Novellas are almost exclusively short novels, self contained and fully fleshed out. I was expecting good things given that one is a sequel to a novella I liked last year (A Heart Shaped Door), another by an author I liked last year (Sarah Gailey), and a third is the sequel to a 2016 winner (Binti).
Category: Book Review
Review – Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
A young girl defies her tribal traditions and sneaks off-world to university. Binti has magical artifacts, powerful rituals, strange races, and arcane institutions – it’s not science fiction that is obsessed with, or even interested in technology. Instead, Binti is about leaving home, encountering new cultures, and becoming part of the big scary world. Two […]
Review – Shades of Magic Series by V.E. Schwab
The world might be different but there will always be London, or at least there are four of them, spanning from Georgian England to a lifeless world scoured by magic. A few special mages ferry messages between the worlds, but not all messages are created equal…
Reviews – Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee (Plus The Battle of Candle Arc)
Sequel to Ninefox Gambit/Book 2 of the Machineries of Empire Trilogy
I thought Ninefox Gambit was brilliant and strange, if a little obtuse. With all the strange technology and bizarre calendar tricks out of the way, Raven Stratagem feels like a chance for Yoon Ha Lee to cut loose and have fun.
Review – Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone
A young woman in private practice after being cast out of the academy in disgrace, is hired by a partner in a major firm to assist in a post bankruptcy restructuring of a global entity, but a range of opponents both old and new are arrayed against her. Oh and the practice is wizardry, the academy was above the clouds, and the entity being restructured is a god.
Review – All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
A young witch and an aspiring super scientist try to survive childhood and save the world.
There’s no getting around it, this feels like an excellent novella stretched into an OK novel.
Review – Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
A loyal commander teams up with a traitorous general to crush a rebellion through a combination of super advanced weapons and manipulation of the calender.
Weird is easy. Believably, coherently and off-puttingly weird is much harder…
Review – Rivers of London Series by Ben Aaronovitch
A member of the filth finds his calling as the police’s newest, and nearly only, wizard.
Peter Grant is not your typical urban fantasy protagonist. For starters he’s a cop, and an extremely junior one at that. More importantly, at the beginning of the series, not a very good cop: better than a hanger, but lacking in the instincts and discipline that would make him stand out. He’s also black, which matter less then it might have in the past, but certainly carries varying degrees of baggage in the Police, London, and England respectively.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – Best Series
Now we get to the category where I can actually seem vaguely competent because I’ve read most of them before. As you would hope, this is an extremely strong category, and my only regret is that I didn’t have time to read more books in these series.
Hugo Awards Extravaganza 2017 – John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
As mentioned before this is not strictly a Hugo category, it just uses the same voting system with the same electorate and is given out at the same time. It’s also an odd duck, as novels duke it out with short stories and mixtures of both. Still, the Campbell Award often ends up being my favourite slate – in previous years I have preferred the novels represented here to those in the novel category.