A new review over at Tor.com:
Afterwar is the first of Saintcrow’s novels that I’ve read than can be parsed as purely science-fictional, and the first that is purely human in its horror. It is also very much in dialogue with the present political moment in American life, where at least one swastika-burning Nazi rally has occurred and been reported in the international press.
I missed, somehow, when this went live over at Tor.com.
The comments are a little baffling, at this point: I’m not sure what some of them are saying.
These arrived Friday. I’ve been rather distracted in the interim…
Courtesy of Solaris Books, K.M. McKinley’s THE IRON SHIPS. Courtesy of Orbit Books, Lilith Saintcrow’s TRAILER PARK FAE.
Reviewed over at Tor.com.
It occurs to me this year I have not been very talkative here. This happens with theses and deadlines.
But at least there are pictures.
“What? You were taking a picture? But I’m sleeping here.”
That’s A.M. Dellamonica’s CHILD OF A HIDDEN SEA, Tracy Hickman and Laura Hickman’s UNWEPT, Paul Park’s ALL THOSE VANISHED ENGINES, Lilith Saintcrow’s THE RIPPER AFFAIR, and IRREGULARITY, a short fiction collection out of Jurassic London edited by Jared Shurin and published coinciding with two exhibitions relevant to its subject material at the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
Also included in picture: Vladimir the cat.
“I’m not moving. Go away.”
Melissa Scott, Fairs’ Point. Lethe Press, 2014.
The long-awaited new novel of Astreiant. An absolutely excellent book, with brilliant worldbuilding, characterisation, great writing, a solid mystery plot, and terrier-racing. Everyone should read this series. It is really good.
William C. Dietz, Legion of the Damned. Titan Books, 2014. Originally published 1993. Copy courtesy of Titan Books.
I believe this was Dietz’s first novel. Heaven help him, it’s terrible. Not just full of shitty male gaze shit, but boring too. Fortunately, he’s improved at least some since then, as witness his Andromeda novels, which have been fun so far – but this one? Seriously not worth it.
Lilith Saintcrow, The Ripper Affair. Orbit, 2014. ARC courtesy of Orbit US.
Read for review for Tor.com. The third in Saintcrow’s “Bannon and Clare” series, it marks a fun entry in her quasi-Victorian magical steampunk not-England series of mysteries.
Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire. Bloomsbury Young Adult, 2014. ARC via Tor.com.
Read for review for Tor.com. The kind of book I love to hate.
Nonfiction
Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain’s Convict Disaster in Africa. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011. First published in Australia by Allen & Unwin in 2010.
Christopher writes a solid and engaging history of the British experiment with sending convicts to act as soldiers in Africa between the American Revolutionary War and the founding of the penal colony at Botany Bay in Australia. It is not entirely comprehensive: it could use more background about the Company of Merchants Trading To Africa and their relations with the Dutch and the indigenous peoples, and Christopher is too willing not to tie off threads in her narrative once they pass away from the African coast – what did become of Ensign John Montagu Clarke, accused of mutiny? – but on the whole, it’s an interesting and readable examination of an overlooked piece of British penal history.
Two, this time.
That’s Paul Kincaid’s CALL AND RESPONSE, which I am to review for Strange Horizons, and Lilith Saintcrow’s THE RIPPER AFFAIR, which I am to review for Tor.com.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea 