Light Reading by Aliya Whiteley

Prudence Green and Lena Patten are best friends, brought together by their marriages to officers in the Royal Air Force. Their husbands are currently away on duty, and the two women are dissatisfied with their lives back home on the base. Excitement of sorts arrives in December 2004, when Pru finds one of the other RAF wives hanging, because her husband is having an affair - with Lena's husband. At which point, it may appear that Light Reading is going to be a run-of-the-mill potboiler...but it's not so...

The full review is available online at The Zone.

Further links:
Aliya Whiteley
Macmillan New Writing

Postscripts, Issue 14: Spring 2008

PS Publishing must have one of the most diverse lists in the independent press; and their magazine, Postscripts, reflects that diversity: reading an issue is like reaching into the PS bran tub and pulling out a random selection...

The full review is available online at The Fix.

Further links:
Jetse de Vries
Rhys Hughes
Paul Jessup
Sarah Monette
Robert Reed
Jeff VanderMeer
Barry Wood
PS Publishing

Something Wicked, Issue 6

On my personal world map of fantastic fiction, South Africa is one of the areas marked “here be dragons,” because I don’t know what else to put there. If the same applies to you, here to amend that is Something Wicked, South Africa’s only quarterly magazine of science fiction and horror (so here there be no dragons after all)...

The full review is available online at The Fix.

The Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell

Simon Lester's old university tutor commissions him to write a book expanding his thesis on forgotten film stars. The actor who particularly captures Simon's interest is Tubby Thackeray, a professor who became a music hall comedian and then a silent movie clown, but who has now been effectively written out of cinematic history. It becomes clear why when Simon eventually tracks down some footage of Thackeray's highly disturbing films...

The full review is online at SF Site.

The Unblemished by Conrad Williams

In a London pub, photographer Bo Mulvey is approached by a random stranger offering him a map to the secret "house of flies." Mulvey accepts, but all he receives for his trouble is a few lines of nonsense. He may think at first that he's been taken for a ride, but then the map invades his vision, and begins to change him...

The full review is online at SF Site.

Tales from the Secret City by Cryptopolis

Cryptopolis -- a writers' group based in Austin, Texas -- offers us an anthology of ten stories by its members, each introduced by another contributor. The book is elevated above the status of back-slapping exercise by actually being pretty good, yet at the same time, it's frustratingly not good enough to be much more than pretty good. It seems that three of the stories go the extra distance to become something quite special; the other seven are interesting, but stop a little short...

The full review is available online at SF Site.

Further links:
Patrice Sarath

A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore

Charlie Asher owns a second-hand goods shop in San Francisco. As the book begins, his wife Rachel has just given birth; she dies soon after of a blood clot in the brain. Later, Charlie begins to see certain objects glowing red; he discovers they are 'soul vessels' and he has become a 'Death Merchant', charged with collecting the soul vessels of people about to die...

The full review is available online at The Zone.

Further links:
Christopher Moore
Orbit

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.