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WoGF Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Alexandra P. (everythinginstatic) was first introduced to sci-fi by her father, at the age of 14. Although it took 3 years and 2 attempts to finish Foundation, she hasn’t stopped reading sci-fi since, branching out into fantasy and speculative fiction as well. Her biggest passions are reading, tea and photography, and she hopes that 2013 will be the year she finally revisits Hari Seldon. You can read more of her reviews on her blog Wanderlust.
The circus arrives without warning. So begins Erin Morgenstern‘s novel about an unusual circus and the magical challenge within it. My previous encounter with a circus-based story was Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which really did very little for me on a storytelling level, partly because the characters were so damn unlikeable.
The Night Circus comes with hefty recommendations, which is why it’s so doubly disappointing. I went in, expecting a tale of magic, circuses and a shadowy challenge. Instead, I got a thinly-plotted novel that really wanted to be something big, but could only muster a weak romance. The setting is Victorian England (for the most part), and I swear Morgenstern picked it just so she could write about bowler hats and big dresses, because there is nothing remotely Victorian in the characters’ behaviours, they act like modern men and women. The aesthetics are kind of there, but that’s about it, and it seriously irritates me, because you either go full in, or you just don’t specify the time-frame.
Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge: February Review Poll Winners
The Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge February review poll is now closed and we have our winners! This month we have a repeat winner – Mattastrophic was the second place finisher for January too.
February WoGF Review Poll Winners:
Our three winners will find an Amazon gift card, $25, $15 and $10 respectively, waiting for them in their email inbox. We hope they’ll use them to buy books and regale us with more great reviews!
Congrats to our winners and thanks to everyone who participated in the poll. There are more prizes up for grabs each month so if you didn’t win this time you still have plenty more chances.
SF Manga 101: Battle Angel Alita & Battle Angel Alita: Last Order
Glenn Hough (gallyangel) is a nonpracticing futurist, an anime and manga otaku, and is almost obsessive about finishing several of the lists tracked on WWEnd. In this series on SF Manga Glenn will provide an overview of the medium and the place of science fiction within it.
Two very strange things happened with Battle Angel during it’s production, which, good god!, started in 1991 and is still going on. When it came to the states, VIZ, for reasons I’ve never been able to find out or figure out, changed the name of the title character to Alita. Her name is Gally in the original. Obviously, no one at Viz looked up the word Gally in the OED. Why would they? Gally, in colloquial english, just means to inspire the fear of death. Root word is probably gallows. As the manga unfolds, we see that Gally certainly is someone who inspires the fear of death.
The second strange thing is Kishiro ended Battle Angel with volume 9. This is only strange since volume 17 of the Last Order arc is due out this month. I’ve heard he was pressured to end it; he was canceled. I’ve heard he rushed the ending due to illness and then couldn’t stand that ending. I’ve heard a lot of things so I don’t know what’s true. What I do know is that Kishiro goes on to another project but returns to Battle Angel a few years later. An omnibus version of Battle Angel appeared in Japan and the last few chapters of volume 9 were lopped off from that edition. The chapters which wraps things up are gone and Kishiro proceeds into the Last Order arc as if he’s just taken time off from the series. It’s as if that ending never happened. Now that I’m more familiar with how the manga system works in Japan, I certainly respect this author for asserting control over his work, which is not always the case over there.
Winter is Coming (Again) this Spring
What’s not to love about this trailer? While I dread the Red Wedding I’m looking forward with glee to the scene where Daenerys finally gets her army.
Monsters: Film Review
When you hear of a film called Monsters, your mind probably makes a quick number of associations: Monsters, Inc., Monsters vs. Aliens, Monster’s Ball, etc. When you hear it’s about alien lifeforms and the people who try to survive their invasion, you probably think of Godzilla, Them, Predator, Cloverfield, and others. What you’re probably not imagining is a quiet and contemplative, but never boring, trek through alien-infested territory that is beautiful more often than it is terrifying.
