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Reviews from April 2016 (21)

Christian Dorse is a terrible person but a great protagonist

Lycanthia or The Children of Wolves

By Tanith Lee  

15 Apr, 2016

A Year of Tanith Lee

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1981’s Lycanthia or The Children of Wolves is one of Tanith Lee’s standalone fantasies. It is not one that lends itself to sequels.

Christian Dorse returns to the family chateau. It had been lost to debt by his grandfather and has only now been returned to the Dorse family. The restored owner believes himself In the grip of a fatal malady, and does not expect to long enjoy possession of the estate. 

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Where Time Flows Lazily

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō,  (Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, volume 1)

By Hitoshi Ashinano  

14 Apr, 2016

Translation

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Hitoshi Ashinano’s science fiction manga series Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō (Yokohama Shopping Trip Diary; popularly known as YKK) was serialized between 1994 and 2006.

The climate changed and the oceans rose. Humanity’s cities have either drowned or have become mere shadows of what they once were. The last remnants of humanity are slowly dwindling away into extinction. The general decline poses many challenges to Alpha Hatsuseno, proprietor of a small coffee shop some distance from the much reduced Yokohama, but she accepts them with inhuman calm.

Alpha, you see, is an android. Humans may be doomed but their technological children are doing just fine. As is the Earth. 

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(What’s So Funny Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding

The Stars Change

By Mary Anne Mohanraj  

13 Apr, 2016

Special Requests

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The setting of In Mary Anne Mohanraj’s 2013 The Stars Change, the world of Pyroxina Major, is a university world. Its combination of multiculturalism and strategic location makes it an academic hotspot. Beings of many races have flocked to the University of All Worlds, there to study and live together in peace. Or at least that’s the theory. 

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First Flinx

Tar-Aiym Krang  (Pip & Flinx, volume 2)

By Alan Dean Foster  

10 Apr, 2016

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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1972’s The Tar-Aiym Krang was the first in the seventeen to date1 volumes of the Pip & Flinx series, the first book in the more than thirty to date Humanx Commonwealth Universe volumes and as far as I can tell, the very first book Alan Dean Foster ever wrote. That is a lot of firsts for one little book. How does it stand up forty-four years later?

Purchased on a whim by Mother Mastiff, Flinx is, by age sixteen, a talented thief and an experienced street performer. He has no idea that one seemingly minor encounter is going to catapult him from the only home he has ever known into a life of interstellar adventure.

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No attorneys/To plead my case 

Trouble and Her Friends

By Melissa Scott  

9 Apr, 2016

Miscellaneous Reviews

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Melissa Scott’s 1994 Lambda-winning cyberpunk novel, Trouble and Her Friends, lives in the intersection of Black-Mask-style mystery and science fiction. It also has echoes of the end of America’s fabled Old West, perhaps in ways that were not intended twenty-two years ago.

Convinced that the age of cracking has been ended by the badly thought-out Evans-Tinsdale Bill, Trouble abandons her old online life and her hacker lover, and vanishes into the world of respectability. There she plans to spend the rest of her life living below the law’s radar. Cerise joins the forces of sanctioned anti-cracker security, a Henry Newton Brown of the future.

For three years, those plans work.

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decayed, ruinous, romantic, and depressing by turns”

The Book of the Mad  (The Secret Books of Paradys, volume 4)

By Tanith Lee  

8 Apr, 2016

A Year of Tanith Lee

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1993’s The Book of the Mad is the fourth and final volume in Tanith Lee’s The Secret Books of Paradys series. It is also the first book in this series that prompted me to shout angrily at whoever wrote the cover copy.

The Paris of our real world may be far across the Uchronic seas from Paradys, but Paradys need not feel lonely. Two other versions of the depraved city, Paradise and Paradis, are close at hand. One only need know the correct magical path to walk from one to another. 

Alas, at present the only two people who know that secret are Felion and Smara, and they are as mad as they are murderous. They are confined to the Paradys lunatic asylum. 

