Books shelved under “Ebook”

The liminal space between science fiction and fantasy is one of the most fertile confluences of genre. Hard science fiction kind of wraps around on itself; when your technology becomes indistinguishable from magic, suddenly you’ve entered a world of nanotechnological fantasy. “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly” echoes these sentiments. Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a nominee for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, plays in a world where technology has advanced…

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…

Could not deal.

I looked at my progress today and realized I was only slightly more than halfway through. Every time I go to read it, my eyes feel heavy. Enormous paragraphs of description and narration make for a style of story that just does not work for me at the moment. I need something more quickly-paced, something that grabs and takes me along for the ride.

This is not a bad book. But it’s…

Here we are at the end of the To Hell and Back trilogy. As I said in my Dreams of Gods and Monsters review, a trilogy works best for me if each successive book raises the stakes and widens the scope of its world. By these criteria, Matthew Hughes has succeeded. The first book introduces Chesney Arnstruther, a high-functioning autistic man whose world is mostly numbers until he accidentally summons a demon, incites a strike…

Disclaimer: I received this book for free from the author in exchange for a review. Loves me the free books!

So, I don’t necessarily do steampunk. I understand the appeal (I think) of speculating about what would have happened had the Victorians taken the Industrial Revolution to the next level. But I think that steampunk often runs aground, for me, as resembling too much both science fiction and fantasy. I like my science fiction scientific,…

This might not have been the best time for me to read The Holders. The first (and only) season of The Tomorrow People just finished broadcasting here in the UK, and I’m sad it’s over, because my landlady and I were having so much fun heckling its ridiculous characters and plot twists. Seriously, Stephen is supposed to be a high school student but has the ripped body of a mid-twenties man and never gets…

Micah Grey runs away and joins the circus. It’s a common enough idea in literature. There is something magical about circuses, which function as heterotpias in which misfits and outcasts find a place where the rest of society can tolerate or ignore them as long as they offer entertainment value. What makes Pantomime different from the run-of-the-mill circus novel is its setting. Ellada is a country in a different world with a society relatively similar…

You don’t need to read Oryx and Crake prior to reading The Year of the Flood. The two novels take place concurrently (though this one does extend slightly beyond the other’s narrative, wrapping up the cliffhanger of Snowman discovering that other humans have survived). However, I would recommend you read them close together. I only read Oryx and Crake back in March, but even a short span of two months has obliterated a…

Lee Collins has gone and done it, people. He has made me a fan of a Western-based series. I never thought I would see the day. But if I liked The Dead of Winter, then I guess I loved She Returns from War. This sequel is everything I wanted and nothing like what I expected; Collins manages to satisfy my appetite while simultaneously surprise and delight.

Whereas The Dead of Winter is a…

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that stories about robots, and in particular stories about love between robots and humans, are actually just stories about humans. Most stories are—about humans, that is. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is no exception. It’s right there in the title: this is about the daughter Cat, and not so much about the robot, Finn. He’s absent for much of the novel—though never gone. His presence throughout Cat’s life, from her…

When I clued into the fact that Broken is a Frankenstein-inspired mashup of resurrection-related romance and teenage angst, I was determined not to like it. I don’t see why we need to revisit Frankenstein but set it in high school. So A.E. Rought was fighting a pitched battle to earn my approval—but she makes a good case.

Broken’s relationship with its source material is similar to how all other vampire stories relate to Dracula…

My first outing with Thomas Usher didn’t go so well. People died. He moped around. I wasn’t sure why or how I should care. Pretty Little Dead Things was a car crash of a dark and nasty novel that would definitely appeal to certain people who are not me. But still, I had Dead Bad Things on my tablet courtesy of my Angry Robot Books subscription, so I thought I would give it a chance.

…

The Pirate’s Wish picks up literally where The Assassin’s Curse leaves off: Naji and Ananna are stranded on the Isles of Sky with a wizard who doesn’t seem all that interested in helping them. That changes when a manticore the wizard has been keeping prisoner escapes, kills him, and makes a deal with Ananna to help her in return for passage to the manticore’s home, the Island of the Sun.

The manticore is an early…

Sometimes I wish I had the power to checkpoint my life, much like one can in many video games. I’d like to index certain times and be able to rewind to them and then make a different decision. For example, this morning I noticed that I was running low on brown sugar, and I hadn’t bought any more last time I bought groceries. It made me wish I could go back to the point where…

So, it’s the future, and on your 18th “cycle” you can apply to ascend into the upper echelons of society, where you will no longer labour in an ash-filled purgatory of dreary hopelessness.

Why? This is a good question. The Phoenix Cycle doesn’t specify, so for all we know, the mysterious General does it for the lulz.

Last month I received a message from Robert Edward asking me to read his story. As far as…

I enjoyed NBC’s new Dracula series an inordinate amount. It was a fun, thrilling experience of storytelling and characterization. And it got me thinking that, despite happily watching various adaptations over the years, I’ve never actually read the original novel. What with it being public domain and all, I put the Project Gutenberg edition on my tablet and sat back to see how the original stacks up to its adaptations.

(If you haven’t already, you…

William Gibson once said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’m starting to think this is the case with the Singularity as well. By its very definition this would seem to belie the idea of a Singularity at all, but bear with me.

Singularity generally deals in two closely related concepts: artificial intelligence and posthumanism. Once we get an AI that no longer relies on humans to improve its own processing…

So, I am an idiot and did not realize this was a book of short stories until I was well into it. Don’t ask me why. I have an ebook copy, and so there was no real description or anything to clue me into it. I just started reading, assuming it was a novel. After a few chapters there were no obvious connections between these characters and their respective stories, but that’s Ekaterina Sedia for…

I had little but praise for The Alchemist of Souls, the first adventure of Mal Catlyn and Coby Hendricks in an alternative Elizabethan England. Anne Lyle had a keen eye for characterization and an ability to weave a tight, dramatic story that held my attention and left me wanting more. So more’s the pity that The Merchant of Dreams was quite a different experience!

This sequel picks up a little while after the first…

The Roanoke Colony was in trouble, and when its governor returned from an expedition to secure more help from England, he discovered the entire population had disappeared: all 114 people, including his grandaughter, Virginia Dare, the first English colonist born in the Americas. To this day, there is no definitive explanation for the colonists’ disappearance, making it the perfect fodder for the literary imagination.

In Blackwood, Gwenda Bond takes some liberties with another Elizabethan…