Spontaneous ∂erivation

I know it’s not necessary anymore, but I thought it would be interesting.

You see, I write reviews for Kindle books, with very rare exceptions (case in point: Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals). Because the Kindle allows me to take notes (and also sync it across multiple Kindles), it becomes my review buddy to bookmark interesting quotes and toss out thoughts and revelations as I read the book. Later on I can search my book/my notes.

People think I’m a decent reader, but the fact is I’m very bad at reading and lean heavily on notes. Unseen Academicals was particularly hard for me to review because my paper bookmarks weren’t as accessible, and I couldn’t really do direct highlights without hurting the physical book. (Highlights are awesome on the Kindle, because it’s a wonderful, automatic, and quick way to create notes for later.)

So. Anyways. I review books for the Kindle. As a result, there are very, very few publishers who are willing to let me (or anyone else) have eArcs. In fact, they tend to treat me as a possible criminal who will totally like distribute their stuff over bittorrent, even though I’m not and I won’t (and with a professional presence on Tor.com, can’t afford to be so anyways). The only one who doesn’t so far is Angry Robot.

Sigh, oh well, it means I buy almost all of the books I review, although I get reimbursed by Tor.com for the ones I review for them. Though that still has its downside: if I want to get reimbursed these days, I need to actually review the book, and if I suck in picking books I want to actually review, well….

Disclosure of my reviews, then:

Bought, without reimbursement:
The Graveyard Book
An Evil Guest
The War with the Mein
Pirate Freedom
Dust
Leave it to Psmith [physical book]
A Fire Upon the Deep [twice]
Zoe’s Tale
Little Brother
Saturn’s Children
Blood and Iron
The Last Colony
Halting State

Bought, with reimbursement from Tor.com:
Ghost Ocean
The Orphan’s Tales
Norse Code
Federations
Matter
The Ghost in Love
The Eye of Night
The Shadow Pavilion
The Stepsister Scheme
You Suck!
The Devil’s Eye
All the Windwracked Stars
Death from the Skies
Nation

Free review copy relayed from publisher via Tor.com:
Unseen Academicals [physical book]

Free review copy relayed directly from author:
Tides From the New Worlds

Free review copy relayed directly from publisher:
F&SF Oct/Nov All-Star Issue [physcial issue]
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union [physical book]

Registered Hugo Voter free copies:
Rollback
Brazyl

Public domain
Psmith, Journalist
Psmith in the City
Mike and Psmith

I buy so many books on my own and then review, that I’m pretty surprised that people still suspect my motives are impure. And I’m very tired of that.

Mind you, the FTC seemed to briefly think that the motives of people who got physical review copies were also impure. But the ebook thing is probably going to last until publishers get a clue.

Le sigh.

Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals is about the parallel development of football (soccer, to Americans) in the alternate and funnier reality that is the Discworld; yet as always, there’s much more swimming in the depths of his Monty Python-esque stories. Humorous but thoughtful, Unseen Academicals combines early Pratchett at his lightest (Pyramids, Moving Pictures, Guards! Guards!) with late Pratchett at his heaviest (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch, Thud!), resulting in an easy read with a heavy afterthought.

[Oh Terry Pratchett, when will you ever be easy to review?]

“Good, now listen…. The Warden couldn’t have the myth-creatures from the old world wandering around and breaking all of his rules, so he made prisons for them. Cities and caves and deserts and stretches of ocean—most of them inhospitable chunks of the planet no one in their right mind would go to…. The point is, St. Ives is one of those places.”
    – Babu Cherion, former Bostonian and paranormal investigator who really, really regrets relocating

Ghost Ocean: a title that understates what all is going on in S. M. Peters’ newest novel. In a way, Ghost Ocean (Roc) is a new take on the urban paranormal; but in other ways, you could consider it a rebirth of an older style of city fantasy.

The small town of St. Ives reminds me of a darker Charles de Lint setting: there are gods and creatures of imagination around every street corner, sometimes literally, often taking on the guise of your kindly next-door neighbor. But in Peters’ St. Ives, the supernaturals’ motivations are twisted by the fact that not only are they out of place in a modern world that doesn’t understand them, but that where they live, even what they are now, is a result of being bound to St. Ives. Not all prisons are cages.

[Read more...]

A mysterious girl in the royal extended family, some say a demon because of disturbing markings around her eyes, is banished from the palace. A very young prince discovers her living in the gardens on the kindness of servants.

Like all princes, even ones that don’t reach the waist of their eldest sister, he wants to save her. But the only way to remove the demon’s markings from her eyes is for her to tell, bit by bit, the stories written upon them.

Thus begins The Orphan’s Tales, a well-woven tapestry of fairytales-within-fairytales in the world of Ajanabh, both like and unlike its inspiration, The Arabian Nights.

[Continue reading...]

It’s the end of the world like you’ve never known it: snarky and sassy with strangely touching moments weaved into a quick-moving story, Greg van Eekhout’s Norse Code manages to turn a fresh edge on old myths. And it’s probably the only re-weaving of Ragnarok where the poor blind guy, the one who started the countdown to Doomsday, is actually a sympathetic and participatory character rather than a footnote in lore.

[What does Norse Code get right?]

In Tides from the New Worlds, Tobias Buckell does what the best SF/F writers do: tells stories that touch our minds with wonder and endow our hearts with perception. Reading this collection, for those of us culture-bound West or East, brings science fiction and fantasy to a fresh awakening. And for those of us who miss seeing ourselves in the fiction we so often read, it’s quite moving.

[Continue reading...]

To boldly go where none have gone before.

To explore new worlds and encounter new civilizations.

To war, love, hate, seek justice and make peace in the depths of space and on the fringes of time.

Also, there is a hamster.

These are the stories of Federations, edited by John Joseph Adams and written by 23 writers.

Continue reading…

On the nesting Matryoshka dolls of space-faring civilizations, philosophy a la Nietzsche, and how Banks ruined SF and epic fantasy at the same time for me.

[Continue reading...]

Ben Gould has a life-changing experience: that is to say, he dies after cracking his head on the sidewalk.

But he isn’t dead.

That’s causing all sorts of complications for the world—both for the inhabitants of the here-and-now, and for those in charge of the afterlife.

[One part love story, one part surreal fantasy...]

Review: The Eye of Night

A disillusioned priest wanders from town to town in a land cursed by destruction and sorrow. He discovers a beautiful lady with an infantile mind, her dwarf servant and caretaker, and the Eye of Night, a powerful artifact destined to save—or destroy—the world.

Pauline J. Alama’s The Eye of Night is a different kind of high fantasy tale, a panacea for every stereotype you run into repeatedly in what I term the traveling-party-on-a-mission-from-God sub-genre. A less kind person might call them Tolkien rip-offs.

[Fortunately, at its best, The Eye of Night is no Tolkien rip-off.]

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