Matt Denault
Book Review – The Love We Share Without Knowing
Author: Christopher Barzak Publisher: Bantam Books Binding: Trade Paperback Publication Date: November 2008 “Are you okay?” That is the question asked, in one form or another, in nearly all of the stories that comprise Christopher Barzak’s new mosaic novel The Love We Share Without Knowing. It is a deceptively simple question. It is a question [...]
Book Review – MultiReal
Author: David Louis Edelman Cover Artist: Stephan Martiniere Publisher: Pyr Binding: Trade Paperback Publication Date: July 2008 The labels “science fiction” and “speculative fiction” have long been entwined, with speculative fiction variously considered synonymous with science fiction or an umbrella that contains science fiction. And indeed most science fiction is speculative, either in the form [...]
Book Review – The Man on the Ceiling
Author: Steve Rasnic Tem, Melanie Tem Cover Artist: Christopher Gibbs Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Binding: Paperback Publication Date: March 2008 Melanie used to wake me in the middle of the night to tell me there was a man in our bedroom window, or a man on the ceiling. Tem’s fantastical memoir The Man on [...]
Book Review – The Last Dragon
Author: J.M. McDermott Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Binding: Paperback Publication Date: February 2008 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 this literary garb on the somewhat [...]
Book Review – Steps Through the Mist
Author: Zoran Zivkovic Publisher: Aio Publishing Binding: Hardcover Publication Date: September, 2007 There are fantasists and there are master fantasists; I’d like to suggest that the masters reveal themselves not only by their greatest works, but by what are — for them and them only — lesser volumes. Steps Through the Mist, the latest of [...]
Book Review – God’s Demon
Author: Wayne Barlowe Cover Artist: Wayne Barlowe Publisher: Tor Binding: Hardcover Publication Date: October 2007 Hell is a setting but never quite a theme in Wayne Barlowe’s debut novel God’s Demon; this explains both the book’s successes and its disappointments. At its best Barlowe’s novel provides a fairly typical, quasi-medieval fantasy story — in an [...]
Book Review – Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing
Edited by: Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss Cover Artist: Connie Toebe Publisher: Small Beer Press Binding: Paperback Publication Date: April 2007 What makes certain writings “interstitial” is largely a matter of expectations, say Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss, editors of Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing. How, then, to set expectations for the anthology itself? [...]
Book Review – Blindsight
Author: Peter Watts Cover Artist: Thomas Pringle Publisher: Tor Binding: Hardcover Publication Date: October 2006 One of the things I find interesting about “hard” science fiction — by way of introducing Peter Watts’s Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight, the best example of the type that I have read in years — is that it is probably the [...]
Book Review – In the Forest of Forgetting
Author: Theodora Goss Cover Artist: Virginia Lee Publisher: Prime Books Binding: Paperback Publication Date: May, 2007 “The Rose in Twelve Petals” begins Theodora Goss’s newly-in-paperback collection In the Forest of Forgetting, and the story makes an ideal introduction to the the author’s work. A retelling of the classic Sleeping Beauty story, it frames and then [...]
Con Report – Readercon 18
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 often sees at conventions of the fantastic. Instead the attention is lavished on the convention program — the panels, talks, [...]
Book Review – Getting to Know You
Author: David Marusek Cover Artist: Mark A. Nelson Publisher: Subterranean Press Binding: Hardcover Publication Date: May, 2007 Getting to Know You is only David Marusek’s second book, but he is already a veteran of the science fiction wars. Marusek’s 2005 novel Counting Heads was the subject of the debut speculative fiction column “Across the Universe” [...]
Book Review – Dreamquest
Author: Brent Hartinger Cover Artist: August Hall Publisher: Starscape Books Binding: Hardcover Publication Date: March 2007 Let me confess up front, I find the consolatory, self-indulgent nature of much recent middle grade and young adult fiction troubling. I started reading novel-length fiction when I was 10 or 11 years old, the same age as the [...]
