Year: 2008

This will be brief. As I’ve said before our strength lies in our diversity. If you want a unified chorus of voices singing hosannas to the pre-approved “best” books of the year then stop reading …

As much as I really enjoyed Every Last Drop, and there is a lot to like, I can’t help but being just a little disappointed. You can check out an interview with Charlie Huston as …

Accompanied by his cowboy sidekick Buffalo Bill, the gorgeous stripper Sheila, and the mountain man Ted, Mortimer journeys to the lost city of Atlanta — and a showdown that might determine the fate of humanity.

Daughter of the Forest is the debut of the New Zealand author Juliet Marillier and the first book in the widely acclaimed Sevenwaters Trilogy. It offers a deep-felt re-telling of “Six Swans”, an old folk …

At a time when workers feel increasingly insecure about their positions with The Company Severance Package acts as a pretty savage critique of corporate culture.

Sly Mongoose is the third novel of Tobias Buckell. It is part of the same future history as its predecessors Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin, but it is a self-contained story that can be read on …

Steven Brust brings us another tale of our hero Vlad Talos as he goes to the East to learn about his family in the town of Burz. Being the outgoing chap that he is, Vlad starts asking about the family Merss (his mother’s side of …

ASH – A Secret History can in many respects be regarded as Mary Gentle’s magnum opus, both in terms of volume (a whopping 1100 pages) and in terms of its ambition and scope. It is …

Recently, I received a splashy invitation to the kind of event that a genre-bender like me can’t refuse.  The location of the festivities was the Explorers Club on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  I couldn’t wait …

Readercon 18 was held July 5th through the 8th, 2007, in Burlington, MA, USA. Readercon is known as a very focused convention: there are none of the art shows, music, gaming, costumes, etc. that one …

China Mieville is the premiere iconoclast of the fantasy genre. Before (or at the same time) that “punk” (as in cyberpunk, splatterpunk and mythpunk) became a common subgenre suffix, Mieville laid out the manifesto of …

Tem’s fantastical memoir The Man on the Ceiling, about his wife Melanie. And Melanie’s character, in one of her narrative turns, tells us how a strange and lost man did one night climb through her …

Maledicte marks Lane Robins’ first effort as a novelist, and a glance at the cover – which depicts and androgynous face in profile, eyes covered with an ornate Venetian-style domino, the title written with gothic …

Deepsix is the second novel in Jack McDevitt’s “Academy” series, which can be described as mostly-hard science fiction with a few exceptions like faster-than-light travel included out of narrative necessity. However, while it has the …

Barth Anderson’s second novel, The Magician and The Fool, is marketed as a thriller in the DaVinci Code mode, with the hidden history behind the Tarot being the focus. Indeed, the novel is fast-paced and …

Seneschal Zhu Irzh, demonic scion and star of the first Detective Inspector Chen Novel, is now officially, if grudgingly, a member of the Singapore 3 police force while Chen is on his honeymoon. An investigation …

In Last Dragon, J.M. McDermott strips the fat from the bones of epic quest-driven fantasy, then dresses up the resulting skeleton of story in layer upon layer of fragmented and elliptical narrative. The fit of …

“One night, I dreamt that trapped cries of ecstasy were turning to water between the floors, staining my ceiling with the shape of a naked woman. I woke and turned on the light, but couldn’t …