My wife says I have great ears. She says our toddler also has them. I know she means the appearance of the ears rather than the skills they can perform in conjunction with the brain. I am sometimes a good listener, but other times I just say "damn, that's crazy" after my wife tells me…
For Human Use, by Sarah G. Pierce, very nearly became a DNF for me. It had that perfect heady concoction of having an intriguing concept that is poorly introduced but examined through a lens that beckoned me like a fresh pie in an open window. Unfortunately, I should have stuck with my overall gut feeling…
Heartless by Marissa Meyer is a prequel story about how the Queen of Hearts came to power in Wonderland. The book pays homage to Lewis Carroll’s world and the well-known characters of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. But Meyer expands the story, giving us insight into the fury-filled, unreasonable queen Alice eventually meets. Catherine would rather…
The long-awaited sequel to Natalie Zina Walschots’ Hench is an extremely weird follow-up titled Villain that goes in directions I absolutely was not expecting. This itself is not surprising, given how refreshing and weird Hench was when it burst onto the scene, so it remains doubly impressive that Walschots was able to still surprise me.…
Few fantasy series kick off with lines that reverberate through the genre’s collective consciousness quite like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger. “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” It summons an urgent and barren image: one man midstep atop a sandy dune, following his quarry across a vast, dying landscape. It…
I have heard for years how lovely Katherine Arden’s The Winternight Trilogy is, and despite it sitting on my shelves, I hate to admit that I have not read it yet. So it feels weird to be here today, reviewing Arden’s newest release, The Unicorn Hunters. But I had to start somewhere, and I’m very…
Letting the cat right out of the bag, I think Platform Decay is pretty bad. Martha Wells’ Murderbot series has been one of my favorite stories in recent years, even though it feels like a book that was split up to make more money at this point. The last two entries (Fugitive Telemetry and System…
Oh lord almighty, it’s another K.J. Parker novella! Pulling the Wings Off Angels embroils readers in a quickfire theological conundrum with a divine winged being at its heart. We’ve praised Parker in the past for Prosper’s Demon (a novella masterpiece) and many other works. Does Pulling the Wings Off Angels have the same heft? Let’s…
Continue reading ➞ Pulling The Wings Off Angels – Helluva Novella
Along with my more focused efforts on climate fiction, I’ve also wanted to dissect the role of science and engineering within the science fiction fantasy genre. Player Piano sort of spurred on my more recent fervor, but I feel that my general critique of science fiction plays with these ideas. Hence, when we were sent…
Bone of My Bone by Johanna van Veen is a horror novel that’s about the obsessive, deep sort of love that you would do anything for. Set in Germany amidst the Thirty Years' War, van Veen uses horror to explore love, the prevalence of violence, and the influence religion has in making sense of chaos. …
