being a review of sorts of The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie (January 2011, Gollancz/Orbit US) I have mixed emotions about this book. On one level, it’s a hell of an effort–a deeply ambitious book that attempts to do for fantasy novels what Platoon did for war movies. It’s a crack at a dog’s-eye view of [...]
Welcome to the January Episode of the SF Squeecast! Episode 8, The Middlesquee! This episode, recorded back on July 30 of last year, brought together Squeecast regulars Elizabeth Bear, Lynne M. Thomas, Seanan McGuire, and Paul Cornell, along with our special guest Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who worked as a producer on Lost, and was the creator of The [...]
From the PW review of Range of Ghosts (Elizabeth Bear. Tor, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2754-3) “Bear launches a trilogy in a fantastic new world with this compelling tale…. Bear creates a vivid world where wizards must sacrifice their ability to procreate in order to control magic and the sky changes to reflect the gods of [...]
11am, Saturday Salon F The Legacy of Thud and Blunder Scott Lynch, Elizabeth Bear, Howard Andrew Jones, Violette Malan 2pm, Saturday Salon H The Shared Universe Cindy Spencer Pape, Cat Rambo, Elizabeth Bear, Steve Buchheit, Tobias Buckell 3pm, Saturday Salon E The Writing Process Dr. Phil Kaldon, Elizabeth Bear, DJ DeSmyter, Jim Hines, Anne Harris 4pm, Saturday Salon G Care and [...]
Now would be a fine time to note that SFF writer’s workshops Clarion, Clarion West, and Viable Paradise are all accepting applications!Also, the Alpha Workshop for young writers fundraiser is under way, and I have a small donation to the cause listed here.
Kirkus has given Range of Ghosts a starred review, which reads in part: This lean, sinewy, visceral narrative, set forth in extraordinarily vivid prose full of telling detail, conveys a remarkable sense of time and place, where the characters belong to the landscape and whose personalities derive naturally from it. Though the book is not [...]
Being a review of sorts of a debut novel, Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon (Daw, February 7 2012) As this is one of the other determinedly non-Western fantasies coming out this year, of course I had a vested interest in it. This promising debut offers a glimpse of a dusty and wonderful fantasy city through the [...]
Being a review of sorts of Caitlìn R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (Penguin-Putnam, March 6 2012). Kiernan has long explored themes of the malleability of identity, of the numinous in everyday life. In The Drowning Girl, she gives us modern-day Providence through the eyes of a young woman who suffers from schizophrenia: the [...]
For your convenience! The obligatory 2011 publications reference post! Novels: The Sea Thy Mistress (Tor) Grail (Spectra) The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette) (Tor) Novellas: The White City (Subterranean) Novelettes: “Gods of the Forge,” MIT Technology Review SF issue, October “King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree,” Naked City: New Tales of Urban Fantasy (Ellen [...]