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Uncozy Mystery

Farthing  (Small Change, volume 1)

By Jo Walton  

6 Apr, 2016

Special Requests

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2006’s Farthing is the first volume in Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy. This short novel was followed by 2007’s Ha’penny and 2008’s Half a Crown.

If British mysteries are any guide, England’s stately homes, rising very so picturesquely out of a verdant countryside, exist primarily to provide suitably isolated locations for spectacular murders, murders sufficiently puzzling to justify the attention of the Empire’s greatest minds. Farthing is no exception: not only does it live up to genre expectations by quickly presenting readers with a gruesomely murdered and artistically posed corpse, but the dead man is a man beloved by all England. He is no less than the great Sir James Thirkie, the architect of the peace between Britain and Nazi Germany.

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The Future is Furry

Barsk

By Lawrence M. Schoen  

5 Apr, 2016

Miscellaneous Reviews

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Lawrence M. Schoen’s Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard was released in late 2015. The lack of lead time did not stop it from snagging a Nebula nomination two months later. I enjoyed large portions of this book, but I cannot fathom why this was considered worthy of a Nebula. 

Sixty-thousand years into the future, the Alliance includes four thousand worlds, each teeming with the descendants of terrestrials. Although not, as it happens, humans. Instead, eighty-seven different intelligent species share the galaxy, each of them evolved from a different non-human terrestrial species. 

The elephantine Fants are scorned by the other species. Eight centuries ago, the two species of Fant — Lox and Eleph — were given exclusive occupation rights to the planet Barsk. At the time it seemed like a good deal: the Fants got a homeland away from the other species who so loathed them, and the Alliance got access to Barsk’s pharmaceutical riches (thanks to the Fants’ hard work). 

That was eight centuries ago and circumstances change. 

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The dead man, the teleporter and the bartender

A Hole in Space

By Larry Niven  

3 Apr, 2016

Because My Tears Are Delicious To You

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This is my third foray into what I have decided to call the essential collections of Larry Niven, being an irregular review series I may not even get around to finishing or continuing” (or, as it turned out, tagging or giving its own formal series name in the sidebar). 

The actual physical book I am reviewing is something of a mystery, because I have no idea how I ended up with a copy of the 1974 printing of A Hole in Space . I clearly remember that the first Niven book I bought was the 1975 edition of Neutron Star


I liked it enough to snap up all the subsequent Niven collections. The book sitting on my desk is clearly the 1974 printing and was purchased new; both the price and the absence of the distinctive cover format Ballantine/Del Rey used for Niven in the latter half of the 1970 make that clear. Did I buy an old, but previously unsold copy that had lingered on bookstore shelves?

At first I thought that this book might be a relic of the failed commune that trashed my family’s farm. (Bad decision to rent to them, bad, bad.) They left behind a lot of junk. My copy of Beyond This Horizon is a hippy relic. But on second thought, I realized that we had cleared away the last remnants of the commune by 1971, or 1972 at the latest. Unless the hippies had developed a time machine just for buying books from the future, this book could not have been left by them. It’s a puzzle I will probably never solve. 

(Trivial? Well, it matters to me, OK? Provenance is important to collectors.) 

This was for many years my favourite Niven collection. Has time been kind to it? 

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A World Shaped by Magic

The Door into Fire  (The Tale of the Five, volume 1)

By Diane Duane  

2 Apr, 2016

Special Requests

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1979’s The Door into Fire is the first volume of Diane Duane’s Tale of the Five. As I recall, there were to be at least four books in the series, but as of this posting, only two further volumes, The Door into Shadow and The Door into Sunset, have been published. A fourth book, The Door into Starlight, is mentioned on ISFDB, but only as unpublished.”

In a world where grimdark rules the fantasy bookshelves, this book may seem like an oddly touchy-feely secondary world fantasy. It was even more remarkable back in the Disco Era, when it was first published.

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