Bigots in the SF Community

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I’m breaking from the review-only format to include news from the specfic market/community because I couldn’t read about this and not pass it on, especially since there seems to be an effort to suppress it. From a rejection letter sent out by an editor of Helix: I’m impressed by your knowledge of the Q’uran and Islamic traditions. (Having spent a couple of years in the Middle East, I know something about these things.) You did a good job of exploring the worm-brained mentality of those people – at the end we still don’t really understand it, but then no one […]

The Virtu (Sarah Monette)

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The VirtuSarah Monette Labyrinthine. Sorry, I just had to. As a single word to describe this book, it’s irresistible and perhaps inevitable. And not in terms of the obscure thaumaturgical theory and the calendar system, although that’s intricate in itself, but in terms of Felix and Mildmay, and this endless, twisted, complex little dance they do. They’re hopelessly interlocked to each other by love and blood and history, and to link it to the baseline metaphor, it’s like they’re both running around the same labyrinth trying to get out but neither of them willing to go through the heart. Backing […]

The Skewed Throne (Joshua Palmatier)

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The Skewed ThroneJoshua Palmatier I don’t know if this was intentional or not (I suspect it wasn’t, but I’m always ready to give the benefit of the doubt), but much of this book sounded as if it was written by a fourteen-year-old, not just narrated. It’s just little things that sort of stick out, like, "Eyes hardening, I turned back to the mouth of the narrow." I mean, you just don’t say things like ‘eyes hardening’ when you’re talking about yourself in first person. It’s the show-not-tell thing, most basic rule in the book. Same thing comes up in multiple […]

His Majesty’s Dragon (Naomi Novik)

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His Majesty’s DragonNaomi Novik I waited a bit too long to write this review to have a completely detailed memory of this book, but maybe I’ll reread it and fill out this brief sketch later. The thing that stands out most about this book is, of course, the style. It’s written with the dialect and rhythms of the period (beginning of the 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars), which is a bit off-putting (unless you read a lot of classical work, I suppose) until you get used to the flow. It’s very convincing, which helps – I can’t remember any anachronistic […]

Companion to Wolves (Monette & Bear)

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Companion to WolvesSarah Monette &Elizabeth Bear I wasn’t sure what to make of this book till the very end. I began with the awareness of the underpinnings of social commentary, having read various discussions online about the idea of Isolfr taking on a woman’s role, and thus emphasizing the artificiality of gender constructs. However, as I went through the actual journey of the book, that point never really came to the forefront for me. I enjoyed the fluid writing style, and was fascinated at the eleventh-hour involvement of the svartalf… it was a strange, sparkly sort of thing to find […]

Storm Front (Jim Butcher)

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Storm FrontJim Butcher Storm Front is the first book of the Dresden Files, about which I’d heard a lot of good things in the corridors of the internet. Urban fantasy has been my genre of choice since I first discovered it, but the books that I’ve read in the same vein as the Dresden Files normally have female main characters. (And female authors, of course, but that’s a much more convoluted issue.) The differences, under Harry Dresden, are a surprising pleasure. With a female main character, there’s always this sort of desperate drive to prove herself, a ramrod tension where […]