Archives: July2009
Review of The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden

The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Gardenby Catherynne M. Valente496pp (Trade Paperback)My Rating: 9/10Amazon Rating: 5/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.51/5Goodreads Rating: 4.36/5 In the Night Garden comprises the first half of Catherynne M. Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales duology. The second volume, In the Cities of Coin and Spice, was released in 2007. Often compared to The Arabian Nights for its style of stories within a story, In the Night Garden was nominated for the 2007 World Fantasy Awards and won the 2006 […]

Review of Archangel

Archangelby Sharon Shinn400pp (Paperback)My Rating: 8.5/10Amazon Rating: 4.5/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.21/5Goodreads Rating: 4.10/5 Archangel is a novel in Sharon Shinn’s Samaria series, featuring a world in which angels and humans live together in harmony. The Samaria series is not published in chronological order, but on her website Shinn recommends reading the books in the following order (by release date): Archangel, Jovah’s Angel, The Allelluia Files, Angelica, and Angel-Seeker. There is also a novella in the To Weave a Web of Magic […]

A Brief Entry to Asimov

Note: I started this as a reply to a comment on my review of Marooned in Realtime, but it grew to the point where I decided to split it out into its own post. Well, the most important Asimov to read is the Robot-Empire-Foundation series (which is actually three separate series that he joined into the same universe after the fact). Wiki can give you the full list in chronological order, but I think how you read them depends on […]

SFF News Tidbits/Update

Orbit announced today that Little, Brown UK announced the audio version of Transition by Iain M. Banks will be available as a free podcast beginning on September 3, its publication date. Banks is best known for his series of science fiction novels set in the Culture universe, but he writes some science fiction novels not set in the Culture and this is one of them (he also writes mainsteam fictions as Iain Banks). I’ve read two of the Culture novels, […]

Guest Review of Marooned in Realtime

Marooned in Realtimeby Vernor Vinge288pp (Paperback)My Rating: 8/10Amazon Rating: 4.5/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.04/5Goodreads Rating: 3.94/5 Vernor Vinge, in the days before he became a three-times-running Hugo award winning author, was merely a two-times-running Hugo nominated author. Last year I reviewed the first of those two novels, The Peace War. The second novel, Marooned in Realtime, is a sequel to Peace in the sense that it takes place in the same universe and timeline, but you have to think rather broadly to […]

Review of Cry Wolf

Cry Wolfby Patricia Briggs320pp (Paperback)My Rating: 6/10Amazon Rating: 4/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.08/5Goodreads Rating: 3.9/5 Cry Wolf is the first book in the Alpha and Omega series by Patricia Briggs, which is set in the same universe as her Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series. It features a different set of main characters, the werewolf Anna and her mate Charles (Bran’s son and assassin), but Mercy is mentioned on occasion, Samuel makes a brief appearance, and Bran himself is present throughout a large […]