Target: David Edison’s The Waking Engine Profile: Weird Fantasy There is point during the creative process when too many ideas can be as bad as too few. I’m personally a very poor judge of where that limit is, but The Waking Engine is firmly on the wrong side of it. Some of the book’s core concepts are interesting and fresh, but they are buried under layers of borrowed imagery, and symbolism stolen from across the width and breadth of fantasy and science fiction. The only thing I took […]
Saga Saga
Target: Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga. Art by Fiona Staples. Collecting issues 7-18 Profile: Comics, Science Fiction, Space Opera It’s been too long, but I’m finally getting around to reviewingSaga Volume 2 and, as a limited time bonus offer, you get Volume 3 thrown in for free. Back when I first picked up this epic comic series, I noted that the one flaw holding it back was the lack of focus and development. To quote myself, “While many of the details needed for true long-term success are still […]
Somewhat Spotty Storytelling
Target: Steven Brust and Skyler White’s The Incrementalists Profile: Speculative Fiction As a concept, The Incrementalists is a pretty impressive pitch. A secret society of quasi-immortal do-gooders dedicated to the slow improvement of mankind suddenly threatened by one of their own sounds like a great, high concept blockbuster. But The Incrementalists can’t seem to decide if it’s supposed to be more like ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ or ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ and flounders unpleasantly somewhere between the two. There are a lot of good ideas here, but the novel […]
The City and the Abcity
Target: China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun Profile: Young Adult, Fantasy, Weird Fantasy ‘China Miéville’ and ‘children’s book’ are not, at first glance, two things that would appear to mesh. Miéville, who I have described in previous reviews as being macabre, dense and sometimes overwhelmingly complicated (in an enjoyable way), is hardly the first person I’d pick to write a book for older kids and young adults. Nevertheless, Un Lun Dun is a triumphant piece of fiction. It taps into the fundamental truths of adventure stories, […]
Super!
Target: Tim Leong’s Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to the Comic Book Universe Profile: Comics!, Non-fiction? Super Graphic is an aggregation of information. A sequence of colorful graphs, diagrams and charts that serve up a dizzying variety of information about comic books, the worlds they contain and the industry that produces them. It isn’t so much a book to be read cover to cover as it is an adventure, every page turn revealing something new and delightful. That is, if you’re a comic book nerd. Which is […]
This review is of no relevance to the cause of Light
Target: Sergei Lukyanenko’s Twilight Watch. Translated by Andrew Bromfield (The Watches pentalogy #3) Profile: Modern Fantasy, Suspense, Horror Sergei Lukyanenko’s Watches books have utterly captivated me. The moody atmosphere and strong characterization drive an uncompromising examination of good and evil. Oh, and the story isn’t bad either. Where Day Watch acted as the natural extension of Night Watch, exploring some of the same material from the perspective of Darkness, Twilight Watch almost starts from scratch with a new, overriding storyline that runs through all three sections of the book. While the […]