Reading – Page 2 – The Warbler Books

Forest of Memory – Mary Robinette Kowal

May 7, 2017 No Comments

I’m steadily working my way up to total fanboy status regarding Mary Robinette Kowal’s work. As I’ve mentioned several times on the blog, her insight, perspective, and wit are one of the great draws of Writing Excuses, and her work that I’ve read (Shades of Milk and Honey, The Lady Astronaut of Mars, and her contribution to the Shadows Beneath anthology) I have absolutely loved. I have her most recent novel, Ghost Talkers, on my to-read list, as well as Word Puppets, a collection of her shorts, but the book that drew me first was Forest of Memory, a novella published by Tor.com. The cover art, by Victo Ngai, of a surreal forest with an etherial buck jumping away from the viewer, captured my attention wholly. Paired with the title, the image piqued my interest, and I wanted to know how the seemingly disparate images would connect to each other.

Pirate Utopia – Bruce Sterling

April 26, 2017 No Comments

Bruce Sterling’s Pirate Utopia is a delightful and odd read. It is a fine work of alternate history focused on a particularly odd time in a little-known city in Europe after the Great War. Because the story of Fiume is so obscure (or, at least was completely unknown to me prior to reading Pirate Utopia), it reads more like historical fantasy than alternate history, and had me pausing regularly to look up people and places I’d never heard of before. The Free State of Fiume (which is now Rijeka, in Croatia) was an incredible experiment, a strange city-state on the Adriatic run by artists and revolutionaries who were looking toward the future. From the ooze that was the meeting of minds and cultures, drugs and uncertainty, came ideas of socialism, fascism, and anarcho-syndicalism (wherein workers form syndicates in which they control their industrial manufactories; power of the collective in influencing

Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi

April 21, 2017 No Comments

John Scalzi is a somewhat enormous figure in genre fiction, having published some 20+ novels, eight non-fiction books, and a generous handful of short fiction and essays. Not only that, but his role as “influencer” is further cemented by the popularity of his “Whatever” blog and his more-than 110,000 followers on Twitter. But we’re not here to talk about Scalzi’s reach as an author, prodigious though it may be. We’re here to talk about the audiobook of Miniatures: The Very Short Fiction of John Scalzi I listened to, courtesy of Audible. The eighteen stories in Miniatures are, as the title suggests, very short. In the introduction, Scalzi says that the longest piece in the collection is only 2,300 words long. The audiobook for the collection is teeny-tiny, clocking in at just under three hours. The stories are funny, and all hover around the central of subverting “conventional” science fiction tropes

Missing Link – Frank Herbert

April 17, 2017 No Comments

When I read Frank Herbert’s Dune as a teenager, it was a revelatory experience. Dune is widely considered to be a crowning achievement in science fiction, and I’ve heard it called “The Lord of the Rings of SF.” I’m aware that it’s polarizing as a book, and that the series as a whole isn’t as well-loved as I’d initially thought, but none of that changes my relationship with those books. I remember days in high school where I’d float from class to class, not listening to a word any of my teachers were saying, because I was so immersed in the political dealings of the Atreides and Harkonnen, in the zealous fury of the Fremen, and of the extraordinary universe they occupied. Dune hit me like blast to the chest, and changed the way I read. And even if I hadn’t read anything else by Frank Herbert until somewhat recently

Behold a Pale Horse – William Cooper

April 3, 2017 No Comments

Caveat Emptor: I get into a somewhat aggressive discussion about biblical literalism below. Before I dig into this review, I have a confession to make: I didn’t finish Behold a Pale Horse. I couldn’t. I think that if the election had gone differently, if the world didn’t seem so crazy right now, that I might have been able to finish it. But I just couldn’t get through it. William Cooper’s frantic writing, logically fallacious conclusions, and absolute certainty about the end-times in which the Illuminati rise to power (the dates of which are well behind us) made it impossible to read. It may be that I’m throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, given the likelihood that there are kernels of truth contained in the sprawling madness of Cooper’s words, but I’m not too bothered by that prospect. Cooper alleges that all secret societies are connected, that all serve

