Category Archives: Books

Alastair Reynolds’ Slow Bullets

Wars do not end neatly. While treaties may be signed and victories declared, there’s always room around the edges and in the grey spaces away from cameras and central command for those more interested in brutality than resolution. Such is … Continue reading

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Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library

The Invisible Library combines storylines I love: alternate Earths, steampunk, and libraries. That it is well-written comes as a pleasant surprise, as usually the stone soup approach to writing fiction results in indigestion from too much grit and too little … Continue reading

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Charles Stross’ The Rhesus Chart

Warning: here be spoilers. Lots of them. There are no such things as vampires. Everyone knows that, including Bob Howard and the other members of The Laundry, the secret agency that protects the British from the eldritch horrors that are … Continue reading

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Steve Niles’s Criminal Macabre: The Complete Cal McDonald Stories

If you like your urban fantasies several steps up from the gutter, this is not the book for you. This is closer in tone to the gruesomeness you find on the show, Criminal Minds. Indeed I can easily picture that … Continue reading

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Roger Zelazny; Donald S. Grubbs, Christopher S. Kivas and Ann Crimmins (eds.): Last Exit to Babylon: The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, Volume 4

I reviewed some time ago the first three volumes of the six total volumes in this set. So I figured that I was overdue to finish off my reviews of this exemplary collection of everything that this writer did save … Continue reading

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Tanya Huff’s A Confederation of Valor

A Confederation of Valor is the omnibus edition of Tanya Huff’s first two novels in the Confederation series, Valor’s Choice and The Better Part of Valor. They demonstrate that Huff, whom I first encountered as a writer of sharp, witty … Continue reading

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Cherie Priest’s Jacaranda

Jacaranda, the most recent entry in Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century alternate history, reads like a movie. This isn’t a bad thing, per se. What it does mean, though, is that the beats of the story come in precise and familiar … Continue reading

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Simon R. Green’s Once in A Blue Moon

At what appeared to be the end of the Forest Kingdom series in Beyond the Blue Moon, Prince Rupert and Princess Julia, also known as Hawk and Fisher, the only honest City Guards in the corrupt city of Haven, have … Continue reading

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Christopher Kovacs with Donald S.Grubbs, Christopher Kovacs and Ann Crimmins (editors): The Ides of Octember : A Pictorial Biblography of Roger Zelazny

This bibliography was prepared as part of The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny, a six volume undertaking, of which you’ll find the first volume, Threshold which is reviewed here. Zelazny, despite dying of cancer at fifty-eight years of age, was … Continue reading

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Steven Brust’s The Khaavren Romances

The Phoenix Guards (Tor, 1992) Five Hundred Years After (Tor, 1994) The Viscount of Adrilankha (Tor, 2002) The Paths of the Dead (Tor, 2002) The Lord of Castle Black (Tor, 2003) Sethra Lavode (Tor, 2003) That somewhat dizzying array of … Continue reading

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