This week I got two cheap bargain books off Amazon. One’s for me and one is for my husband. As of when I’m writing this, there are still a few copies available as bargain books. The Soul Mirror by Carol Berg This is the second book in Carol Berg’s latest trilogy, Collegia Magica. The first book is The Spirit Lens, and the third book entitled The Daemon Prism just came out last month. In spite of having bought it right […]

This week brought two unsolicited review copies, both of which I’m very excited about. One of these books has actually already been reviewed here since I picked up an ARC at BEA – The Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep.  I haven’t read it myself yet (John read and reviewed it), but I am planning to since I really enjoyed A Fire Upon the Deep when I read it earlier this […]

The Children of the Sky is Vernor Vinge’s sequel to his iconic book A Fire Upon the Deep, which was first released almost twenty years ago (that sentence makes me feel kind of old…alas).  Another Vinge book, A Deepness in the Sky, is set in the same universe but is largely unrelated to the other two, and there have been various other related works as well.  Children is the first direct sequel though, set in the ten years following the […]

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge tied with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis as the winner of the Hugo Award in 1993.  (Coincidentally, The Book Smugglers just reviewed Doomsday Book today if you want to read about the other Hugo winner for the year.) It was also nominated for several other awards such as the Nebula Award, the Campbell Award, and the Locus SF Award.  There is a prequel to this science fiction novel called A Deepness in […]

Recently I came across a link to the Tor Spring/Summer catalog on asoiaf.westeros.org and was very excited to see the sequel to A Companion to Wolves by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette was included.  The Tempering of Men will be released in hardcover in August 2011 and I cannot wait since I really liked the first book – and Bear and Monette are two of my favorite authors. Since my husband is a huge fan of Vernor Vinge, I also […]

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 […]