Reviews :: Book Genre :: Science Fiction :: Page 31

Every now-and-then a novel surprises us. For whatever reason, we have preconceptions about a novel before reading; it could be we’ve read the author’s previous novels, it could be the cover-art, or really anything else for that matter. What we love is when a novel shatters all of our unfounded notions, and completely sucks us into the story (if this were a vampire novel, we would insert a mandatory pun here, but alas…).

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has been writing SF for a while now (not to mention every other genre under various pen-names). You may have heard of her, and you may have even read her Retrieval Artist series. It is a decent series, and good for beginners in the SF genre, but nothing that made us squeal and say, “Wow!” That was our exposure to Rusch, and really the basis for our opinions of her writing. We figured that her new novel, DIVING INTO THE WRECK (Amazon), would be more of the same.

Wow! (See what we did there?) We were seriously mistaken. Take a screen-shot of that last sentence, ladies and gentlemen, because it rarely happens.
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How about something new and different for our review here at EBR? We read and review novels pretty much constantly, but we have yet to discuss any short fiction. The thing to be wary of when reading short fiction, in our opinions, is that you can’t treat it like a novel. Where novels have several fully developed ideas that all contribute to the plot, setting, and characters, short stories and novellas typically only have one or two fully developed (sometimes) ideas. If you go into a collection of short fiction with the right mind-set, you will find that it can be a refreshing change from the novels that you have been reading.
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In our continued quest to bring you new authors and new series we have come across a number of candidates. You have a lot to look forward to. We, however, decided to start with this book, simply because it really has the coolest cover. (Hey…turns out even WE judge a book by its cover.)

THE ELECTRIC CHURCH by Jeff Somers (Amazon) is a loose SF/Cyberpunk novel set in a post-apocalyptic near-future USA (and London). In this particular world, a new religion, The Electric Church, guarantees Salvation and Eternal Life…

… with a catch.
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We often wondered if the reason Scalzi was nominated for various Hugo awards was due to his insane amount of blogging (why do you think we started this site, eh?). Last year, his novel THE LAST COLONY (Amazon) was nominated for the prestigious 2008 Hugo Award. He didn’t win, and initially we thought, “Guess we were right, as always.”

The thing is, we read THE LAST COLONY, and realized that he should have won in that field of competition.

Scalzi will be the first one to tell you that he was more than happy to even be nominated, and that the other authors were very deserving of their nominations. Sure, we thought the other 2008 Hugo nominated novels were great, but THE LAST COLONY should have won.
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