Book Review: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Bruncvik

Necromancers in space.  Walking skeletons, magic, sword fights, all in a galactic empire setting with spaceships, planetary invasions, and armies.  Throw in a fairly pedestrian, yet amusing language, and you have a literary concoction that has the potential to blow up in your face.  Muir, however, manages to make it work, creating a light-hearted romp with a believable redemption story and characters who outgrow their obnoxious selves.

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Book review: Middlegame by Seanan McGuire

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Bruncvik

Seanan McGuire has a very vivid imagination that produced some of the best combinations of folklore, modern fairy tales and urban fantasy in recent years.  Her Wayward Children series is a superb take on classic children literature, with a dark, beautifully ambiguous twist.  As a result, I was very excited to pick up Middlegame, but as much as I enjoyed most of it, this slow burner fizzled out at the end.  The superb writing offsets the drawn-out plot, one-dimensional characters and the lack of any emotional attachment, which may work well in the author’s shorter stories, but thinking back at this novel, I must admit I’m likely to forget this book soon.

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Flash review: Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson

Posted on May 9, 2021 by Bruncvik

Bears Discover Fire is one of the most decorated science fiction short stories.  It has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Sturgeon awards, among others, and has been nominated for even more.  It is a wonderful bittersweet piece of writing, which may or may not be science fiction at all.  In my case, I read it late at night, and it left behind a warm, fuzzy feeling that returns whenever I think of this story.

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Hugos 2021 – Short Stories

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Bruncvik

The finalists for this year’s short story Hugo Award were a pleasant surprise.  A full half of them were actually science fiction, but I enjoyed the rest just as much.  The quality of the writing was consistently high, which caused some difficulties in ranking my ballot.  This year, I will be voting for all six stories, in the order presented below.

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Flash review: A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Bruncvik

Roger Zelazny was a master wordsmith, and Rose is one of his early masterpieces.  It is so skillfully written that one doesn’t even notice that it is more akin to a Greek tragedy than to science fiction.  And one doesn’t mind that even when it becomes apparent.  Rose is a tale of hubris and hope, wrapped in a language that is rarely matched.

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Flash Review: The Little Black Bag by Cyril M. Kornbluth

Posted on April 11, 2021 by Bruncvik

This highly amusing and cynical short story hits all the right buttons.  It contains a future that may be funny for some and terrifying for others.  It has a highly emotional redemption arc.  And a crime and punishment element so exquisitely fulfilling that I can hardly think of a better ending to a story.

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Flash review: Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Bruncvik

Before Alastair Reynolds and the Ultras, before the mind-numbing and soul-crushing emptiness of deep space travel, there was Smith and his Scanners.  This is one of the first stories that combine Lovecraftian horror with space travel.  It uses very vivid imagery without too much exposition, adds concepts like body modification and its effects on human psychology, and it makes the reader to work hard to get all the nuances included in the text.  The story fizzles out at the end, but the worldbuilding will stay with the reader for a long time.

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Flash Review: Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon

Posted on April 1, 2021 by Bruncvik

A few years ago, I got to meet George R. R. Martin at a convention.  My “meeting” was absolutely forgettable for him.  I was one of hundreds of people queuing to get his autograph.  Still, I was one of the few people not dressed as characters from his A Song of Ice and Fire series or waving around one of those books.  Other than “I’m so honored to meet you” and “Thank you”, I told him only one thing: that his Sandkings was my favorite science fiction short story.  Subjectively, I wasn’t lying, but on an objective level, Microcosmic God, which popularized the idea of a pocket universe and inspired Sandkings and countless other works, is superior.

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Flash review: A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Bruncvik

87 years ago, a remarkably modern short story was published in Weird Stories.  Although sometimes overshadowed by the works of Olaf Stapledon, which were published at around the same time frame, this work has been immensely influential to science fiction, in particular through its novel approach to wrorldbuilding and alien-human relations.  Some may consider the language and structure a bit dated, but I’ve had fun reading the story even today.

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Book Review: The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi

Posted on January 6, 2021 by Bruncvik

Scalzi’s second published science fiction novel already features his signature humor and themes, which would permeate many of his more mature works.  Even though it lacks polish and changes directions rather unexpectedly, it is still a fun short read for a series of dreary winter afternoons.

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