Jun 222016
 

Cover for Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit.Tor.com: Lee knows that if the fate of the world is at stake, the reader has to care about that world, so he uses language as a way to reveal a beauty that can be found even in the depths of an interstellar war. He builds more in a couple of sentences than some authors manage in entire novels, and beautifully.

…for those itching for dense worldbuilding, a riproaring plot, complex relationships, and military SF with a deep imagination, it’ll do just the trick. Lee’s already shown he has the chops for short fiction, and now Ninefox Gambit proves that he’s a novelist to watch out for. This is military SF with blood, guts, math, and heart.

Read Tor.com’s full review of Ninefox Gambit here.

 June 22, 2016  Tagged with: ,
Jun 202016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.Chicago Tribune: Palmer’s most innovative strategy isn’t futuristic technology but rather the archaic and digressive 18th-century voice in which she (or Canner) has chosen to tell the tale. The result is a richly detailed, very odd future couched in language that recalls Henry Fielding more than Robert Heinlein (though there are occasional nods to science fiction along the way).

Read the Chicago Tribune‘s full review of Too Like the Lightning here.

 June 20, 2016  Tagged with: ,
Jun 162016
 

Cover for Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit.B&N SFF Blog: Yoon Ha Lee’s short fiction has been praised for its elegant prose, outsize SF-nal ambition, and rigorous technical detail. Hard SF space opera from a mathematician and data analyst: one of those times you put a bunch of boring words together, and the result is only awesome. Ordered to retake a fortress captured by heretical rebels and with no other way to win, Captain Kel Cheris must welcome into her head the digitized consciousness of Shuos Jedao, an infamous military strategist who has been exiled to machine space ever since he engineered a disastrous campaign that left an entire planet dead. Together, they will unlock a galaxy-wide conspiracy that could disrupt the entirety of their rigid, ordered, highly mathematical society, throwing everything into chaos. This is one of the most challenging, mind-expanding new sci-fi books you’ll read this year.

Read B&N’s full review of Ninefox Gambit here.

 June 16, 2016  Tagged with: ,
Jun 032016
 

Cover for Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit. RT Book Reviews: Suitably enough, given the rigid Doctrine of the hexarchate and the irresistible formation instinct of the warrior Kel faction, Ninefox Gambit is a book of precise rigor that gives a wonderful amount of worldbuilding without any clunky exposition dumps, is ruthlessly clear-eyed about the costs and concerns of war (especially at this technological level) and gives us an instantly ingratiating heroine who spends most of the book doing her best to outmaneuver the forces that have set her up to fail, waste the lives of her troops or just die. This is a future to get excited about, especially given the likely path of the next book.

Read RT Book Review’s full review of Ninefox Gambit here.

 June 3, 2016  Tagged with: ,
May 232016
 

Cover for Dragon Exile by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller.Publishers Weekly: The 19th installment of the long-running Liaden Universe space adventure series (following 2015’s Dragon in Exile) opens with the members of Clan Korval and their allies still trying to solidify their economic position and regain their strength following their exile from their home planet. With the insidious Department of the Interior manipulating their public image and outright attacking their ships, the clan is hard-pressed to maintain and expand its trade routes. Meanwhile, Clan Korval member Padi yos’Galen is starting to manifest a power that could destroy her, and AI experts Tolly Jones and Hazenthull are dispatched to mentor a newborn computer intelligence, with orders to save or destroy it as necessary. The large number of ongoing story lines, ever-growing cast, and series-wide narrative arc make this an awkward book for newcomers, serving more as the mid-point of the current cycle. However, this space opera continues to delight with genteel interactions between mild-spoken characters who are capable of great passions and swift actions, and its immense scope encompasses a well-realized and comfortable universe.

 May 23, 2016  Tagged with: ,
May 172016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.Tor.com: Sometimes I read a book and I know it’s going to be a huge important book and everyone’s going to be talking about it and it’s going to change the field and be a milestone for ever after. It’s always a great feeling, but it’s never happened to me before with a first novel written by a friend, which is an even greater feeling.

I’ve been waiting for the book to come out so I can talk to people about it the way I used to wait for Christmas when I was a kid. Read it now. Preorder Seven Surrenders.

Read Jo Walton’s full review of Too Like the Lightning at Tor.com.

 May 17, 2016  Tagged with: ,
May 132016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.Boing Boing: Too Like the Lightning, a book more intricate, more plausible, more significant than any debut I can recall. […] Palmer writes science fiction like a historian, maneuvering vast historical forces deftly, plunging effortlessly into their minutae and detail, zooming out to dizzying heights to show how they all fit together. Her acknowledgements cite Alfred Bester as an influence, and that’s no surprise — few writers can trump Bester for the sense of a world that contains within it all the other worlds of all its inhabitants. Palmer, though, may have exceeded the master.

Too Like the Lightning manages to be several books at once: a serious philosophical treatise; a murder-mystery whose surprises buffet the reader like cold slaps out of nowhere that feel inevitable in hindsight; a piece of historical theory in narrative form; a thought-experiment about gender, nationality, identity and bigotry; and a gripping personal story whose players are likable, flawed, sexy, and sometimes terrifying.

If you read a debut novel this year, make it Too Like the Lightning.

Read Cory Doctorow’s full review of Too Like the Lightning at Boing Boing.

 May 13, 2016  Tagged with: ,
May 112016
 

Cover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.NPR: The world Palmer creates is extraordinarily intricate, with forces and organizations forming a delicate web of tenuous coexistence. It’s a thrilling feat of speculative worldbuilding, on par with those of masters like Gene Wolfe and Neal Stephenson. […] The next book, Seven Surrenders, is due in December. That may be just enough to fully savor and digest this first installment, a novel that’s one of the most maddening, majestic, ambitious novels — in any genre — in recent years.

Read Jason Heller’s full review of Too Like the Lightning at NPR.

 May 11, 2016  Tagged with: ,
May 062016
 

BCover for Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. A flying car in the foreground heads towards a glittering city on a massive cliffside, the orange and pink sunset glowing in the background.&N SF/F: The plot is dense in a way that can be almost challenging, but the sheer invention carries you through. […] Once you adjust to the unique rhythms of the story, the rewards are many. There an intriguing mystery at the heart of Too Like the Lightning, and a love of history and language that bleeds through from the very first page.

Read B&N’s full review of Too Like the Lightning here.

 May 6, 2016  Tagged with: ,
May 042016
 

Cover for Emily Winslow's Jane Doe January: My Twenty-Year Search for Truth and JusticeLibrary Journal: This eloquent memoir will be appreciated by anyone interested in cold case investigations and victim advocacy as well as true crime fans. In 1992, novelist Winslow (The Whole World) was a theater major at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, when she was raped in her apartment by an unknown assailant. The cold case opened again in 2013, when DNA evidence unexpectedly pointed to serial rapist Arthur Fryar, and a loophole in the statute of limitations allowed him to be prosecuted. Winslow, designated “Jane Doe January” in the court records, begins a diary of her thoughts about the assault, its aftermath, and the preparation for the trial that follows. An active participant in the prosecution taking place across the Atlantic (she lives in England), the author researches the suspect, contacts people involved in the original investigation, and maintains constant correspondence with the prosecutors. It is a long journey of starts and stops, delays, disappointments, and loss. Mostly, it is full of kind, helpful people whose refusal to give up heartens Winslow through the frustrating process. This important chronicle answers the question, does it serve justice to put a man on trial for a 20-year-old crime? For the victim, it absolutely does.

 May 4, 2016  Tagged with: ,