The Just City, by Jo Walton, is such an odd little book, I had a hard time making my mind up about it. It’s fantasy with a smidge of sci-fi and a lot of Greek Mythology, so it has a lot to appeal to me. But the story wandered around so much it was a
The last book of Michel Faber’s that I read was his Victorian-era novel that people either enjoyed or wanted to kill with fire. I fell into the “enjoyed” category, so I was surprised and delighted to discover that late last year Faber released an actual science-fiction novel. Although since we’re talking about a Michel Faber
The book I’d picked to review this week is taking a lot longer to read than planned. And the one-two punch of gloomy weather and the complete inability of anyone in North Carolina to deal with winter storms (anyone including me) (and storms in this case meaning even the rumor of ice) has meant a lot of days
According to the blurb on the cover, Krassi Zourkova’s Wildalone has everything I’m looking for in a romance novel: magic, music, angst, and lots of sex. A young woman travels to America and Princeton, tries to solve a mystery, ends up in a whirlwind romance with a handsome, mysterious fellow, and is tempted by his equally
I have to admit that I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, or any of the sequels, or the Twilight books that apparently inspired E.L. James to write the Fifty Shades fanfiction series in the first place. Not taking a stand against them or anything, they’re just not my thing. There’s been a lot of
I picked up this one thinking that it was going to be one of those adapted-classics-with-a-twist, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Android Karenina. It isn’t. In 1958, the submarine Plongeur had just begun its maiden voyage when the ballast tanks, steering, and engine all experienced catastrophic failure at the same time. The vessel
I remember Icarus. He flew too close to the sun. In the stories, though, it’s worth it. Always worth it to have tried, even if you fail, even if you fall like a meteor forever. Better to have flamed in the darkness, to have inspired others, to have lived, than to have sat in the darkness, cursing
I’ve decided that, as a fan of the steampunk genre, it’s a shame and a crime that I haven’t read more Jules Verne. As a fan of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, not reading the original tale of Captain Nemo is just unacceptable. A classic science fiction story along the lines of Journey To The Center of the
Phil and Kaja Foglio’s gaslamp fantasy series Girl Genius is set in a world of automatons and dirigibles, tyrants and heroes, and stories of the famous adventurers, The Heterodyne Boys. It’s a world where a small portion of the population are Sparks, geniuses born with the ability to invent death rays and revenants and robots capable of leveling cities, but