to help him hide in a hyper-connected world. But he can’t hide from Big Momma.

She is the living internet, a benevolent AI who knows everything and everyone… and somehow is in love with Liverloin.

Agent Stevly works for DAIS, an AI on the other side of the internet: the darkness to Big Momma’s light. DAIS’s agents manipulate news, information and media and pull the strings behind world events, but DAIS cannot control Big Momma or understand why she loves Liverloin. Agent Stevly, bound body and soul to DAIS, will stop at nothing to find the answer.

Unto the Godless What Little Remains is very much designed to be a novella, and as such it gets away with things that would frustrate me otherwise, like the constantly switching point-of-view and time in the continuity of the story. It’s still a little frustrating, especially for the chapters with Stevly (which are in a horrible format with less punctuation and few capital letters), but it mostly gets away with it at this length.

The story itself isn’t too surprising to me: AI have learned to predict everything humans think, do, like or want, because everything is part of a chain of causes and effects. The AI Big Momma rules the world, and everybody lets her, because life’s easy that way. But Big Momma’s fascinated with a human, Liverloin, who acts and thinks in ways that she just cannot predict — and obviously others have a vested interest in stopping her getting obsessed with him. Liverloin flees both her and them, confused, and running from something in his past.

It all comes together pretty well; it doesn’t feel startling or surprising to me, but it was entertaining enough.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Undertow

Posted November 3, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Undertow

Undertow

by Jordan L. Hawk

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 90
Series: Whyborne & Griffin #8.5
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Shy secretary Maggie Parkhurst knows there’s nothing special about her. She’s neither sorceress, nor fighter, nor scholar. What could she possibly have to offer Persephone, the chieftess of the inhuman ketoi — and the woman Maggie’s fallen in love with?

After Maggie’s friend Irene goes missing under mysterious circumstances, she has no choice but to turn to Persephone for help. When the trail leads to a shadowy acting troupe, they discover a plot that stretches much farther than a single vanished woman.

But when a dark truth is revealed, Maggie must choose between a man from her past… and the impossible yearnings of her heart.

Undertow gives us the story of Dr Whyborne’s secretary, Maggie, and her friendship with his sister, Persephone. It’s a short one, but it has a nice action sequence, and shows us a slightly different side of Widdershins society.

I do think it’s funny that Maggie still hasn’t worked out that Whyborne’s in a relationship with Griffin. All the signs are there, she sees them, and… doesn’t clock on.

It’s nice to spend time with a character other than Whyborne, and also to see Maggie find happiness instead of mooning after him. I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed Persephone’s efforts to woo Maggie. Dead squid, indeed.

Rating: 3/5

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