Children of God by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In many ways, this novel rivals the scope of The Sparrow in both worldbuilding and theme. By the same token, both are portrayed in a much more dilute fashion.

This is not a bad thing, but it is a different thing when comparing the two. I loved The Sparrow's tight focus on faith and the loss of it and the general healing or the swift decline. Death came fast and suffering was slow.

Children of God added many new dimensions to the tale. Many characters from either alien species and humans had their time as PoVs. Emilio is still a major character, but not necessarily the Main Character. Sophia and her son Issac have a lot of screen time. As do the once-pacifistic vegetarians on the alien world and the meat eaters. Do we need to get into that little feature? Maybe, maybe not, but let's put it this way... Soylent Green is People.

Where does forgiveness reside? Can it even have a place in the discussion where the meek are constantly preyed upon and the arrogant constantly get away with it? Is this a novel about our own world? Actually, yes and no. The alien society is writ large for us, but better than that, it's delightfully complex.

Russell does a great job juggling all these issues and as a cohesive whole of a novel, I'm surprised and delighted by how wise and multi-layered it develops. Emilio heals a bit of his heart but is eventually convinced to return. Sophia, in the meantime, wrangles up the meek and starts a revolution.

Everything else is gravy and nuance and a delight. :) There's nothing simple about this tale. In fact, between the two novels, it might be one of the most heart-wrenching alien tales I've read. So much better than, say, ET. ;) Little about faith, hate, understanding, and intelligent discourse touches that tale.

This one is for smart people.

View all my reviews

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Let me be a bit real here. I was a bit anxious about reading this because it seemed to be yet another Jesuit first contact novel including aliens.

Now, let me be clear. I actually like religious ruminations when I'm in the right mood and when it's done well and when the context is backed up with solid world-building, whether local or extra-solar. Blish did it extremely well with his Jesuits and aliens. I was simply worried that this would be more of the same. Meaning of life and faith for the poor unsaved brothers from other systems kind of thing.

But actually, what I received was a prototypical near-LitSF that was erudite, humorous, full of likable and complex characters, and a full-blown excellent novel in structure, prose, and thriller-type twists.

And yes, there is also a lot about aliens, tragedy, loss of faith, and especially rape.

We know it's a tragedy before we even really begin. There are two timelines. Before. And after. The nearly saintly linguist-priest Emilio is the sole survivor of an 8-person mission to Alpha Centauri after a musical message gets decoded, luckily, by peeps bankrolled by the Vatican. He comes back mutilated, completely out of faith, calling himself the Whore of God (as in a reference to Beloved being the highest title in a harem), and who keeps everyone around him ignorant of the details.

We must learn about it the long way. But in the meantime, we're treated to present and past as others attempt to heal him and get him to talk and we're delighted by how fresh and funny and faithful he is early on.

The science bits aren't bad and Russell does a lot to keep it real, glossing over a few little issues such as power sources and stuff, but this isn't nearly as bad as some more recent LitSF titles I've read. This is actual SF with a deep and complex storyline about faith and tragedy and a really nasty surprise about the aliens. All three are intertwined.

No spoilers, but my god the end is pretty horrible. We're given a lot of great characters and characterizations, so losing them this way, and then seeing what Emilio had to go through, was damn rough.

A sparrow falling in the wood, but yet, the Father sees all, indeed.

My initial reservations were unfounded. Both atheists and the faithful can find wonderful things in here. Indeed, it's meant to be challenging as hell. And it is.

As for being a new-modern-classic for SF, I can definitely see it. Most of these other LitSF titles are lightweights in comparison.

View all my reviews

Pandemonium by Daryl Gregory
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I suppose this is the first Daryl Gregory that I really really loved. And since it's only my second novel, it might be not too far a stretch to start thinking he might be one of THOSE AUTHORS.

You know, Good Ideas, Great Execution, Cool Characters, Deep Plot... and while we're at it, it's a fantasy/SF hybrid with major horror undertones, a vast world-building mythology/history doing an alternate universe diverging from the '50's and ending in the present.

