Blood and Ironby Elizabeth Bear448pp (Paperback)My Rating: 8.75/10Amazon Rating: 4/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.05/5Good Reads Rating: 3.63/5 Blood and Iron is the first book in Campbell award winning author Elizabeth Bear’s urban fantasy series, “The Promethean Age.” The third book in the series will be out on July 1 and a fourth book is scheduled for release on August 5 of this year. With its lush prose, gray characters, and interweaving of mythology, Blood and Iron was a very enchanting story with […]

I finished Blood and Iron, the first book in Elizabeth Bear’s “Promethean Age” series so I should have a review of that up in the next couple of days. You could say I liked it since I want the next book now. It is out, but I’m going to be patient (ha!) and wait until the third book is out on July 1 and just order them both since I can’t find the next book at any of my local […]

I visited Realms of Speculative Fiction today and found I’ve been tagged. I’m now supposed to get the nearest book, turn to page 123, and copy the fifth sentence. Hm, there an awful lot of books that could qualify as “nearest” with 8 bookshelves here… So I chose the book I just finished, Blood and Iron by Elizabeth Bear. That sentence is… You should go. Well, that’s a boring sentence. What’s on page 223? Seeker whirled and hurled the glass […]

For many years, back before I decided that choosing favorites was a no-win proposition, The Abyss held a rather bizarre distinction for me: it was both my favorite book and my favorite movie. This is bizarre, of course, because novelizations of movies are very rarely good, much less great, and film adaptations of books very rarely manage to capture the full power of an exceptional novel. But Orson Scott Card and James Cameron created such an exceptional pair of complementary […]

I first heard of posting about forgotten books on Friday’s a couple of weeks ago and was reminded of it again today when I read the OF Blog’s feature on The Famished Road by Ben Okri. I’ve only been reading speculative fiction regularly for the last few years, so I thought I didn’t have any older books to mention since I already read and review a lot of the older ones I have missed here. However, a few books did […]

Elantrisby Brandon Sanderson656pp (Paperback)My Rating: 7/10Amazon Rating: 4.5/5LibraryThing Rating: 4.07/5Good Reads Rating: 4.23/5 Elantris is the first published novel by Brandon Sanderson, the author who will be completing the final novel in the Wheel of Time series. Although it leaves a few questions unanswered, this is a stand alone book and no sequels are planned. While Elantris is a solid debut and an entertaining story, it never rises above readable to the level of exceptional. The Shaod, a mysterious transformation […]