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.

Electric Velocipede, Issue 10

I can offer no great introduction to Electric Velocipede; this issue was my first time. Initial impressions: it looks pretty unassuming, though the cover is no less attractive and striking for that; using the back cover as a space for the subscriber's address is a nice touch, too. The stories fit broadly into a region that I'm not sure even has a name... "Literary weird"? Don't know if that's a real term, but I trust you get the gist of what I mean. On to the fiction...

The full review is available at SF Site.

Further links:

Electric Velocipede

Tim Akers

Jeffrey Ford

Richard Bowes

Mark Rich

Robert Freeman Wexler

Under the Sun by Hanne Marie Svendsen

The questions of what we do with life and what we have to show for it reverberate throughout the novel. The particular life we follow is that of Margrethe Thiede, who lives in a small Danish fishing town. As a child, her head is full of fairy tales, and she views the world through that lens...but she also senses (even if not quite conciously) that reality doesn't necessarily work that way...

The full review appears in Issue 3 of The Small Press Review.

Further links:
Norvik Press

New Writings in the Fantastic, ed. John Grant

I'm a big fan of John Grant's attitude to fantasy, which is that it should not be funnelled into narrow marketing categories, only to be diluted in the process; but should instead be let free to do whatever it wants and generally be, well, imaginative. I'm all for that, so naturally I was interested in reading a big anthology (41 stories in 360 pages of small, close-set type) edited by Grant and intended to embody those very principles...

The full review is available online at Serendipity.

Further links:
John Grant
Geoffrey Maloney
E. Sedia
Kim Sheard
Naomi Alderman
Gary McMahon
Edd Vick
Vera Nazarian
Derek J. Goodman
Greg Beatty
Andrew Hook
Paul Pinn
Pendragon Press

Cynnador by Patrick Welch

The first 40 pages comprise a prologue and thirteen "preludes" before the main story starts. These preludes are a series of vignettes introducing Cynnador and its people: some are more directly related to the main story than others; some characters in the vignettes appear later in the book, others don't, and some characters in the main tale are only referred to in the preludes. What emerges is a picture of a mysterious city that somehow looks after itself, a place in which magic is difficult to cast, but that has some magic of its own...

The full review is available online at SF Site.

Further links:
Patrick Welch
Twilight Times Books

Animal's People by Indra Sinha

The novel is set in a city named Khaufpur, which is fictional but has experienced a similar catastrophe [to Bhopal]. It is narrated by a nineteen-year-old boy whose spine was destroyed by the gas, such that he must move around on all fours—he's taken the name 'Animal' to reflect what he sees as his nature. There are demands for the chemical firm (known only as 'the Kampani') to face justice, but it has thus far refused even to send lawyers to Khaupfur. Now Elli Barber, an 'Amrikan doctress', arrives in the city to open free clinic—but is she all that she seems? Could she actually be working for the Kampani?

The full review is available online at Serendipity.

Further links:
Indra Sinha
The city of Khaupfur
Simon & Schuster

On the Overgrown Path by David Herter

Janáček is the protagonist, though the tale itself names him only as J______. He begins on a train, carrying his notebook, in which he transcribes the notation of any interesting sound he hears. During an unscheduled stop at an unfamiliar village, J______ hears a beautiful song and races off to find its singer. He fails, but the distraction causes him to miss the departing train. Staying at the village, he comes across the body of a young woman who was wounded horrifically – and discovers that there may be more going on than meets the eye...

The full review appears in Issue Two of The Small Press Review.

Further links:
PS Publishing

The Man Who Was Loved by Kay MacCauley

We first meet Marin as an infant at the San Barnabo Redentore Shelter for Foundlings. Sister Clara recognises something in him: could he be her own child, the one she abandoned? Believing so, she takes him from the shelter to raise herself.... As Marin grows, he discovers that people see in him who they want to see, which sometimes even leads to his own physical appearance changing in sympathy. This naturally leads to... various adventures.

The full review appears in Issue Two of The Small Press Review.

Further links:
Telegram Books