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Wednesday reviews roundup for 29th April
Posted by Paul Raven on April 29th, 2009 at 12:20
Well, it’s all high excitement here in Camp PS – tonight sees the Arthur C Clarke Award ceremony taking place in London, and we get to find out whether Ian R MacLeod’s Song of Time has made the grade!
But excitement aside, there are duties to be fulfilled – it’s Wednesday, which means it’s time to round up the last week of review coverage. Onwards!
Let’s kick off with Stephen Baxter‘s new Xeelee novella, Starfall. The Fix‘s Ziv Wities found one of the plot twists a bit frustrating, but provides the following summary:
Earth has established an empire among the stars, but Imperial rule is paranoid and tyrannical. The novella describes the colonists’ rebellion against Earth – a massive military operation that must be carried out in total stealth, and under relativistic speeds. For the rebellion to have any chance of success, the final preparations must be made 60 years before the first shot will be fired, and no one can be allowed to uncover it in the meantime…
This setup makes for an exciting tactical exercise, for building suspense as the day of open attack draws near, for exciting, unusual space battles, and for depicting the calculating minds necessary to wage war under such conditions – as well as the harsh circumstances that compel them to do so. In all these, Baxter does an excellent job, and any reader who likes space battles, tension, and scientific speculation should enjoy the book greatly.
Aaron Wilson of the Soulless Machine Reviews blog was unreservedly enthusiastic, however:
There is a lot of story packed into this 89-page novella, a story of galactic war full of intricate battle plans and last minute strategy that will consume you, pull you through the plot, as a black hole devours time and space. Told from multiple perspectives that keep you guessing as the story unfolds, you are transported into a multi-world future that doesn’t know the danger that exists in a shimmering pool of mathematical possibilities that resides in one of Earth most protected bunkers deep be bellow one its most populous cities.
That’s Baxter for you – high-grade big-canvas sensawunda science fiction, every time.
Next we have a triptych of reviews from Stephen Theaker of the eponymous Theaker’s Quarterly, now up to issue #28. He’s been reading and enjoying Sebastien Doubinsky‘s Babylonian Trilogy:
Overall, a well-written, exciting and thought-provoking book. It’s a book I suspect I won’t really understand until I read what other people have to say about it, but that wasn’t a barrier to enjoying it, and the sense that it will repay further consideration is a good thing: a book that you know you’ve probably misunderstood is much better than one that leaves you thinking, glad I’m done with that!
Joe Hill‘s Gunpowder also made a big impression:
… now science fiction fans can find out what all the fuss is about. This superb novella took hold of my attention from the very first page and never released it. If I didn’t read it in a single sitting, I’ve no memory of what else I was doing that day! It’s a familiar scenario – gifted kids and the military that wants to exploit them – but the writing is so wonderful, the character touches so exquisite, the narrative so brilliantly focused.
The story starts out small – the relationships between the boys and their handler/mother – but opens out to so much more. I won’t say what, because it should all come as a surprise – but it’s all cool stuff. It’s tragic, moving, epic and glorious, and all in a mere eighty pages.
As did The Witnesses Are Gone by Joel Lane:
… this is a brilliant book. It combines perfectly certain English, American and Japanese traditions of horror, as exemplified by M.R. James, Lovecraft and Hideo Nakata. But this isn’t a Frankenstein monster of influences sewn together; somehow Lane makes it seem as if they were all part of the same tradition in the first place [...] Perhaps the book’s biggest achievement is that you’re left wanting to see the films described, despite the inevitable consequences for your sanity…
This was a superb book, one that I read in a single sitting; I refused to let myself sleep until I’d reached the end. And once I’d reached the end, I found it very difficult to sleep…
And that, I suspect, is what every horror writer longs to hear someone say about their work.
Finally we’ve got a few ‘retro’ reviews of older titles. Liviu Suciu of Fantasy Book Critic explores Rhys Hughes‘ Crystal Cosmos, billing it as an ‘overlooked masterpiece novella’:
Dense and worth at least one re-read, I liked this novella a lot, but I felt a bit cheated of a masterpiece since 80 pages are just not enough to do justice to the wealth of ideas introduced here.
[...]
Highly, highly recommended if you can get a hold of a copy.
Elsewhere, Kent Allard of the alarmingly-named Dead in the South blog sings the praises of Justice and Wilbanks‘ Dead Earth: The Green Dawn.
Dead Earth: The Green Dawn is a superlative addition to the current zombie-fiction trend. Set in the New Mexico of the near future (2048), it is a story from the perspective of a young sheriff’s deputy named Jubal Slate, as he watches his world come to an end. An infection breaks out, from a disputed source (A military experiment gone wrong? An alien invasion?). Jubal doesn’t know how it begins; he just has to deal with its effects. He watches as a wave of illness sweeps his beloved town, people sicken and die, and then are resurrected as zombies. (Flouting a horror convention, the zombies are referred to as such in this story.) All Jubal can do is try to escape with his fiancée. The story is exhilarating, shocking and funny.
The one complaint I would register is it’s too short. However, this is billed as the prelude to subsequent books, and I’m eager to see them.
And that’s about it for this week. As always, click on the cover art to be taken directly to the catalogue page for any of the books above, or just pop over to the PS webstore to have a browse.
And don’t forget that the current upgrades on anniversary gift boxes will expire on the turn of the month, which means that if you want to get nine PS novels for a bargain price with a trade copy of Secret Histories as the tenth title, you’ve only got a day left to make your order!
- Nine trade novels, plus a trade edition of Secret Histories – £100 [US$150 approx.]
- Nine slipcased novels, plus a trade edition of Secret Histories – £200 [US$300 approx.]