Blood & IronElizabeth Bear The first and second acts are lovely; the third falls apart a bit, as if disintegrating into fibres. This is probably a direct result of the way the first and second build up, giving you all this backstory about the Dragon Princes — my favorite scene, I think, is the one where Elaine is telling the Merlin about all the previous Dragon Princes, because it’s so much history, so tightly compacted. Because it seems as if the first and second acts are focused around Keith, as the Dragon Prince, and to a lesser extent, Carel, as […]

DustElizabeth Bear Just as fantastic and mind-bending as I was anticipating… full of those ideas that just make me shiver in awe. The first punch of the story is the best, when you get hit with all the world’s concepts at once. There were a few things I recognized – shadow panels show up in Ringworld, the term ‘coffins’ for sleeping quarters in Neuromancer – but the vast majority was new territory. I mean, angel Engineers who have machine-oil blood? Jacob’s Ladder a DNA helix? An entire artificial world that’s just as foreign and unexplored as an organic one? That […]