Target: Sergei Lukyanenko’s Last Watch. Translated by Andrew Bromfield (The Watches pentalogy #4) Profile: Modern Fantasy, Suspense, Urban Fantasy So, I spent a really unreasonable amount of time waiting for and then looking for the Harper paperback release of Last Watch. I waited so long that the fifth book in the series was published stateside and my copy actually started to gather dust on my shelf. Eventually I contacted Harper Collins which prompted a very curt autoreply informing me that they didn’t have the publication rights. Although the […]
Math is hard. Also bad for novels.
Target: John C. Wright’s Count to a Trillion. (Count to Eschaton Sequence #1) Profile: Science Fiction, Space Opera After Action Report: Count to a Trillion is a strange sort of novel. It seems primarily dedicated to avoiding any kind of resolution to any of the narratives it establishes and finding other literary ways to annoy me. Poor characterization, egregious technobabble and obnoxious timeskips are just a few of the book’s many sins. And yet, there is an interesting and ambitious concept at its core. Ultimately, I think the […]
Weirdly Good Comic
Target: China Miéville’s Dial H, Vol. 2: Exchange. Art by Alberto Ponticelli, David Lapham and Dan Green. Collecting issues #7-15 and Justice League issue #23.3 Profile: Comics, Mystery, Science Fiction, Fantasy When last we left Dial H, Miéville was busy adding weird fiction and horror tropes to a little known corner of the DC Universe. The events of the last volume have raised the stakes and opened the door to a multiverse of possibilities. Unfortunately, while Dial H was an incredible critical success, its sales numbers left something to be […]
Art, life and a long journey
Target: Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life. Translated by Taro Nettleton. English design and lettering by Adrian Tomine. Profile: Autobiography, Manga, Graphic Novel A Drifting Life is a wonderfully thick tome of a graphic novel. Equal parts autobiography, national history and understated drama; the book chronicles the story of one of the founding fathers of Japanese Manga. The style pioneered by Yoshihiro Tatsumi was one of the first attempts to turn cartoons into a medium for serious works. Appropriately, his story is a serious one, touching on the themes […]
Caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea…
Target: Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1) Profile: Speculative Fiction, Young Adult There is a gritty reality to Paolo Bacigalupi’s work. A grim straightforwardness that crushes the optimism older SF styles. On its own, this same honesty produces brilliantly brutal speculative fiction, like Windup Girl. But there is a necessary optimism to Young Adult literature that is at odds with Bacigalupi’s tone. Ship Breaker lives in artificial space between two styles, carving out its own literary niche, but at the same time feeling discordant and incomplete. And yet, it […]
Burn it all down!
Target: L. E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Antiagon Fire (Imager Portfolio #7) Profile: Fantasy, Political Fiction, Military Two things struck me as I was preparing for this review: First, I somehow managed to skip Imager’s Battalion during my utter failure of a Cannonball Read 5. I read the book, but I never got a review up. Second, I think I ran out of useful things to say about the series back at book five. The things that I liked are still good, and the elements that are weaker don’t seem to […]