The Last Iota by Robert Kroese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I seem to be reading a lot of humor books capturing the essence of economics lately. It's almost as if economics is funny.

AND MAYBE IT IS. :)

The Last Iota certainly takes electronic currencies on a wild spin. It throws us in a wild cyberpunk future mixing clones, lawless zones in the heart of LA with high-tech military action and gives us a sociopathic genius as the other MC, the main one being a tactically brilliant hands-on guy who we follow and love to see clash with his partner.

So wait. Is this a great high-tech thriller or is it a comedy?

It's both, maybe neither. It's a noir mystery with overtones of Sherlock Holmes if Sherlock just wanted to see the world burn and he thought an Ex-Seal Team murderer might be a good choice to serve as his conscience. It's certainly funny as hell. Weird, huh? It works. Especially when you hunted a lost sheep in the heart of the city in the previous book and a worthless limited edition coin representing electronic currency in this one. :)

See the disconnect?

Oh yeah. It's pretty awesome.

:)

View all my reviews

Christmas Past by Jodi Taylor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Short and delightful xmas story featuring our scariest mom yet. Max. Also, arguably the worst. Or best. Depends on your POV. :)

She takes her child to disease-ridden London to give food and blankets to Matthew's old friends in the muck.

Time-travel can be nice, sometimes, and no one got pissed on. This time.

The best part is the yelling. Go Max!

A very Scrooge-y story. :) And cute.

View all my reviews

Fire Dance by Ilana C. Myer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Without getting into spoilers, I think this novel is poetry.

This may not be self-evident, but when we deal with poets and an academy of poets who may or may not grow into magicians, anything might happen.

It begins with death, from a highly-placed demise inside the academy to the deeply shaded returning character of Lin from A Song Before Night to the gruesome demise of many melted people. It's a lightly-stepped dance between light and shadow, life and death.

The writing is gentle and nuanced. Don't expect harsh plotting. Expect winding and weaving and storytelling that's more about paths and discoveries and the darkness that lays ahead, the light behind.

I said it was more like poetry than a novel. And it is.

For a fantasy, and specifically for being a sequel, it feels like a departure in tone and events. There were some things I missed and some things that were explored much better in this one, but I'm afraid that these are purely personal preferences.

In all, this is an exceptional novel of personal discovery within the academy and from without, following along with students on one hand and back with an older, wiser, and beset Lin on the other.

Settle in for a long tale that deserves a leisurely read or at the very least a careful one. Much can be missed by moving too fast, but know that it is worth it in the end.

More will come. The fire doesn't end in absolute ashes. :)



View all my reviews

White Trash Zombie Unchained by Diana Rowland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Make no mistake, when I rate this book, I'm rating it out of sheer enjoyment. It's total popcorn goodness. AND this particular book in the series is a bit more fun than all the rest. Or at least it just feels that way.

See those crocs on the cover? See that zombie handling them? Yeah?

I'm telling you. This is FUN. It could have taken a more generally funny turn, but it didn't. It's just pure UF goodness with a tribe of zombies eating brains in exchange for immortality, secret and not so secret facilities trying to use or destroy them for their immortality, and it does it with great characters.

Cure for zombies? No, way! Enslave zombies? No, way! Brains in chip format? Sure. Love and rot? Sure. High tech research, zombie crocs, a dreaded sociopathic foe? Sure! :)

I'm sorry, but this just tickles all my funny bones. :) Like raspberry ice cream. With BRAINS.

View all my reviews

Troop of Shadows by Nicki Huntsman Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Maybe I'm getting a little jaded with the whole idea of post-apocalyptic fiction or maybe I'm just tired of plain-Jane portrayals without excellent hooks.

Fortunately for us, this isn't one of those. :)

The execution is all survival fiction after a major plague with all the elements you might expect, the food runs, guns, men treating women like inflatable bags to be thrown away, evil villains, and striving for civilization amongst all the rot.

However, the hook is rather neat. The plague kills off everyone except special needs cases. There's a big continuum between sociopaths, the autistic, and the genuinely brilliant and adaptable, but that's a cool spin on who survives to later die.

I had the most enjoyment not out of the survival bits but in seeing how the characters moved along and got along and how they meshed in a large community.

It feels like humanity is being fine-tuned to some gigantic genetic experiment, and we're right there in the heart of it.

No spoilers. It's simply good post-apocalyptic fiction that not only conforms, but stands out with the rest of the genre. More than that, it shines in the twist. :)

View all my reviews

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

After I finished the Gaia trilogy, I knew I had to keep going through all of John Varley's work.

It's not a compulsion. It's a necessity for the sake of my love of SF.

John Varley is one of the most impressive authors of the field I've had the pleasure to experience. The imagination and the devotion to pushing all those envelopes is the key to my love. :)

This one starts out noir with cloning goodness, moves on pretty quickly to the fate of the Earth and how it had been invaded, very successfully, to save the fishes and to oust the rest of humanity as lower life-forms. If the intrigue to Free Earth hadn't been enough, there was the whole business about the message being transmitted just outside of the reach of the inner system, the one letting us know that the bill has come due for the instantaneous communication technology we'd been using for the last five hundred years.

Ooops.

I guess it's time to figure out if humanity is doomed two times over!

Maybe it sounds like a joke, but it's hardly anything like a joke. The telling of it is all adventure, immortality, corruption, intrigue, and pure imagination through and through. The joy is really in the execution.

And the ending? Wow. Like, totally wow. This is easily one of the very best Hard SF novels I've ever read. It's right up there with anything I can think of. It explores time, memory, and even the social aspects of what alien races might think or do and how they could relate to any other species.

I'm tempted to rank it right up there on the same level as Cixin Liu's latest English-translated trilogy starting with Three Body Problem and ending with Death's End, and I haven't even read Varley's subsequent novels. :)

You can guess that I'll be picking up books two and three very soon. :) This is on another level compared to most modern SF. Let's just call it an undisputed classic. :) '77 and timeless.



View all my reviews

The Agony of After by Scott Hale
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that Mr. Hale is one of the most compellingly disturbing masters of horror to have come out of nowhere in the last few decades.

The rest are just piddling around with character studies of people who have lost a little here or there or people who like to cause a little misery. Some just have monsters to survive or monsters to be.

Mr. Hale takes everything much further than that. He goes epic. Great characters, deep imaginings, fully connected worldbuilding in every single story and novel, and more blood and tentacular horror than I've seen in any book.

I've read a lot. A lot. My guilty pleasure has always been horror in all its breeds, but I have a very soft spot for the over-the-top stuff. As in... you've become super comfortable in this life of genres, have you? Loving the social message, the complicated family life, the career? It sucks you in... and then the worst horrors of anyone's imagining crawl out of the walls, the ground, the trees, even time, flipping everything you think you know on its head.

And the greatest thing about Mr. Hale's work? It's consistent, it's freaking horrific, and he's only getting better.

These four long novellas have probably gone to the top of my list of favorites.

Where the Dead Go to Die - A social worker gets a lot more than he bargains for with the remnants of the Ashcroft family.

Augurs - My personal favorite, a complicated LGBT community tweets itself into a nightmare of epic proportions, but first it does a damn awesome job of exploring its own issues.

A Child in Every Home - A place where families are the causes of their own misfortunes. A missing child case goes horribly, horribly awry.

Trauma - Mr. Haemo is back and we explore behind the scenes of so many of the happenings in the novels after the Trauma, where black is white and graves are the birth canals.

Welcome to the Wormverse.
I can't recommend these enough. There's more blood in these than you can fit in a stadium pool.

View all my reviews