Another blog

I've started a personal blog elsewhere, called Reading by the Moon. I'll still be updating this blog with snippets of the reviews, though.

The Clock King and the Queen of the Hourglass by Vera Nazarian

Far in the future, when the distinctions between 'fantasy' and 'science fiction' are meaningless, the Pacific Ocean has dwindled to a (relatively) small body of polluted water, and the human population is concentrated in two cities on the edge and floor of the basin. Humankind has itself evolved beyond primitive old homo sapiens - but has also lost the ability to reproduce. So the species perpetuates itself by growing a female with the old DNA, who will become the Queen of the Hourglass, destined to mate with the Clock King. Liraei is the current Queen of the Hourglass, and this novella follows her life from 'birth' until...

The full review is available online at Serendipity.

Further links:
Vera Nazarian
PS Publishing

H2O by Mark Swartz

The year is 2020, and clean water has become a scarcity. Chicago has weathered the 'hydro crisis' reasonably well, though its society has still been reconfigured, with all the major utilities controlled by three giant public-private partnerships. Water is the responsibility of Drixa, and it's an employee of that corporation - an engineer named Hayden Shivers - who makes a discovery that could solve the world's water-supply problems: a Maltese moss whose properties defy conventional physics; if you filter water through it, a greater volume of water comes out. The new product, dubbed 'H2O', is, Drixa insists, just ordinary water; though the protest group ICE-9 (led by the daughter of Drixa's CEO) is not convinced. As the novel begins, Miyumi Park, Drixa's head of human resources, offers Hayden Shivers the post of chief engineer - and he becomes a pawn in an elaborate game of power played out by more parties than he could ever have anticipated...

The full review is available online at The Zone.