Review Roundup
John Joseph Adams | February 2nd 2009 at 12:20 pm
Static Multimedia reviews Eclipse Two, giving it 3/4 stars: “This collection celebrates the short story. … While a novel lets you dive into another person’s imagination and watch a story slowly unfold before you, a short story collection is a kind of sampler platter, allowing you to bounce from idea to idea so quickly you might not even realize the combined effect until much later. The power of Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, and Nancy Kress’ prose only amplify the pleasure of reading this collection.”
Discover Magazine’s Science Not Fiction blog also reviews Eclipse Two: "Stand outs for me included Alastair Reynolds’ Fury — Reynolds is best known for his novels and stories set in the Revelation Space universe, but Fury is not set in that complex milieu. Instead it’s a clever stand alone tale about a robot bodyguard who discovers he must confront some home truths. I also liked Stephen Baxter’s SETI story, Turing’s Apples, Karl Schroeder’s voyage through an incredibly imaginative zero-gravity habitat in The Hero, and Daryl Gregory’s The Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm, which makes a strong point about collateral damage without being preachy or predictable."
Dead Reckonings reviews How to Make Friends with Demons: “Graham Joyce once again demonstrates that he is among the most interesting and rewarding of novelists at work today.”
Joseph Mallozzi has a review of The Living Dead, and is currently featuring the book on his book club (a Q&A with yours truly will be forthcoming). Meanwhile, here’s what he had to say: “A fun and freaky foray into the eerie world where things go bump in the night.”
In an interview on BuzzFocus.com, Wil Wheaton said some nice things about Wastelands: “I find Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic futures to be really compelling and very rarely are they done well. They always kind of descend into parody. I like when they’re satire. There’s an anthology of stories called Wastelands that John Joseph Adams edited. It’s one of my favorite anthologies from last year. I’d love to take any of those stories and make them into films.”
(Cool) Shite reviews Shadow of the Scorpion: “A good, fast-moving, active SF yarn with some interesting ideas woven through it. Worth reading, and worth buying.”
WEEKLY BOOK BUZZ on Mania.com reviews Laird Barron’s The Imago Sequence: “To the long tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti, comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with rare intensity and astonishing craftsmanship. … With colorful protagonists, including an over-the-hill CIA agent, a grizzled Pinkerton detective, and a failed actor accompanying a group of bounty hunters, Barron’s stories are resonant and authentic, featuring vulnerable, hardboiled tough guys attempting to stand against the stygian wasteland of night. Throughout the collection, themes of desolation, fear, and masculine identity are played out against the backdrop of an indifferent, devouring cosmos.”
SF Site reviews Greg Egan’s Incandescence: “Greg Egan’s first novel in several years is as dizzying a piece of speculation as we have come to expect from him. … For SF readers, it is highly worth reading.”
Filed in Eclipse 2, Incandescence, News, Shadow of the Scorpion, The Living Dead, Wastelands, how to make friends with demons, the imago sequence. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use this URL to trackback.