Monsters was written and directed by Gareth Edwards, who was not known for much at the time. It was filmed with a budget of less than $500,000, and Edwards did all of the visual effects himself after filming was complete. Released back in 2010, Monsters made the rounds at various film festivals and eventually as a limited release in theatres. It seems to have descended into rental land without making much of a splash, which is a real pity.
It’s hard to say too many good things about this movie. The setup is fairly simple: a space probe sent to find suspected life elsewhere in the solar system returns to Earth with an alien infection, and crashes over Mexico. The northern half of Mexico is quickly overrun by the giant octopus-like creatures, forcing the U.S. to build a massive wall to protect its southern border. America and Mexico combine their armed forces to send air strikes at the aliens whenever they creep too close to civilized areas.
Forays into Fantasy: William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land
Scott Lazerus is a Professor of Economics at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado, and has been a science fiction fan since the 1970s. The Forays into Fantasy series is an exploration of the various threads of fantastic literature that have led to the wide variety of fantasy found today, from the perspective of an SF fan newly exploring the fantasy landscape. FiF will examine some of the most interesting landmark books of the past, along with a few of today’s most acclaimed fantasies, in an attempt to understand the connections between fantasy’s origins, its touchstones, and its many strands of influence.
In an earlier Foray into Fantasy, I looked at William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908) as an influential early precursor of the weird tale, a difficult-to-define subgenre of fantasy portraying incursions of the inexplicable or uncanny into our consensual reality. Since then, I’ve been looking forward to reading The Night Land (1912), Hodgson’s fourth and final novel, which, though sometimes cited as his masterpiece, is not as often read today due to its length and distracting pseudo-archaic English. While it certainly has touches of the weird, The Night Land is also an amalgamation of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and romance, its uniqueness compounded by its extremely unusual narrative viewpoint.
The first chapter tells of the courtship and marriage of Mirdath and the unnamed narrator. Based on the writing style and details of the setting, it seems to take place in England in the seventeenth century, though this is not specified. When Mirdath dies in childbirth, the narrator, who idealized his wife with an intense degree of sentimentality, is plunged into despair. Somehow, whether through some form of clairvoyant reincarnation or psychic time travel (the ambiguous possibility of both mystical and science fictional interpretations is characteristic of the novel), he finds himself occupying the mind of a young man living on the dying earth millions of years in the future, after the sun has stopped emitting visible light, and humanity has retreated into the “Great Redoubt”—a giant metal pyramid powered by the “Earth Current” and protected from the malevolent forces of the Night Land by a sort of force field. The remainder of the novel is narrated from the perspective of this seventeenth century Englishman, now with the knowledge of the young man of the future whose mind he co-occupies, describing this future dying earth and his quest to regain his lost love—a journey through a blighted landscape teeming with evil creatures.
WoGF Review: Ironskin by Tina Connolly
Emily Sandoval (ersandoval) is a bookaholic, whose poison of choice is fantasy and science fiction. At her day job, she’s an engineer working on satellites, and in her spare time she writes epic fantasy novels. She blogs irregularly about writing and the genre, and joined the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge to force herself to slow down between books and write the occasional review.
When the 2012 Nebula Award nominees were announced, I was pleased to find I had read (and enjoyed) four out of six in the Best Novel category. The fifth has been on my reading list for a while. The sixth, the only one I’d never heard of, was Ironskin by Tina Connolly.
I picked it up so quickly in part because of some idiot comments floating around the web about the genre becoming too girly, and it made me happy that books like this are starting to get serious recognition. Once I read the description, I was curious about what made this book so special that both it and Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamour in Glass were included on the shortlist (both being alternate histories in the regency era).
Ironskin is a retelling of Jane Eyre with fey. Unlike Glamour in Glass, where society is practically unchanged by the addition of magic, Connolly’s world is dramatically different. Society had become dependent on fey technology, powering everything from lights to motor cars with magical “bluepacks”—until the Great War. The story starts five years after the war’s end. The fey are gone, but the country is left devastated, and scrambling to make do with coal and steam. A generation of young men is slaughtered, and many unlucky survivors are left with fey curses that can only be suppressed by covering the scars with iron. Jane Eliot is one such ironskin, hiding her deformed face with an iron half-mask.
