ELITIST BOOK REVIEWS

I like avocados. A good one will leave you longing for more without much effort. Soft, green flesh, that great nutty flavor, and all it needs is a bit of salt to provide, quite possibly, one of the finest snacks on the planet. Yum. I’m always on the lookout for some good Green.
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First written as a serial in 1911, A PRINCESS OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Amazon) was soon after published in novel form in 1917. While the story is more adventure than science fiction, it was this Mars-based pulp that influenced the men and women who would later fuel the SF renaissance of the mid-Twentieth Century–writers like Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, and Arthur C. Clarke.
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Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury! He turned 90 on August 22nd (just this past weekend), and what better way than to celebrate one of his classics? A prolific writer of novels, short stories, essays, and other works, Bradbury originally published THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (Amazon) in 1950. It’s a short story collection about the human colonization of Mars–but it’s not your traditional collection.
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Call me spoiled if you want. After the likes of epic fantasy writers Erikson, Sanderson, and Butcher (and others), I’ve gotten used to the current trend of jumping right into the middle of the story. You could say I’m a girl who likes her some action. Ahem.

Alas, not all epic fantasy writers have gotten the hint. THE LAST STORMLORD by Glenda Larke (Amazon), reminds me of the epic fantasies of 20-odd years ago because the pacing is similar in its devotion to world-building without a visible purpose. There’s the standard young boy being trained whose abilities will change the world. A girl on the verge of womanhood, trapped in a life not of her choosing. I probably wouldn’t have minded STORMLORD if I haven’t already read it, like, one thousand times before in its various incarnations.
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Shadowspawn used to rule the Earth as gods. But you can get kind of lazy when you’re immortal and nearly indestructible. After thousands of years of cross-breeding with humans, today’s Shadowspawn posterity isn’t as pureblooded, making for all kinds of problems. Even worse, humans have over-populated the Earth and kind of taken over things. By the time you get around to dealing with the issue, you have to do something drastic, say, another plague to wipe out all the extra humans so you can reestablish yourself as the one in charge.
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THE DERVISH HOUSE (Amazon) is Ian McDonald’s latest near future SF tale set in an up-and-coming country. Recently he has covered the near future of India in RIVER OF THE GODS (Amazon) and then Brazil in BRASYL (Amazon). Both of those books made the Hugo Award shortlist for their respective years and I have no doubt that this one will too.
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Since starting this review blog, we have noticed a huge increase in the amount of short fiction that has made its way onto our bookshelves. This is a good thing. We have held the opinion for a long time that short fiction was evil, and in many cases this is still true. However when Subterranean Press puts a collection together, the results are always (at least so far!) fantastic. We got our hands on the recent release of the collection LESSER DEMONS by Norman Partridge (Amazon), and absolutely loved the Horror stories inside.
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THE DIGITAL PLAGUE (Amazon) is the second book in the Avery Cates Series by Jeff Somers. We’ve already reviewed the previous book, THE ELECTRIC CHURCH (EBR Review, and I highly encourage you to read that review because everything said in it could apply equally well to this volume.
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Introduction: Before you read the review Dan Wells has crafted for you, there is something we at Elitist Book Reviews need to make clear: Dan Wells is a jerk-face. We mean this in the nicest way possible. He is an amazing author, a terrific friend, and a cylon (what’s not to like?). And yet, he is a jerk-face. We let him borrow the ARC to SHADES OF MILK AND HONEY (Amazon) with the intention of guest-reviewing it for us. He then promptly read, loved, and reviewed it on his website. The problem? It was supposed to be posted here first. We were given strict instructions that we could not post the review of Mary’s novel until it was released… and then Dan stole our copious amounts of thunder. Like we said: jerk-face.
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We noticed something the other day when browsing over our history of reviews (all of them awesome, of course). We didn’t have hardly any reviews of books published by Baen. We attribute part of this to us not reading a lot of their novels. Now, this isn’t because Baen books are bad (as one misguided soul insinuated in a comment to one of our earlier reviews), we just have a lot of books on our plate, many of which are Fantasy (which we prefer over SF). The few Baen novels we have read have actually been pretty solid (looking at you Larry Correia). One of the main Baen authors is David Weber. He practically has his own section at bookstores. His main series follows one Honor Harrington, and the latest book in that series, MISSION OF HONOR (Amazon), was just released.
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