DEMONS. Or is it daemons? Whatever, it's awesome. Possession all over the place and while there are still people with mental health issues, real demons are possessing people out in the open and it's kinda obvious as hell it's a real thing. So real that it's on the law books. Media. You name it. It's there. And this is just the setup.

The rest of this novel has surprises. So I'm not gonna start spoiling stuff, but the fact that this begins quirky and develops fascinating twists and never strays far from a gorgeously drawn world with complicated and cool characters in a VERY un-UF way, becoming more of a thriller than anything, makes me want to jump for joy.

It's a serious treatment of both mental health, fantasy, and Jungian analysis. :) And because it leans fully on the hardcore fantasy side rather than a trite dismissal on the traditional fiction side just makes me weep with joy. :)

So yeah, I love this stuff. :) Quality all the way through. :)

View all my reviews

Kitty's House of Horrors by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For me, this is a big year for resuming old series. I think I read up to the current installment of the Kitty Norville and then ... completely forgot about it when new books came out.

Oops.

Well, here I am and I'm back to say... it's fun! Not the best UF I've ever read, but for all you folks who like to see your favorite Werewolf Talk Show Host get invited onto a Reality TV show that then becomes an all-out classic horror/mystery with peeps dying off like supernatural fleas, then this is definitely the book for you.

Truly, it's light, fast, and fun. No major entanglements, but there are old bit-players from earlier novels who get some screen time. Some dead time, too. It's a whodoneit! With shapeshifters, psychics, and magicians!

Can everyone get along long enough on or off the camera? :)

View all my reviews

The Gathering Dark by Christopher Golden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Christopher Golden will always have a soft spot in my heart. Why? Because when I read the first two books of this Shadow Saga back in the nineties, they pretty much blew me the f*** away. I thought the characters were delightfully historical, especially because it was real historical and interesting characters being pulled through time because they're now vampires, and also because this was on the forefront of the UF movement making an enormous splash and paving the way for the TRULY super popular ones that came later.

Only, this one never QUITE took off the way those others did. And that's a real shame. Why? Because of the freaking AWESOME SCOPE. It began with vampires pitted against the evil Catholic magician army who kept opening gateways to actual HELL, the subjugation of vampires who aren't exactly evil, just bound by magic to seem that way, and then there was the whole soul thing. Vampires have souls.

Sound like a common enough UF? I mean, besides an army of Catholic magicians opening up city-large gateways to hell to fight the menace of the vampires that they, themselves, made?

Okay, skip that for a moment. Those were the older books. The characters were pretty much larger than life and delightful but sometimes they were somewhat TOO much drawn with a broad-tip pen if you know what I mean. Very little subtlety. But who cares, especially when you have our modern world overrun with city-block-sized demons and good vampires learning to fight and transform in the daylight, or Peter being locked away in hell for a little real-time but for him it's a thousand years, him coming back as one of the most powerful magicians EVER, and battling it out in some of the hugest OVERPOWERED battles I've ever seen in any modern fantasy. In any UF, even.

So why isn't this more popular, again? Why isn't he revered as a god?

HELL IF I KNOW.

So then the third book came around and tons of my favorite characters died and a very unsatisfying end happened and I got BUMMED OUT. Enough that I didn't bother looking to see if he wrote any sequels.

Hint: He did. Four more.

Guess who got embarrassed and ashamed? That's right! ME!

I didn't do any re-reads. I just jumped in with book 4 after a LONG hiatus. How did it go?

Good. I was pretty much WOWed all over again with the magic, the baddies, the enormous scope transforming our modern world as the big bad demon transported whole towns to hell. En-masse. With lots of blood and gobbling of poor people. And armies stepping in to get stepped on. And even the super OP Peter getting his a** handed to him.

Cool. So cool. It's the scope, the descriptions, the HUGE magic on par with Feist or a number of regular big-magic fantasy authors, only it's ripping apart our modern world. :)

And then there's the conflict and harmony of Peter's infernal magic with the Gaia magic. And the love story with the actual magical whirlwind ripping apart waves after waves of demons.

Was I wowed? I was wowed.