WoGF Review: Rusalka by C. J. Cherryh
Thom Denholm (Thomcat) works in the software industry and as a baseball umpire. In his spare time, he has kept up a steady stream of reading, fiction and non-fiction, since he was old enough to enter a library “summer reading” contest. He first read “A Wrinkle in Time” before it was extended into a series, only coming back to read the subsequent books recently. He joined WWEnd last year, too late to really dive into the GMRC but signed up for the WoGF challenge immediately, and he’s looking forward to a functioning “random author picker”. : )
This is a story about a young wizard and a gambler, thrown together and sent on an adventure. They encounter a dead girl and her living elderly father, a wizard in his own right. Descriptions of Mythic Russia include people, places and creatures – including that of the title.
From the author’s description, “A rusalka is a Russian ghost: a drowned maiden who dies for love will become a rusalka, haunting the river where she perished.” A few other Russian beasties appear in this story – including bannik, leshy, and vodyanoy. The interactions of these between themselves and with the main characters form much of what I liked about this book.
Unfortunately there was a lot I had difficulties with. The thought processes of each main character were overly detailed, slowing any action to a crawl. I’ve read Heinlein’s chapter-long discussions between characters easily enough, but found myself distracted or worse, nodding off during thought-filled paragraphs in this book. When the characters conversed, the dialogue wasn’t much better, and could be repetitive at times. The book does contain a few action sequences, including most of the first chapter. These went by quickly, perhaps because the characters were focused on actions instead of thoughts.
Review: Quantum Coin by E. C. Myers
Stats
Quantum Coin by E. C. Myers
Published 2012 by Prometheus Books/Pyr
Fair Coin Series: Book 2
331 pages
I originally reviewed Fair Coin after winning a copy in a WWEnd giveaway last year. So when Pyr gave Dave and the guys a copy of the sequel, Quantum Coin, they asked if I was interested. I liked Fair Coin well enough; it was fun, did a lot to stoke a latent librarian fetish I didn’t know I was harboring, and ended the Ephraim/Jena/Zoe love triangle in an oh-so-deliciously-yet-unsatisfying way that probably resonates with anyone who has ever had a teenage crush (I09 called it “Pure Awesome Crack”). Well, and of course turning down a free book is just weird, so I told Dave a few months ago that I’d love to review it and could probably do so within a few weeks (clearly an unscrupulous lie).
Time and Space and Everything
Quantum Coin begins almost as soon as Fair Coin leaves off. Ephraim has left the world of universe-jumping behind – sort of – and he is happily in love with Jena Kim. No more coins, no more controllers, no more careless wishes, no more murders. But you know the multiverse is going to put him on notice on the very night, of all nights, that he and Jena plan to finally… cough… go to prom.
WoGF Review: The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin
Jack Dowden (JDowds) doesn’t review Sci-Fi/Fantasy books on his blog 100 Stories 100 Weeks. Instead, he’s set himself the unbelievably naive task of writing 100 short stories in 100 weeks. The results are often disastrous. He came to WWEnd to talk to people about Sci-Fi/Fantasy books though, and is having a wonderful time doing it!
I just bought a Queen size bed. It’s glorious. Granted, I can’t move around in my bedroom anymore, but it’s totally worth it.
There’s a little rack next to it. My girlfriend asked me to hang it in the bathroom months ago, but I never did. And I won’t, because it’s a great place to put my beer when I’m sitting in bed.
So I spent my weekend in bed, beers on standy, with The Killing Moon in hand. It was a near perfect weekend. I devoured N. K. Jemisin‘s book in four days. I would’ve gotten through it sooner, but eventually the drinking muddied my brain and I had to go play video games instead.
Nonetheless, The Killing Moon is a great book, and for the first time in a while, I found myself unable to put it down (when I was sober).
The story centers of three people: the Gatherers Ehiru and Nijiri, and a foreign emissary named Sunandi. Actually, there’s a fourth character, that of the main city, Gujaareh. Though there are no maps of the city, Jemisin weaves the place together with such strong visuals that it’s hard not to imagine it. Few authors nowadays seem capable of bringing a city to life like she has done here.
