A surly nerd girl goes to GinormoCon on a quest for a rare action figure, and finds… Could it be, true love?

Nerd Alert blogger Sarah Kuhn’s short novella has received enthusiastic online reviews and netted its author a movie deal. Does the book live up to the ballyhoo?

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This weekend is WorldCon, and the 2011 Hugo Awards. So, appropriately enough, I have a video review of this novel that I prepared several weeks earlier (for my own little web series) today. I’ll have another, more recent, video for Blackout tomorrow. Continue reading →

NPR is doing a semi-formal poll to determine the top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy novels. After much feedback from listeners, and having an expert panel narrow it down further, they’ve narrowed down the list to a few hundred. Now it’s up to us. They want readers to vote here, with ten titles per voter. On the 12th (eight days away) they will tabulate their votes and announce their top 100 titles.

So, go forth and vote!

Old-time America, the eugenics movement, and Lovecraftian horror get surgically grafted in David Nickle’s first solo novel, with disturbing results.

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Regular reader erf read a book he enjoyed so much he felt compelled to write and submit a review. He says, “The Desert of Souls is a fast-paced adventure tale, full of swords and magic and heroism, set in the world of One Thousand and One Nights.” More below.
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An exception was the crew, who stared frankly at the Ariekei they had never seen before. Across the room I saw my helmsman and I saw the expression on his face. Once I had heard a theory. It was an attempt to make sense of the fact that no matter how travelled people are, no matter how cosmopolitan, how biotically miscegenated from their homes, they can’t be insouciant at the first sight of any exot race. The theory is that we’re hardwired with the Terre biome, that every glimpse of anything not descended from the original backwater home, our bodies know we should not ever see.

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Yellow light slicing across my pillow like a knife would be the appropriate simile, but it feels more like a mole digging its way into my skull through my right eyeball. There is a boy in my bed, or at least I think it’s a boy. It’s hard to judge gender by the back of someone’s head. But I have my suspicions, based on the sandy curls and the snippets of last night that my brain is starting to defrag (277).

South African author Lauren Beukes received too little attention for her excellent debut novel, Moxyland, but critics have been fawning over her follow-up, an alternate history which blends a noir investigation of the music industry with totem-animal toting lowlifes. Is it as good as people say, or are they making up for having until now missed one of the great emerging SF/fantasy writers?
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