Recent ReviewsTwo Views: Moxyland by Lauren Beukes 20 November 2009 James Trimarco: Moxyland manages to breathe new life into this subgenre by capturing the peculiarly cynical voice of a generation that has absorbed so much branded messaging that it literally cannot imagine a gesture—not an utterance, not a political strategy, not even an act of violence—intended to do anything but stimulate the media for marketing-related purposes.
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, volume 3, edited by Jonathan Strahan 18 November 2009 The volume offers few surprises (certainly for those who read much current science fiction and fantasy), but does succeed in offering that healthy (if conventional) sampling promised in the introduction. 16 November 2009 Filaria is not a work that dazzles with new ideas, rather it impresses by deploying a greater set of storytelling techniques than many better-known works, and in so doing renews the sense of wonder associated with familiar concepts of SF and horror. 13 November 2009 Lake attempts to wrestle with big themes—individual identity, gender and racial politics, gods and religion, and sexuality, to name but a few—but the overall impression is that he has bitten off more than he can chew. Interfictions 2, edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak 11 November 2009 What Interfictions 2 does offer is a set of stories that, if united by only the most tenuous thematic and generic threads, couldn't be more worth reading. 09 November 2009 There was nothing exactly wrong at first, and hundreds of pages passed with nothing exactly going wrong; so why, at p.332, should the reader (this one, anyway) find himself baulking at the thought of reading even one more page, baulking for almost a month at clawing through the last few chapters of The Magicians? 06 November 2009 Shiver's flaws, weighed against one of the most engaging and emotionally involving reads I've had recently, are slight. The Drowning City by Amanda Downum 04 November 2009 Downum takes us into that dark and dangerous territory pioneered by Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber. 02 November 2009 Jonathan McCalmont: Is Baxter to be praised for his seemingly ever-increasing control over an array of themes and issues that few other authors bother to tackle? Or is he to be condemned for writing and re-writing the same kind of book over and over again?
30 October 2009 In other words: I hate this book. 28 October 2009 Robert Conroy's alternate history of the Japanese attack against Pearl Harbor serves as a morality play about good guys and bad guys. The Black Mirror and Other Stories, edited by Franz Rottensteiner (trans. Mike Mitchell) 26 October 2009 Overall: a very worthwhile collection of stories indeed. 23 October 2009 A wonderfully versatile book. View older reviews in our Archive, thanks to the kindness of our authors who allow us to keep their material online. |