The accidental theme of this month’s Shortly Ever After is perspective, and the vastly different worlds we inhabit depending on where we’re standing. (I’m trying so hard not to say anything about These Troubled Times ™ because it’s beginning to seem like I have lost the ability to write a blog post without referencing These Troubled Times ™, but I swear to God I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it!) While I do love SFF for its mad ideas about what could be or might be someday, I also love its ability to make me…
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I love publisher catalogs, y’all. I can’t describe how much I love them. It’s because I judge books by their covers, and publishers’ catalogs offer me the opportunity to do that on a grand scale. So here are a few of the books from 2015 for which I am excited, in no particular order. Flood of Fire, the last in Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful Ibis trilogy, appears in August, and then I can at last set about getting matching copies of all three. Sea of Poppies was one of my favorite books of its year, and while River of Smoke was…
31 CommentsConfession: I love Daryl Gregory, and I wanted to read all his existing novels prior to the release of his new one, but I kept putting off reading Raising Stony Mayhall (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) because I don’t like zombies. Of course, Daryl Gregory doesn’t just do zombies like everyone does zombies. (Well, he does, but not right away.) Wanda Mayhall is driving her children home one night, in the year of the zombie outbreak, and she finds a dead girl wrapped around a tiny, still-moving baby. When she gets the baby home, she realizes that he isn’t…
23 CommentsAs mentioned in this space a few weeks ago, I was more excited by the first couple of chapters of Pandemonium than I have been by the first few chapters of any book I’ve read in a while. Naturally, I was excited to check out more of Gregory’s work. Like Pandemonium, The Devil’s Alphabet drew me in with its premise, but didn’t quite succeed in bringing the plot home. Okay. Here’s the premise. Bear with me for a bit. When Paxton was a kid, his town was hit with what’s now known as Transcription Divergence Syndrome, which killed some of…
11 CommentsAm I just reading a lot of good speculative fiction lately, or is speculative fiction being extra awesome recently? The beginning: Pandemonium has a killer premise in a lot of ways. First, the basic premise baldly stated — a world exactly like ours except that starting in the 1940s/1950s, random acts of demonic possession started happening — is awesome. Second, the particulars of the premise — there are only about 100 known demons, who possess people for brief periods of time (a few minutes to a few days, usually), act out fairly consistent scenes, and then jump to another victim…
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