Christopher Golden may not have a lot of subtlety, but his hold on grand ideas, gratuitous satisfaction with big magic and bigger gore, and the whole ball of yarn that is his world-building more than makes up for any shortcomings.

Think BIG SCALE COMIC BOOKS with an independent story that shakes the hell out of you. Doing what only novels can do. There's a reason why he's well known as a comic author now. And it's generally because people loved the hell out of what he did in his early novels. :) I assume.

I know he never lost his knack. Whatever issues I had with book 3 is wiped away with the cool bits in book 4. :)

View all my reviews

1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List by James Mustich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

1,000 Books to Kill You.

I don't know if this list is quite as life-changing as it purports, but I will grant it this: It is very eclectic and a wide-reaching list of true classics interspersed with the best of the best B-List books you've probably never heard of or you might have heard in passing before they slipped beneath the waves of all the other books on the high seas.

That being said, this book is a beautiful doorstopper. Enormous, picturesque, fully annotated and researched, and each book is picked with love.

Do I have any issues with this tome? Perhaps. There is a pretty obvious bias to it that may not be fully realized because of the preponderance of outright classics herewithin.

The unknowns are generally packed to the gills with 30's to 50's popular books.

It wasn't obvious to me until fairly late into my reading, from first to last page, alphabetical by author, because the old classics were heavily represented and the new modern classics are also there like quota victims. You know, like the random science text, a book or ten on travelogues, or ones that kind of surprised me like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Quicksilver, and Underground Railroad. Others are a gimmie like Hitchhiker's Guide and Harry Potter... even Among Us!

But for the most part, the heaviest weight of the books belong to the beginning of the Baby Boomers. The kinds of books that might have been on the shelves of that generation's parents. Growing dusty and perhaps picked up right at the time that those children hit their 20's.

I'm not saying this is wrong or that this list of a thousand books to read before you die ought not to be targeted to this aging population. Indeed, that sounds about right. They might pick this up and be proud of themselves as they go, "Hey! I read that!"

I know I did. I've probably read around a 1/3 of these books, myself. I also made a huge list of books I want to read, too, sinking my To Read shelf to new and unplumbed depths.

Alas.

Still, I'm quite happy to have read this. Even with the reservations. And not all books tickled my fancy... by a long shot... but it was very fun to browse.

I just ask one thing... Did SF just peek it's head out during the 30's and 50's and then just GO AWAY or something? So silly. There are only a FEW SF books in here. Definitely a major failing.


View all my reviews

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Re-read 7/1/18:

I feel like I've read this book three times now. Sure, not quite true, but I DID watch the Expanse episodes encompassing this book. So close enough. And now, after a third (sic second) read?

Pure love.

This is the gold standard for space opera. :) Everything else is just trying to catch up. :)

My original review still stands, too. :) I love it all. It's as close to genius as this kind of story can get.


Original Review:

Fantastic Space-Opera! I didn't know what to expect when I picked up the book besides the basic premise, and yet I was slowly drawn into situation after situation that got bigger and more bad-ass, contrary to what I was expecting in the first hundred pages or so. Sure, Solar-system action, big haulers, warships... I didn't expect the scope to become as large as it soon became, and believe me, I was quite satisfied with what came next. War? No problem. An expectation of high-level manipulation? Again, no problem. Cthulhu vomit zombies from galactic gods? I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING. Sorry about the spoilers, folks. I couldn't resist, especially how well it was developed and written and snared me big time. The title could have been filler, but actually, it was spot on mythological-wise. There were quite a few great cultural references that never felt strained or out of place. I was frankly delighted by the story and ideas. I've read quite a few novels that couldn't match this one.

I am tempted to compare this, slightly, to the tone and complexity available in Brin's Startide Rising. Nothing quite matches between SR and LW except the amount of world-building, depth of characterizations, implied scope, and delightful multiple plot twists. That is a lot, mind you, but in no way are the two related in the story! Leviathan Wakes was my first intro into the Expanse and I'll be looking forward to reading all of the rest, including the not-yet-released 4th book, with great anticipation.

Great, great space opera!

View all my reviews