Reviews

Love for 2 Ass-Kicking Ladies

Lila Black is a cyborg. She’s got human bits, but she’s more metal than flesh, and she’s packed with weapons and gadgets that pop out of every conceivable square inch of her body when she goes into combat mode. Cassandra Kresnov is a synthetic person, with super strength and heightened reflexes. She doesn’t have any hidden weaponry, though she can interface directly with computer nets, an ability she shares with Lila. Think of Cassandra as a female Terminator, with Lila as a bit more like RoboCop. Naturally, I can’t help but wonder who would win in a fight? Cassandra doesn’t have Lila’s on board weapon systems, but she seems a good deal more self-adjusted/self-assured than Lila. But then Lila, despite her emotional anxieties, is nuclear powered. Somewhere in the multiverse, these two ladies must have met, and if Marvel comics has taught us anything, it’s that when world’s collide, super folk always throw down. Still, I suspect after the tussle, Lila and Sandy would actually get along quite well.

Meanwhile, back here on Earth Prime, both of these ass-kicking augmented women continue to amass the love.

Tomas L Martin, of SFCrowsnest, returns to Cassandra Kresnov’s world with his review of Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway, in which he says:

“It is this extremely nuanced political spectrum that truly brings ‘Breakaway’ to life. That and the explosions. The superb set pieces featuring SWAT teams against extremists are matched in excitement by the battles on the floors of government. The debates between Callay’s representatives are as exciting as the running gun battles in its streets… The brilliance of ‘Breakaway’ in making these politicians seem just as real as those in the real world adds a huge depth of interest to this book… an extremely well rounded novel. Recommended.”

And on Blog, Jvstin Style, we read of Justina Robson’s work: “I really enjoyed Keeping It Real. The book is unabashedly the first in a series, the book ends with lots of dangling questions to be answered. Hyping and turbocharging Earth into the 21st century, with high tech to counter and contrast against the sorceries of the other realms provides new life for the ‘Elves meet modern humans’ genre. Here, we do get an Elf riding a motorcycle, but we have a special agent with a nuclear reactor to help give her an edge, as well as a lot of other toys. There is a decent leavening of sex and eroticism, but not to the point where it overwhelms the narrative as it seems to do in a certain writer’s oeuvre…there is a lot of potential here, to explore these new worlds and the interactions between these interesting characters. Not just Zal and Lila, but other characters in the band, and others we meet throughout the course of the novel, from elf necromancers to a demoness singer to a dragon that reminded me of the elemental entities of Exalted. Robson knows that the characters that inhabit her worlds have to hold up as well as the world itself, and she does this ably.”

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Breakaway: Bookgasm Finds a Lot to Love

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Over at the Bookgasm website, Ryun Patterson reviews Joel Shepherd’s just-released Breakaway, where he calls it, ” a step up from its already good predecessor.” This is high praise when you consider that the prior book, Crossover, was listed in Bookgasm’s 5 Best SF&F Books of 2006. So, a step up from best of the year? We’ll take that! Just as we like to hear this bit, which calls out what I feel is so great about Joel’s Cassandra Kresnov series:

“Ever-mindful that books with leaping cyber-chicks on the cover are expected to have leaping cyber-chicks within, Shepherd kicks the action up a notch from Crossover, providing more than enough lethal grooviness to satisfy action junkies. This series is not just popcorn, though; amid the shooting and kicking is a really interesting story about trust and friendship and the aftermath of betrayal… The non-action bits just might be good enough that Shepherd could have left out the hot synthetic hunter-killer operatives altogether and set the series on a rural Nova Scotia sheep farm, but would I have read it? Probably not. So buy Breakaway for the hot action, but read it for the characters.”

Oh, and the subtle Blazing Saddles reference made me laugh, though as another tale of a law enforcement officer who meets prejudice and ignorance with uber-competence and good humor, it’s an apropos comparison.

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Breakaway

Cynthia Ward reviews Joel Shepherds’ Breakaway: A Cassandra Kresnov Novel for SciFi.com’s Sci Fi Weekly, where she gives the book a C+. Despite the low grade, there are some very enthusiastic quotes, such as:

“Shepherd continues to develop his ambitious future with considerable sociocultural and political astuteness. More than occasionally, readers will find themselves reminded uncomfortably of current events, as when Shepherd’s protagonist states, ‘I like that the public can change their mind. It means politicians have to be flexible, and take all public mood-swings into account. Nothing’s more dangerous than a narrow-focused leadership with a closed mind.’ Shepherd’s universe is developed in enormous depth, and Breakaway delivers all the world-building details that SF fans expect—and many, many more.”

And this:

“Shepherd’s protagonist, the smart yet naive Cassandra Kresnov, is a sympathetic character, and an intriguing new addition to SF’s self-aware android tradition, which includes Clifford Simak’s Time and Again, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner, Robert A. Heinlein‘s Friday and the anime series Ghost in the Shell.”

Cynthia takes issues with aspects of the novel, from the complexity of its politics (a plus in my mind), to the supra-human nature of its action, to “the heterosexual Sandy’s friendship with the bisexual Vanessa,” seeing male projections onto these female characters. I won’t take issue here. I appreciate the review, which has me itching to reread the book, so maybe it will have that effect on others too!

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Fast Forward BookLetters Review Gets My Goat

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I just learned about a service BookPage provides called BookLetters, which syndicates online reviews for local libraries websites. BookLetters has given a stunning endorsement to Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge, listing it as a “notable” book, in a great review by Paul “Goat” Allen. Paul says:

“The 21 stories included in Fast Forward 1 are truly visionary science fiction, harkening back to the days of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein.…Of the 21 ‘future fiction’ stories featured — which also include works from Stephen Baxter, Ken MacLeod, George Zebrowski, Gene Wolfe and John Meaney — all are noteworthy in their own right, a rare feat for any anthology. Diverse, entertaining and thought-provoking, this collection offers a wildly imaginative view of what the future might hold. Editor Anders has it right when he writes in his introduction: ‘Who knew enlightenment could be so much fun?'”

