Category Archives: Books

Kage Baker and Kathleen Bartholomew’s Nell Gywnne’s On Land and At Sea

“Posthumous collaborations” tend to have a somewhat uneven track record. For every Poodle Springs, you’ve got a handful of “Lurker at the Threshold”s, whereby the fit in prose, storytelling, and vision between the original, deceased author and the one stepping … Continue reading

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Tim Powers’ Salvage and Demolition

Time travel stories are notoriously tricky to get right. Doctor Who and its multiple versions of the destruction of Atlantis aside (it’s the pre-Eccleston stuff. Go back and check. I’ll wait) there are a nigh-infinite number of ways the aspiring … Continue reading

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Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Zombie

There’s actually a fairly long history for the fantasy detective genre, going back at least to Randall Garrett’s stories of Lord Darcy from the 1960s. The genre has enjoyed a roster of stellar practitioners — Michael Moorcock, Glenn Cook, Steven … Continue reading

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Madeleine L’Engle’s The Time Quartet

Naomi de Bruyn is the author. As far as I am concerned, Madeleine L’Engle’s books should be required reading in all schools, as they open doors — not only in the imagination, but also in the academics, math and science … Continue reading

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Liz Williams’ Worldsoul

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Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovitch, Eds., Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

Nobody knows how many short stories Robert Sheckley actually wrote; too many of them appeared under pseudonyms because during his heyday, he was cranking them out faster than his byline could handle them. That tidbit makes any putative “best of” … Continue reading

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Christopher Golden’s 21st Century Dead

It is safe to say that if American popular culture has not in fact achieved its saturation point with zombies, we’ve at least gotten close to it. There are fast zombies, slow zombies, biological zombies, cybernetic zombies, wacky comedy zombies, … Continue reading

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Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief

I could make some surface comparisons to another critically-acclaimed debut from years past. Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon is also set some centuries hence, also takes place in a universe of heavy extra-terrestrial human colonization, and also features the altered … Continue reading

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C.E. Murphy’s Baba Yaga’s Daughter and Other Tales of the Old Races

One of the standard critiques of the Twilight series is that the protagonist stands in between two supernatural critters and the only choice she can make is between the two of them. A pair of male supernatural entities also bracket … Continue reading

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Glen Cook’s A Cruel Wind

Many years ago I read Glen Cook’s first Dread Empire trilogy, A Shadow of All Night Falling, October’s Baby, and All Darkness Met. I was impressed. Here was a heroic fantasy that cast aside the mold of Tolkien and Andersen, … Continue reading

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