Silver and Stone is the second volume in a steampunk trilogy set in a fantasy version of Australia where certain metals can be ‘activated’ to take on magical properties – iron can confer strength, gold can attract, silver can heal, etc. I read the first volume (Heart of Brass) last year so it didn’t qualify for the Cannonball but it did give me the background for this story, which takes up pretty much where the last one left off. (This review will therefore have spoilers […]
“They killed their own just to see time pass.”
I first read about “The Only Harmless Great Thing” as a Big Idea on John Scalzi’s blog. It instantly intrigued me but the past year has been very hard on me and left me in a fragile state so I was reluctant to read anything that I would find disturbing. Still, I kept seeing references to it and realized that I needed the beauty and magic that the story promised. “The Only Harmless Great Thing” is a novella that tells the story of an alternate […]
Mmmmm, syrup
“When light encounters a strong magical field it loses all sense of urgency. It slows right down. And on the Discworld the magic was embarrassingly strong, which meant that the soft yellow light of dawn flowed over the sleeping landscape like the caress of a gentle lover or, as some would have it, like golden syrup.” Pratchett describes the sunlight of Discworld as flowing like golden syrup several times during The Light Fantastic, which meant I spent a fair amount of the time that I […]
And so it begins…
I attempted the second Cannonball and failed miserably (seriously – the ancient blog I managed to cobble together for the effort shows that but a single book review ever got posted). I’m finally back to try again, although I’ve lowered the bar to just a Quarter Cannonball in the hopes it will be more manageable. I am the sort of person who buys books in the hopes that perhaps I will someday find a way to read them and this challenge may be the impetus […]