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Fantasy

The Lost World: It Made Me Feel Funny (A Review)

written by Byron

“Some believe what separates men from animals is our ability to reason. Others say it’s language or romantic love, or opposable thumbs. Living here in this lost world, I’ve come to believe it is more than our biology. What truly makes us human is our unending search, our abiding desire for immortality.”

The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, for those that haven’t heard of this famous classic, is about an expedition to South America to verify claims of a discovery of an area in which dinosaurs and other ancient creatures continue to live. I gave the book a try because (1) I was looking for inspiration for some travel/nature writing that I’m attempting, (2) Arthur Conan Doyle and this book are famous, and (3) the digital download of the book was free.

It was written over a hundred years ago, and I’m still trying to work out how I feel about it.

July 29, 2018 0 comment

Byron Fantasy Literary Fiction Reviews

Galatea: Another great story by the author of Circe and The Song of Achilles (A Review)

written by Byron

The thing is, I don’t think my husband expected me to be able to talk.

Pygmalion is one of the most-famous least-violent Greek myths. It’s the one in which a sculptor creates a statue and falls in love with it, the goddess of love takes pity on him, gives the statue life, and the sculptor and the now-living statue (sometimes named Galatea) get married. Maybe they have a kid or two, depending on which version of the story you read. The end.

Galatea, by Madeline Miller, takes place a little while after those events. Told from the point-of-view of Galatea, it’s a short, gut-punch of a story and a LOT darker than the original myth.

July 14, 2018 0 comment

Byron Fantasy Literary Fiction Reviews

The Song of Achilles: Fans of Circe won’t be disappointed (A Review)

written by Byron

We were like gods at the dawning of the world, & our joy was so bright we could see nothing else but the other.

I really liked Circe, so I bought another, older book by its author (Madeline Miller): The Song of Achilles. I’m glad I did because it’s terrific.

The simplest way to describe it is that it’s The Iliad from Patroclus’ point of view. I haven’t read The Iliad, so I cannot really personally vouch for The Song of Achilles‘ faithfulness to the source material. However, based upon some wiki research and google-fu, I THINK all the important high points from The Illiad are preserved.

July 1, 2018 1 comment

Byron Byron's Favorite Books Fantasy Literary Fiction Reviews

Circe: I loved it (A spoiler free review)

written by Byron

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

Along with a few Sunday school stories and fairy tales, Greek myths were some of the first stories that I was exposed to. Before I knew anything at all about hobbits or Jesus lions, I could recite the names of all the Olympians and a few of the Titans. Jason and Theseus and Hercules and Perseus were way more familiar to little-Me than Robin Hood or Wyatt Earp or Frodo. As I got older and read more of the myths, plays, and poems of ancient Greece, unedited, I became a bit uncomfortable with the casual sexism and idiotic violence of it all. Other, later works, like the Aeneid, proved deeper, prettier, and more intellectually stimulating than the Bronze Age Greek stuff. Nevertheless, I have always had a special place in my heart for the old tales.

Circe, by Madeline Miller, therefore, proved to be the perfect book to get me out of my fiction-funk. It tells the “life” story of Circe, the premier witch of ancient Greek myth, from Circe’s point of view.

June 24, 2018 1 comment

2017 Ardis Ardis's Lists Award Winners Books Fantasy Science Fiction

Nebula Award for Best Novel, 2018

written by Ardis

The Nebula awards 2018 will be announced tonight, at the SFWA Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Over the past few months, I’ve been working to read and review all of the nominees in the Best Novel category. As theVerge.com describes:

The Nebula Awards are issued annually by SFWA to the best works in genre novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories published in the last year, alongside the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation. The Nebulas are a sort of industry award, determined by professional authors.

Below, I’ll talk a little bit about each book as a nominee, as well as give you both my vote (which book I think should win) and my prediction (which book I think will win). Also, for each book I will include a link to my full review so you can get all caught up and (if I’ve done my job right) form your own opinions just in time for the award announcement.

