Cherie Priest has been writing for most of the last decade, her first published work being the Eden Moore series, a trilogy in the Southern Gothic genre which has received favorable reviews, including a Blooker Prize for the opening entry, Four and Twenty Blackbirds. Cherie Priest’s latest work, Boneshaker, garnered further critical [...]
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It seems every year a debut fantasy novels electrifies the speculative fiction community. Scott Lynch opened a planned seven volume series (The Gentleman Bastard Sequence) with The Lies of Locke Lamora, which arrived in a perfect storm of buzz, excitement, and positive reviews. So did Scott Lynch’s debut live up to the hype, and with the benefit of hindsight, does it compare favorably to other impressive fantasy debuts? I would say yes and no; unlike many reviewers, my reaction to The Lies of Locke Lamora was decidedly mixed. [...] Neal Stephenson established himself in the early 90’s as a science fiction author to pay attention to: the cyberpunk classic/parody Snow Crash was included on Time’s magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923, and The Diamond Age or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer won the Hugo and the Locus award in 1996. [...] Scott Westerfeld cut his teeth on the popular science fiction series, The Uglies, describing a not-quite-perfect future in which adolescents are surgically modified to be beautiful, but stupid. Demonstrating that he is definitely not afraid to switch gears, Westerfeld has leapt from the future to the past for his next creation, commencing with Leviathan, which the author describes as “Edwardian biotechnology versus Teutonic machinery. With [...] Paolo Bacigalupi has been making a name for himself in the science fiction community over the last half-dozen years, penning several short stories and collections preoccupied with the same dystopian future (he won two Locus awards for 2008’s Pump Six and Other Stories. In his debut novel,The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi expounds upon his vision of a world dependent on human muscle as its primary energy source. In this grim imagining of Earth’s future, the environment was devastated by global warming and rising [...] Jeff Vandermeer’s City of Saints and Madmen is a sometimes bewildering collection of works related to the fictional city of Ambergris. Almost immediately, it becomes apparent that this is not your typical fantasy; instead, Vandermeer’s literature is a bizarre amalgamation of fantasy, horror, and postmodern literary techniques. [...] Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian author with a dozen published manuscripts under his belt, has established himself as an author of “historical fiction,” or at least that’s the description often given to his novels. Tigana, set in a fictionalized version of medieval Italy, continues this [...] Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy thunders to a conclusion with the lengthy (the trade paperback edition I purchased was almost 800 pages) Mistborn: The Hero of Ages. Even from the opening paragraphs of the first novel, Sanderson established that the Mistborn series was going to be a work of fantasy to remember: the first two installments in the trilogy were well written, entertaining, and surprisingly thought-provoking (see my earlier reviews of The Final Empire and The Well of [...] Brandon Sanderson’s sequel to Mistborn: The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension has big shoes to fill. The first novel in the Mistborn trilogy was a fun, exciting, and meticulously written fantasy tale that documented a thieving crew’s attempt to overthrow their tyrannical government, led by the near-omnipotent Lord Ruler. Without spoiling too much of the story from the first novel, their plan was more successful than they could have anticipated, leaving the surprised crew-members as the leaders of an uncertain kingdom… [...] Mistborn: The Final Empire is the first novel of Brandon Sanderson’s freshly completed Mistborn trilogy. Sanderson is probably most famous, at the moment, for being the author chosen to finish Robert Jordan’s mammoth Wheel of Time series, but he has been extremely busy over the last few [...] |
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