Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey (2011) – It’s terrible getting halfway through a 750-page book and realizing you’ve read it before. The good news is that the story is so good that I didn’t care. I like a good spaceship crew story and this one combines space opera with a good mystery and a love story. The story is told by the two strong male protagonists, Miller, an alcoholic policeman on Ceres, and Holden, an executive officer aboard an ice mover. When Holden’s ship […]
Hot Off the Presses
Crimson Son 2 by Russ Linten (2017) – It’s not often I have the opportunity to review a book before it’s published, but I was a Beta reader for this book, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and give the author this review since it’s officially out there now. In the first book, Crimson Son, we’re introduced to the world of Crimson Mask. It’s a world very similar to ours except that governments have created super-powered heroes called Augments. But we’re […]
Sanderson does detective fiction with a sf twist.
I swear, one of these days Brandon Sanderson will write something that I dislike—something that is boring or trite or that just plain doesn’t work—but that day is not this day. This day that son of a gun has written yet another clever, entertaining story for me to four or five star. And this time he takes on detective stories! With a fantasy twist, of course. In the near future, some sort of supernatural event has reshaped the world, and made it possible to recreate […]
“You carry despair as your gift.”
By now, most science fiction readers know that James Tiptree, Jr was not James Tiptree, Jr, but rather Alice Bradley Sheldon. Sheldon was a retired CIA officer (and scientist/artist/critic/businesswoman) who, between 1968 and her death in 1987, published some of the most acclaimed short stories in the genre, using Tiptree as her nom de plume. (She also published a few stories – mostly ignored at the time – under the name Raccoona Sheldon.) I was too young to discover her work while she was living, […]