Book Review: Curse Of The Wolf Girl by Martin Millar
Source: blogcritics – books
Nowadays you can’t open the the TV listings, entertainment pages or go into a book store without coming across a reference to either werewolves or vampires. However, unlike the good old days when they were considered straight ahead creatures of evil who would as soon rip out your throat or drink your blood as look at you, they’ve been turned into tragic romantic heroes (or heroines) becoming the favoured subject matter of something called paranormal romance – enough to make Bram Stoker rise from the dead and drive a stake in anybody’s heart. I can only guess this latest twist on the bad boy theme — kind of makes you miss the love ’em and leave ’em cad or even the brooding, dark-haired guy with the mysterious past of the old days — will continue to rake in millions for publishers across North America as the way the number of titles falling into this category continue to proliferate suggests the public’s appetite for this schlock isn’t going to wane anytime soon.
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Review: The Native Star by M.K. Hobson
Source: Tor.Com
The Native Star opens in the year 1876 with one Miss Emily Edwards, age 25, a backwoods witch from the Sierra Nevadas with financial difficulties and an aging father to support. With the prolonged nastiness of the Civil War receding into the past, the U.S. economy is booming. The magical-industrial complex is building the nation faster than you can say “What development permit?” The boom has brought with it a tide of big-city potions, from a manufacturer called Baugh’s Patent Magics. These nostrum are making it all the way to the small town of Lost Pine, where they’re chipping away at Emily’s livelihood dime by dime.
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Review of Omnitopia Dawn, by Diane Duane
Source: Tor.com
For those who are familiar with the ouvre of Diane Duane, Omnitopia Dawn will seem a departure. Duane is best known for her fantasy: the Young Wizards series of children’s books and their spinoff novels about wizard cats, and the seemingly eternally incomplete Tales of the Five series, which seem to be linked to these others by way of universe.Omnitopia Dawn is something very different—a near-future science fiction novel structured like a thriller, rather than an epic fantasy revolving around the moral judgments of human or feline wizards. I think it’s more fair to consider it as a thriller than as science fiction, actually, because while it does ask some questions about how future technologies may affect human interactions, those are not its central concerns.
Interview – Daniel Abraham
Source: Peter Orullian
Hey, Daniel. Let’s get your vitals out of the way–books you’ve published, genres you’ve written in, any awards or mentions, boarding schools that scarred you. You know, the usual stuff.
Funny thing. I was just having that conversation with an old friend of mine. At this point, I’ve got eight books in print, four semi-literary epic fantasy in a completed series (The Long Price Quartet), a book of short stories that’s just come out from Subterranean Press (Leviathan Wept and other stories), a three-way collaborative science fiction adventure with George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois (Hunter’s Run), and two urban fantasy titles under the pseudonym MLN Hanover (The Black Sun’s Daughter series). I’ve got eight more books under contract: two more of the urban fantasies, three books in a new epic fantasy series (The Dagger and the Coin), and three collaborative space opera books in a new series (The Expanse) under a third pseudonym.
Most of the critical attention I’ve gotten has been for short stories, though. I think I’m pushing 30 stories at this point, and they’ve been all over the genre map. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, unclassifiable what-the-heck-was-that, surreal. Haven’t done a straight mystery/crime project yet, but I’ve got one I’m chewing on.
Escape, Resonance, and Recovery: Traversing the Values of Fantasy
Source: SWFA
A few years back, I was hit with an emotional blow so fierce that it stunned every aspect of my life. I was numb, in a state of confusion, and alone. The details are private, but my recovery answered for me a question often asked in genre circles: What is the value of “escapism” in fiction? Is it a value at all?In the wake of my hardship, I had lost the ability to escape into books. Pages from my favourite authors did not generate that “vivid and continuous dream” John Gardner remarked was the goal of all good fiction. Thankfully, this frightening situation was reversed by two very different fantasists: Robert E. Howard and Gary Braunbeck.
Howard provided my mind with a dark, fantastic landscape, filled the rapid-fire and arcane adventures, completely foreign to my experiences. Braunbeck, on the other hand, closed the gap between the fantastic and the real, dealing with savagely human concerns. Both showed that fantasy has within in it many values, including the relief of escape and the importance of human resonance.
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