Reviews for 5/14
The Free Lance-Star reviews Jim Crace's post-apocalyptic novel The Pesthouse.
Salon reviews Where's My Jetpack? by Daniel Wilson, a book about the future that didn't happen. (Any bets that we'll see a similar spate of "How Come We Weren't All Eaten By Our Toasters?" books and articles in about 2040?) The Salon reviewer falls into the usual trap of seeing big things as important and small things as unimportant, wondering if "progress itself has actually slowed down, with the 1960s as the climax of a 20th century surge of innovation, and the decades that followed consisting of a weird mix of consolidation, stagnation and rollback." That, of course, is purely an effect of our not hitting the Transportation Singularity, but try explaining that to Salon....
Eric Brown, in The Guardian, reviews Richard Morgan's Black Man (soon to be published as Thirteen in the US, and available from the SFBC then), The Mermaids by Robert Edric and Tony Ballantyne's Divergence.
Fantasy Book Critic reviews Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden.
New at Fantasybookspot:
- a review of the bone-song-infused Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick
- a review of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
- a review of Paul Park's The White Tyger
- a review of Antony Johnston's Stealing Life
- a review of Bloodring by Faith Hunter
- a review of Kim Harrison's Every Which Way But Dead (also available in the SFBC omnibus Dead Witches Tell No Tales)
- and a review of Thomas M. Reid's The Gossamer Plan.
Monsters & Critics reviews Carol Berg's Flesh and Spirit.
Monsters & Critics reviews Laurell K. Hamilton's The Harlequin.
And Monsters & Critics also reviews MaryJanice Davidson's Undead and Uneasy.
SciFi Weekly reviews Lucius Shepard's Softspoken.
At SciFi Weekly, John Clute is awfully dogmatic about what alternate history is and is not allowed to do while reviewing Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. ("A genuine alternate world/alternate history must be an argument about the case of things, or why bother?" sayeth Clute. Considering that I've heard plenty of similar arguments that the novel must be about real people in the real world, or it's similarly not worth the bother, I'm afraid I'm not going along with Clute on this one. I also might say that a space opera must be comprehensible and centered on a character that readers can identify with, but that would be mere cruelty, and I don't exactly mean it.)
From SFFWorld:
- a review of Kelley Armstrong's No Humans Involved
- a review of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin
- and a review of James Barclay's A Shout for the Dead.
SF Signal reviews Minister Faust's From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain.
Blogcritics reviews Frank Beddor's The Looking Glass Wars.
Book Fetish reviews Gerry Bartlett's Real Vampires Have Curves.
Book Fetish reviews Darrell Schweitzer's new anthology The Secret History of Vampires.
Bookgasm reviews the Lou Anders-edited anthology Fast Forward 1.
Publishers Weekly's current fiction reviews page includes their coverage of Jasper Fforde's First Among Sequels (the new "Thursday Next" novel), David Brin's Sky Colony, Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen (coming soon to the SFBC), Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9Tail Fox, and many more.
The New York Times Book Review looked at Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reviews John "Still Not King" Scalzi's The Last Colony, David Gunn's Death's Head, Kathleen Goonan's In War Times, and has a quick take on Jim Butcher's White Night (also available in the SFBC omnibus Wizard Under Fire).
SF Diplomat reviews the first issue of Death Ray magazine.
Neth Space reviews Steven Erikson's Reaper's Gale.
New at Tangent:
- a review of the tenth issue of Black Gate
- a review of the May Clarkesworld
- a review of Hub #3
- a review of the Winter 2007 issue of Shimmer
- a review of Darker Matter #2
- and a review of Chizine issue #32.
Black Gate reviews J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin and Charles Saunders's Imaro.
This week's additions to Don D'Amassa's Science Fiction reviews include Jeff Carlson's Plague Year and E.E. Knight's Valentine's Resolve.
And on D'Amassa's Fantasy reviews page, the new reviews are Will Shetterly's The Gospel of the Knife and L.E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Natural Ordermage.
D'Amassa's Horror page also has a few new reviews, most recently Many Bloody Returns, an anthology about vampires at birthday parties edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L.P. Kellner.
