You searched for book_author:"Max Gladstone"
Every so often I read a book that I wish I had written. Right there, in those pages, is a universe that I don’t just enjoy but that I’m actively envious of. Three Parts Dead is not quite one of these books, but it comes close. It’s the kind of book I could see a me from a parallel universe not too far away could have written. It satisfies my current hunger for fantasy that…
I read Max Gladstone’s Three Parts Dead last summer when he was first nominated for the John W. Campbell Award. I remember getting a good deal of enjoyment from it during a few sunny days reading outside. It was fantasy, but not as we’ve become accustomed to know it. Gladstone’s Alt Coulumb was a twisting maze of legal deals entwined with magical contracts. The worldbuilding was simply superb, and the plot had me hooked. So…
Like so many time-travel stories, This Is How You Lose the Time War is frustratingly, endearingly, eerily beautiful. It takes a special kind of talent to write time travel well—you need not only that non-linear perspective that many writers find necessary even for linear plots, but you also require a certain level of sheer, Lewis Carroll-like madness to conceive of a multiverse so vastly alternative to our tiny slice, or strand. Amal El-Mohtar and Max…