Reviews by Writer Dan

Every once in a while, we’ll come across a legit publication horror story. Inevitably, these stories make us roll our eyes and gnash our teeth and reach for our bongo-drums of war. One notable author that immediately comes to mind is Ian Tregillis (EBR Archive) when his Milkweed Triptych got picked up by Tor. In that case, there was some egregious mishandling of his books.

I don’t necessarily know if Steve was gunning for top position of publication horror stories or not, but this single series of books has made the rounds with nearly a handful of different publication houses and a not-insignificant number of those actually went under. It would not surprise me in the least to find out that those who acquired his books in the latter part of the merry-go-round of exploding monkeys had actual conversations about his books being cursed.

Or hexed.

Or both.

It is this condition exactly that makes it such a terrible travesty that we’ve taken as long as we have to get this review up, but we’re ridiculously excited that he’s survived the gauntlet and these things are out in the wild.
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It seems to me that nautical tales don’t get near enough attention. At least within the fantasy genre, that is. There aren’t many that I can pull to mind. Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch, Robin Hobbs’ Liveship Traders books, Tide Child books by RJ Barker. There are some really cool steampunk airship books around too — Chris Wooding’s Ketty Jay books, Butcher’s Cinder Spires — but they only kind of count. I did come across another one from Tor a while ago: The Sin in the Steel by Rayn Van Loan, that was pretty decent (review to come).

There are obviously more out there that I’m not listing here, tons of little stories from authors that relatively few have heard of and some that are just escaping my normal bear-trap of a mind, but still it seems like it takes more effort than it should to come up with any kind of significant list. Now, I’m not one that necessarily goes out looking for specific things in my fiction. The semi-recent rash of marketing efforts that I’ve seen in this vein are more than a little ridiculous. But, if you happen to have noticed the same dearth of ocean-faring fantastical tales and find yourself in the mood for something out of the ordinary, this book might be just the one for you.
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There are relatively few authors for whom I’ll buy physical copies of novellas. By and large, they end up being too short for the money they cost. Falls into the same category as Audible books that are only 3 or 4 hours long but still cost me a full credit. Not that length, necessarily, lines up with goodness, but it absolutely lines up with potential *amount* of goodness, yeah? When it came to this one, I found myself smack dab on the top of fence. After all, it was being released at essentially the same time as the next novel in the main series, and it had been forever since the last (first) book in the main series came out. What if the novella ended up being super important to the story? What if it was a connector? Gah! I just couldn’t do it. So, I bought the thing, and here we are.
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It seems like my social media feeds have been getting slammed lately by ads for this new anthology of science fiction stories put together by Amazon. Almost seemed to double in frequency after I got them, oddly enough. Sometimes it just boggles my mind how much money must flow through the coffers of social media ads, and I can’t help but wonder how much of it goes to absolute waste. In this case, it got me to pick them up, but everything since then? Yeah.

You’ll notice that our image doesn’t match the name of the collection. Yup. Thank you e-book collections. So, instead I just included the cover for the best story in the group. Hint hint. Wink wink. Nudge nudge.
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If there are any core concepts more central to the genre of science fiction than mind-bending ideas, awe-inspiring vistas, and grand adventure, I don’t know what they are. In the relatively short time period since the fantasy genre has split from it, and stories written under its guise have taken us up and out into the cosmos, many authors have endeavored to fill the space with their version of the best kind of fiction. I may be biased, but in my view there is no better fiction than great science fiction. And Alastair Reynolds is writing some of the best science fiction there is.
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I’m always on the lookout for a great, quick read, and when I came across this one, I decided pretty quickly that it fit the bill.
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I haven’t read near enough Glen Cook.

I keep telling myself this, and yet my penchant for continuing to push his books down my TBR pile is, quite frankly, fairly embarrassing. I actually received this book quite some time ago, and only recently took the chance to read it. Mainly because it was short and I needed to get to something short. One of these days I’m going to figure out how to get ahead of the review game again, and have these things scheduled out. Until then, one foot in front of the other.
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It’s not often I come across a modern book that’s been written from the 3rd-person omniscient viewpoint. Especially recently. For those of you not in the know, this means the story is told from an external perspective (like a god) that knows the thoughts and feelings of all characters, knows information that a given character doesn’t know but that you the reader should, and almost always employs the use of “head-jumping”.

There are very few instances where a book written in such a way will not turn me off very quickly. For me, an experiential reader, consuming a story from the viewpoint of one character, and then suddenly finding myself experiencing the story from the viewpoint of a different character, without some kind of obvious change in the narrative (a chapter end; a break in the text to denote a change of scene) is very disorienting and immediately off-putting.

Every once in a while though, a book written in this way will come along that doesn’t completely ruin the experience of the story for me. Almost invariably, this is because the story “sticks” to a single POV for the large majority of the time. I.e., minimal head-jumping. DUNE is one that immediately comes to mind, but that was written in another era completely.

I can’t think of any others. Though, I might be guilty of having some selective cognition here.

The point is that this book is a second that succeeded for me where others have failed.
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I feel like I owe Gareth Hanrahan an apology. I mean, that review I put up for his most recent book– Yeah. Not exactly the brightest shining star in the firmament. Not that I’m going to apologize for my opinion on it. Nope. Just that I ended up leaving it at the top of our site for the past two weeks. Totally meant to get this review up more quickly than I did to hopefully overshadow some of the negativity I’d left hanging around. Because, I think this guy has a stellar imagination and knows his stuff, and up until that most recent book I’ve thought that everything I’d read from him was pretty impressive. So, even though my review for this book will absolutely be spot-on as to what I thought about it in particular (no apologies, remember?), hopefully it’ll also help to wash away any lingering bad taste left in our reader’s mouths with regard to his stuff in general.

Because, MAN, this one was abso-freaking-awesome-tastic and you really need to read it (and the rest of the series, if you haven’t) right now.
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It’s been a long time since I’ve been really disappointed by a read. Guess I was about due for one.
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