You can see the review “in action” here at the New York Public Library, the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District website, and the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library system.

Meanwhile, after the bad pun in the title of this blog, I hope I can be forgiven for the immodesty in quoting this bit:

“In the last decade or so, many of the leading publishers of science fiction and fantasy have taken a decidedly safe philosophy regarding new releases. The popularity of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake vampire saga, for example, has spawned dozens if not hundreds of derivative and uninspired series. Unrestrained creativity and visionary speculation, it seems, isn’t as integral to science fiction and fantasy as mainstream marketability. Wrong. One person who has almost single-handedly reignited and redirected the course of the genre is Pyr Editorial Director Lou Anders.”

Which is immensely gratifying to hear, whether or not it’s true.

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A Review Round-Up

Don D’Ammassa posts several Pyr reviews on his Science Fiction Reviews site:

Of Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, he says, “The real focus of the novel is the setting, which McDonald illustrates in three different eras, pulling them all together through the device of quantum physics and the malleability of reality. His prose is, as always, a joy to read. This is a major novel from a major talent.”

Less enthused with Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, he at least offers that “There are parts of this very ambitious novel – particularly the evocation of an alternate human culture – which I liked very much…”

And he’s quite taken with Joel Shepherd’s Breakaway, proclaiming it, “a well constructed planetary adventure story with plausible political maneuvering.”

As an aside: I’m also pleased to see his review of Saturn Returns, a space opera forthcoming from Ace from our friend (and author) Sean Williams, which concludes, “This appears to be the first in a promising new series from one of the few writers still producing consistently excellent space opera,” which echoes my own sentiments that everyone should be reading Sean Williams.

Meanwhile, over on another blog, Neth Space considers Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real, beginning by saying that “referring to Keeping It Real as genre-bending is not good enough – this book is multidisciplinary,” struggles with the balance of SF to F, and finally deciding that the novel “succeeds as a techno-punk romp through fantasy and science fiction…” that won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but will really push some folks buttons. I can live with that. My own buttons, obviously, very pushed.

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Bright of the Sky is a Sci-Fantasy World

Rob H. Bedford enjoys Kay Kenyon’s Bright of the Sky, as his recent review on SFFWorld attests:

“Bright of the Sky has both a fantastical feel, as well as science fictional trappings, such as interstellar travel, super-corporations. It might even be fair to say the novel has the feel of a Planetary Romance…. With a rich and vivid setting, peopled with believable and sympathetic characters and fascinating alens, Kay Kenyon has launched an impressive saga with Bright of the Sky. …Bright of the Sky, like the best novels opening a larger sequence, balances closure with open plot strands.

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Adventures in Reading: KIR

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Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real (Quantum Gravity, Book 1) is reviewed in Adventures in Reading:

“While Keeping It Real by Justina Robson is her fifth published novel, she shows off the full strength of her imagination here and announces to those who may not have heard already that she is a major talent and that she will write a blend of science fiction and fantasy that demands to be read. …Robson keeps the novel moving at a reasonably fast clip with action, excitement, elf sex, imperfect cyborg machinery, inept fake assassination attempts, and a heroine who is broken more on the inside than on the outside…and this is the woman who must protect Zal, and elf who barely wishes to be protected. ….Keeping It Real is perhaps the most original science fiction or fantasy novel I have read in some time and it is because Robson is able to blend the two genres so seamlessly that it is simply just good storytelling. “

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A Bold New Series

John DeNardo posts his review of Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction from the Cutting Edge on SF Signal. John says that fifteen of the nineteen stories in the anthology are “good or better,” calling the book a “good sampling of the literary range sf has to offer” and adding that Fast Forward is “a good example of why I love reading short fiction.”

John rates each story in the book individually (with some minor spoilers), and says that “It helps that Anders has assembled some of the field’s brightest stars, mostly veterans, and some newer voices, too. Having a cool John Picacio cover to get passersby to notice that is also a great help. The collection of visions depicted here is indisputable proof that science fiction is the literature of ideas.”

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Future-Tech und Kastendenken

Phantastik-couch.de, a German language online magazine of fantatic literature, has just posted a review by Frank A. Dudley of Alan Dean Foster’s Sagramanda.

I don’t speak German – I dropped out of German 101 in college in frustration – but Frank very kindly summarized his main points for us:

  • Alan Dean Foster is the genre’s globetrotting chameleon.
  • Foster takes the Indian society with its castes as a backdrop and charges it with a techno plot reminiscent of William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy.
  • His protagonists are dazzling, and Foster manages to maintain this strength of the novel until the end. He follows their thoughts and motivations with subtle irony while elegantly proceeding the parallel story lines.
  • The finale appears to be a bit constructed.

Which sounds like a pretty good review to me. And even without running it through Babel Fish to make sure, I think I agree with this: “Was Japan in den 1980ern Japan für Cyberpunk war, das sind Indien und China für die SciFi-Techno-Thriller des noch jungen 21.”

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One of the Major SF Books of 2007

Nick Gevers weighs in on Ian McDonald’s forthcoming Brasyl in the April edition of Locus magazine:

“McDonald conveys quite brilliantly the prodigious energy and fecundity of Brazil as it is and could be. …Brasyl is a feast of fine prose, an able political novel, and an intriguing experiment in cross-temporal storytelling and implication. …it is without doubt one of the major SF books of 2007.”

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