The Divine Comedy – Dante

March 23, 2017 2 Comments

This is another one of those cases where I feel that a book I aim to review is out of my league. The Divine Comedy is absolutely beyond the scope of my review blog. So I will attempt to not review it for its contents. But what I feel is within my purview is a discussion of the performance of the audiobook, since that was how I made it through the somewhat difficult text. The first time I tried to read Inferno, as a high-schooler, I wasn’t able to penetrate the form. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get past the second canto. It might have been because I was too focused on looking at it as an epic poem, a work of unparalleled religious zeal. But listening to Edoardo Ballerini’s performance of the book on Audible was a completely different experience. The form—the epic poem—took a back seat

Binti: Home – Nnedi Okorafor

March 8, 2017 No Comments

There seems to be no better day than today, International Women’s Day, to talk about an extraordinary piece of science fiction written by the brilliant Nnedi Okorafor, about belonging and identity from the perspective of a powerful young woman. You might recall that Binti was one of my two favorite works of science fiction of last year. It was evocative. Beautiful. Frightening. Most importantly, it was different. It managed to pack an incredible and vibrant world, a complex and compelling protagonist, and a spectacular plot into a fairly short piece of fiction. It told a story that could have easily fallen into the category of sci-fi tropes, but it avoided them by applying a unique voice and perspective through Binti, it’s main character. Binti: Home finds Binti after about a year at Oomza University. A year after she heroically (and accidentally, if I recall correctly) brokered peace between two warring

Snapshot – Brandon Sanderson

March 1, 2017 No Comments

I’m not sure about other writers in the world, but it seems to me unique that Brandon Sanderson considers writing a new novella to be a break from, well, writing. Granted, he did write Snapshot as a break from working on Oathbringer, the third volume in his mega-epic Stormlight Archive series, but, like, I mean…he wrote a novella as a breather from a bigger project. Maybe I’m crazy, though. All I know is that I hope to display such fortitude toward the craft in the future, once I strengthen those muscles a bit. On his blog, Sanderson said that Snapshot was a story idea that wouldn’t leave him alone; something he had to write furiously over the course of a week. I can see why the idea stuck in is mind. The premise of Snapshot is cool—Cool enough that MGM is already optioning the story—and though it is expansive in

The Geek Feminist Revolution – Kameron Hurley

February 21, 2017 No Comments

It’s difficult to know where to begin when discussing Kameron Hurley’s essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution. Heartfelt may be a good word. Expansive may be another. But what keeps coming to my mind, over and again, is important. Vital, even. Especially in today’s America, wherein the once-fringe Gamergate movement has become the de-facto governing philosophy of the country. It sickens me to complete that sentence, but it’s where we are. Hurley’s book explores nothing new, which is a remarkable enough thought on its own. The problems women and minorities face in the zeitgeist are nothing new, and though things are slowly changing—and we certainly live in a “better” time—we are still unbelievably far from where we need to be. And it feels like we may have just taken a major step backwards. Hurley’s essays are a no-nonsense, unvarnished look at the status quo, most often through the lens of

Tears of the Assassin – William Schiele

February 14, 2017 3 Comments

William Schiele packs a hefty amount of action and intrigue into Tears of the Assassin, his debut novel published by Inkshares last week. In Assassin, David Diegert, a half-Ojibwa half-white American, is passed from gauntlet to gauntlet, his situation growing worse and worse, until he’s forced to take work as a contract killer on the Dark Web. Abused by his father, brother, and high school classmates, Diegert decides to join the military, hoping that he cam earn college tuition through his service. He’s put into service with an unofficial group funneling heroin into the US from Afghanistan, and when he loses his temper at his superior officer, he’s dishonorably discharged and told to keep quiet about his actions in the military. He ends up bouncing at a bar stateside, where he gets caught up in Russian mafia intrigue, which ultimately forces his hand, turning him into a killer. Out of

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