Category Archives: Books

BBC’s Neverwhere audio series

I spent nearly four very entertaining hours listening to the latest interaction of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a full cast production that I swear was completely rewritten yet again for this production. Gaiman would win the 2015 BBC Audio Drama for … Continue reading

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Garth Dahl’s Masks from Around the World: A Personal Collection

Masks occur in every human culture I’ve ever run across, and their purpose is always the same: disguise. In the theater of ancient Greece, the disguise served to submerge the actor in the persona of the god or hero he … Continue reading

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Naomi Kritzer’s Cat Pictures Please and Other Stories

I don’t normally purchase a collection for just one story but the community over at File 770 was saying in a discussion of AIs that the Hugo Award-winning ’Cat Pictures Please’ was a story that the folks there who hadn’t … Continue reading

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Carrie Vaughn Kitty’s Mix Tape

Carrie Vaughn is an experienced hand at urban fantasy, and Kitty’s Mix Tape is a nice collection of shorter works set in one of her milieus. These stories range from the distant past to after the end of the Kitty … Continue reading

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Camille Bacon-Smith’s Daemon Eyes

Camille Bacon-Smith’s Daemon Eyes is an omnibus edition of Eye of the Daemon and Eyes of the Empress, which tell the story of the half-daemon Evan Davis, who is part of a most unusual detective agency. To fill in the … Continue reading

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Kimberly Unger’s Nucleation

Nucleation by Kimberly Unger is a science fiction novel that attempts to deal with everything from possible first contact, to nanomachines, to corporate espionage and personal rivalries. This would make the book seem overpacked in other hands, yet is quite … Continue reading

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C.R. Maguire‘s A Whovian Feast: A Doctor Who Inspired Cookbook for Discriminating Fans and Chris-Rachael Oseland’s Dining with The Doctor

This review is really an acknowledgement that there’s a nearly inifinite number of writings about Doctor Who done by the fans of the show over the past fifty years. Yes there’s fanfic where they’ve created their own stories, some using … Continue reading

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Elizabeth Bear’s Dust

At her best, Elizabeth Bear can deliver the kind of hard-edged poetry that one often searches for in vain in science-fiction. (She also does some hard-nosed fantasy, but that’s for another review.) It may seem strange to talk about “poetry” … Continue reading

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Elizabeth Bear’s The White City

Elizabeth Bear’s The White City is the third installment in her ongoing saga of Sebastien de Ulloa, vampire and wanderer in a universe somewhat different than out own in important respects. This one is a double-pronged narrative, sandwiching the events … Continue reading

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What’s New for the 9th of August: two London based urban fantasies, Devolving Europe Festival, Oysterband live and other interesting things…

There’s nothing for your comfort in the place where I was born  Someone’s got the roses ’cause my people got the thorns;  My people are the poor ones, their country made of stones  Their wealth is in persistence, in stories and in bones Oysterband’s … Continue reading

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