IT’S HERE! IT’S HERE!! IT’S FINALLY HERE!!! *Ahem* Apologies, but I have a lot of feelings about Neil Gaiman’s books, and it seems like this one was announced 742 years ago. However, I got my hands on it a week and half before the official release date, because I’m bullshit lucky and someone at my local bookstore put it on the shelves early. One of my favourite books in recent years was Philip Pullman’s retelling of some classic fairy tales, Fairy Tales from the Brothers […]
Takin’ a Trip to Goofyland
Question Quest by Piers Anthony (1991) Xanth is a very magical realm and a complete series of fantasy books by cheeky Mr. Anthony. In this ongoing story of Xanth, it begins with a simple girl on a simple quest. She, like everyone else on Xanth, has a magical ability but that’s not the reason she’s come to ask an ancient wizard a Question. She thinks she is an old maid at thirty and perhaps the proposal she turned down when she was younger could be […]
More timey-wimey from Birmo (you need to read this book)
Full disclosure: I’m already a fan of John Birmingham, and I talk to him occasionally on Twitter; so I read A Girl in Time with some preconceptions, and more than a little positive spin on my bias. Birmo is a big fan of manipulating both time and history in his recent fiction; his very excellent Axis of Time series (three full-length novels and three novellas) plays hard and fast with 21st Century military forces being inadvertently sent back to WWII and the massive fallout from […]
The Rook Files: Revisiting the Supernatural MI5
I have been reading a lot this year, and nearly all the books I have read have had me thinking about being used and being of use. Daniel O’Malley’s excellent Stiletto, which revisits the Checquy and it’s collection of supernatural government servants, fits right into this pattern. For those who have not read The Rook, the background here is that Britain has a entire government agency made up of agents with mysterious powers, ranging from people who increase the fertility of those who surround them […]