May 19, 2018 0 comment

Award Winners Byron Fantasy Reviews

The Black Tides of Heaven: A Flawed Story in a Cool World (A Spoiler-Free Review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the fifth in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang is…shoot, I’m not sure how to describe it. Others have described it as silkpunk (it’s not), Asian fantasy (kind of but not really), or some sort of epic thingy (that’s not written in the style of an epic at all). I don’t usually like to provide details of an author’s created world in my reviews because authors work really hard to introduce readers to their worlds in their stories. Who am I to short circuit that introduction? At the same time, though, I want to give MY readers, friends, and followers kind of a heads up of what they’re getting into if they were to pick the book up. So, the highlights: it is an entirely fictional world, set in an entirely fictional country that has magic, and the magic fuels technology levels to more-or-less 19th century/early 20th century. There is an “Asian” flavor, but that’s confined to pretty much names and some creature/legend stuff.

Now that the description of the world is out of the way, we come to the real question…is it any good? I don’t know if it’s good or not – I’m not some gatekeeping arbiter of all that is Good and Worthy in the written world – but I do know that it is not a book that I particularly enjoyed reading. People that share my tastes would also probably not enjoy this book too much.

May 18, 2018 0 comment

2017 Ardis Award Winners Fantasy Reviews

Turn to Amberlough for easy pleasures

written by Ardis

The Nebula award will be announced May 19, 2018, at this year’s Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. This post is the third in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novel. The other nominees are Jade City by Fonda Lee, Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss, The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin, Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (which I reviewed for the Philip K. Dick award), and Autonomous by Annalee Newitz.

“Businesses on the banks of the Heyn, where it flowed behind the theatre district, were as likely to cater to pirates as to penniless aristocrats. Wealthy courtesans mingled with starving artists. The men wore jewels and the women suits and everyone else a mixture of both. The place was a magpie’s den of true gems and counterfeits, impeccable taste and outrageous lack thereof.”

Lara Elena Donnelly’s Amberlough is truly a pleasure to read. Within the first 10 pages, I was laughing with the characters, dazzled by the setting, engaged by the story. Most of all I was impressed by how easy it was to read. Despite the alien world, the complicated social and political dynamics, the strange names and stranger characters, Donnelly’s pages just flew by. Getting into this story was effortless.

May 14, 2018 4 comments

Award Winners Byron Fantasy History Reviews

Passing Strange: Not one of my favorites by the author, but still pretty damn good (A spoiler-free review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the third in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages is basically historical literary fiction involving the LBGT scene of early 1940s San Francisco with a little magic thrown in here and there.

May 13, 2018 0 comment

2017 Ardis Award Winners Books Fantasy Reviews

Spoonbenders

written by Ardis

The Nebula award will be announced May 19, 2018, at this year’s Nebula Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Since 1965, the Nebula Awards have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. This post is the second in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novel. The other nominees are Jade City by Fonda Lee, Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss, The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin, Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty (which I reviewed for the Philip K. Dick award), and Autonomous by Annalee Newitz.

“The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances.”

If you like tall tales and depression, this book is for you. Daryl Gregory’s story covers the lives of members of the Telemachus family both in the 1960s, as the family is formed and comes to explore their extraordinary gifts, and in the 1990s, as the grown Telemachus children try to live their lives and raise their own children, struggling to move past the events of the 1960s.

May 10, 2018 3 comments

Award Winners Byron Fantasy Reviews Westerns

River of Teeth: An uneven alternate history of hippo-riding cowboys (A Spoiler-Free Review)

written by Byron

The Nebula Awards will be announced May 19, 2018. The awards are given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. This post is the second in a series of reviews of the nominees for this year’s Nebula award for best novella. The Nebula defines a work as a novella if it is between 17,500 and 40,000 words. These are short books.

It’s not a caper. It’s an operation.

River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey should be one of my favorite books of all time. It’s an alternative-history western heist story involving a gathering of diverse, eclectic, violent individuals to accomplish a risky task. With hippos. It is as if the book had been custom designed to check off All the Stuff Byron Likes.

And yet, I don’t love it.

May 5, 2018 2 comments

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