Category Archives: Books

Iron Council

Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The hug tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. And behind that enormous unwieldy face the engine was crowded with trophies and totems. The skulls and chitin headcases of a menagerie glared dead ferocity from its flanks: toothy and agape, flat, eyeless, horned, lamprey-mouthed with cilia-teeth, bone-ridged, shockingly human, intricate. Where they had them the trophies’ skins were tanned, drabbed by preservation, bones and teeth mazed with cracks and discoloured by smoke. The befaced engine wore dead like a raucous hunter god.
(339)

Imagine science and technology came to Middle-Earth. Now imagine that in place of hobbits, orcs, elves, and ents, you have steam-cyborgs, amphibious vodyanoi, insect-headed khepri, vegetable cactacae, ab-dead vampires, and a hundred other races. In place of epic heroism, imagine people so morally murky that Sauron would walk away from the worst of them in disgust. Mix SF, fantasy, steampunk, and maritime epic, people the result with psychologically complex (and complexed) characters, and have a gifted writer tell the tale. The world is Bas-Lag, created by China Mieville. He introduced it in Perdido Street Station and revisited it in The Scar, both extraordinary books by an extraordinary literary talent.

In 2004 he published his third and most political Bas-Lag novel, Iron Council.

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Girls Who Bite Back

Girls Who Bite Back examines turn-of-the-millennium pop culture, particularly superhero and comic-related pop culture, as it relates to females. The anthology defies any other description, and Pohl-Weary has gathered essays, articles, short fiction, and comix between the covers. The book even features “Crisis Girl in ‘Springrolls,'” a recipe presented in the form of a superhero strip. It’s a mixed smorgasbord, and the quality of the pieces being dished out varies significantly. Developing a list of useful categories by which to rank this work would have been impossible. Still, the best make this a book worth biting into.

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Singularity Sky

The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd. Some of them had half-melted from the heat of re-entry; others pinged and ticked, cooling rapidly in the postdawn chill. An inquisitive pigeon hopped close, head cocked to one side; it pecked at the shiny case of one such device, then fluttered away in alarm when it beeped. A tinny voice spoke: “Hello? Will you entertain us?”(1)

Charles Stross’ reputation for excellent short stories has made his first novel one of the most anticipated of the year. Singularity Sky has been nominated for a Hugo, and both James Patrick Kelly and Gardner Dozois (Asimov’s) place Stross on the “cutting edge of science fiction.”< So, how good is it? Continue reading →

Blind Lake

Of this year’s Hugo nominees, Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake has the greatest crossover appeal, a fact which will draw in some readers and (possibly) alienate others. An SF thriller set in a community under pressure, Blind Lake features a Stephen King-esque small community and a plausible extra-terrestrial– but who the heck is Nerissa Iverson?

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