30 Aug, 2024
Doing the WFC's Homework
Minsoo Kang’s 2024 The Melancholy of Untold History is a secondary-universe history… of sorts.
What, if anything, do a doomed storyteller, four angry gods, and a heartbroken historian, have to do with each other?
29 Aug, 2024
Special Requests
2015’s The Just City is the first volume in Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy.
Astonished to discover that some of the women who flee from him flee because they most sincerely do not want to have sex with him, the god Apollo partakes in a social experiment with his wiser sister Athene. They will set up Plato’s Just City and see how it plays out.
Athene prudently remains a god. Apollo, wanting to better understand the human condition, willingly becomes a mortal for the duration of a lifetime.
28 Aug, 2024
Translation
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2015’s Usotoki Rhetoric Volume 6 is the sixth tankōbon in Ritsu Miyako’s historical mystery manga series. Usotoki Rhetoric was published in Bessatsu Hana to Yume from June 26, 2012, to March 26, 2018. The English translation of Volume 6 was published in 2024.
Private detective Iwai Soma and his young assistant Kanako Urabe have settled into a comfortable partnership. He provides the deductive and inductive skills needed to solve mysteries. Urabe is a living lie detector, on top of which she prods the otherwise indolent Iwai to find work and pay the bills.
This arrangement is upended.
27 Aug, 2024
Shockwave Reader
John Brunner’s 1987 The Shift Key is a stand-alone novel.
Usually, I start out by telling readers the genre, but in this case revealing the genre would be a bit of a spoiler. Read on!
Weyharrow Goodsir’s name is the oddest aspect of an otherwise unremarkable British village. Weyharrow has no crime-solving spinsters, no outbreaks of murder, not even the occasional alien mass-impregnation events so common elsewhere in the UK. Such crises that Weyharrow experiences are interpersonal, unremarkable, and entirely conventional.
Until the day the town goes mad.
25 Aug, 2024
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
Francis Stevens’ 1918 The Citadel of Fear is a stand-alone lost-race dark fantasy.
Determined to find his fortune, American Archer Kennedy recruits a much younger ally, stalwart Irishman Colin O’Hara. Ignoring every warning uttered by Indigenous Mexican locals, the pair march off across an inhospitable desert towards Collados del Demonio — Hills of the Fiend — where Kennedy is certain fortune awaits.
Fortune does await… of a sort.
23 Aug, 2024
Doing the WFC's Homework
P. H. Low’s 2024’s These Deathless Shores is a secondary-universe South-Asian revisiting of Peter Pan.
As children, pals Jordan and Baron took Peter up on his invitation, abandoning homes and families to become Lost Boys on the Island. Nine years ago, the pair were among the lucky few who survived adolescence by fleeing the Island. The mundane world proved a bitter disappointment. The gap in his education left Baron a dismal scholar, while Jordan’s incessant use of Dust left her hopelessly addicted to Dust. There is no Dust in the mundane world. There is karsa, but it is a pale substitute for Dust and it’s ultimately fatal for the addict.
For Jordan to survive, she must find her way back to the Island. For reasons that probably don’t stand up to rational examination, Baron joins in Jordan’s quest. But how to return to an Island notoriously difficult to reach?
22 Aug, 2024
Space Opera That Doesn't Suck
2024’s The Mercy of Gods is the first volume of James S. A. Corey’s science fiction series, Captives’ War.
The novel biome of which humans are part first appeared on Anjiin three and a half millennia ago. Utterly unlike the lifeforms that existed for billions of years before, the new biome has been slowly spreading across Anjiin ever since. Too unlike each other to interact save indirectly, old and new biome exist alongside each other.
Tonner Freis and his team have worked out how to bridge the gap, to translate from one genetic system to another. This breakthrough makes them a target in a relentless academic struggle.
Another, equally relentless, far vaster, struggle is bearing down on Anjiin.
21 Aug, 2024
Translation
Miye Lee’s 2020 The Dallergut Dream Department Store is a stand-alone fantasy novel. The 2024 English translation is by Sandy Joosun Lee.
Penny yearns for her dream job, both figuratively and literally.
20 Aug, 2024
What's The Worst That Could Happen?
Hayden Howard’s 1967 The Eskimo Invasion is a fix-up of several satirical Population-Bomb science fiction stories.
The Eskimo Invasion isn’t so much an infamously bad science fiction work as it is an infamously obscure award-nominated science fiction work. Readers, fannish and professional, liked the series of short works enough to nominate the novelette The Eskimo Invasion for both the Hugo1 and the Nebula2. The fix-up was nominated for a Nebula2. However, the book went out of print almost immediately. The only time I’ve ever seen it discussed is in this Revisiting the Hugos thread. Therefore, stumbling across a reasonably priced MMPB, how could I not read it? How bad could it possibly be?
Former Director of Oriental Population Problems Research Dr. Joe West steals into Canada’s Eskimo Cultural Sanctuary.
18 Aug, 2024
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
James Blish’s 1967 Star Trek was the first of twelve volumes in the Star Trek Original TV Series Adaptations science-fiction TV-show novelizations. Later printings embraced the less misleading title Star Trek 1.
“Novelization” is a bit misleading.