A Memory Called Empire
A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE (Amazon) is full of political intrigue and deception and culture-shock and poetry, all of which is to say: I loved it. For fans of Ann Leckie, Arkady Martine’s debut novel has rich worldbuilding and a sympathetic narrator that will pull you into the galaxy-spanning Teixcalaan Empire.
Read the rest of this review »
Jade City
JADE CITY by Fonda Lee has been nominated (and won) a number of awards in the past year. I was interested to see if it lived up to the buzz and I am happy to report that it did.
Read the rest of this review »
Machine Learning
So it’s been a little while since I’ve read any short fiction. In general, I tend to watch for anthologies with lots of new authors (so I can find new sources of awesomeness) or collections of authors that I already know are good. However, I’d heard so dang much good stuff about the Silo trilogy (but still never read it) that when this collection showed up in our pile, I was quick to snatch it up. As it turns out, I’m very glad that I did.
Read the rest of this review »
Into the Drowning Deep
INTO THE DROWNING DEEP (Amazon) is the kind of book I would normally recommend as a beach read. First, I guess I should clarify that by beach read, I don’t mean trash. A good beach read is straightforward enough that you can pick it up and put it down whenever you need to take a dip in the water or reapply that sunscreen. Ideally, beach reads also have enough forward motion that I can while away the hours with ease. INTO THE DROWNING DEEP meets those criteria–it’s engaging and fun with a good dose of horror and an embrace of the absurd.
It’s also about killer mermaids.
Read the rest of this review »
Zenith
ZENITH (Amazon) opens on Androma Racella, aka Andy, aka The Bloody Baroness, flying free. She and her all-female crew are between jobs when they’re intercepted by Andy’s old flame, Dextro. Dex is a bounty hunter and Guardian (of the Galaxy… don’t sue me Marvel) who is working for General Cortas. Cortas is Andy’s old boss and the father of her best friend, whose death she feels responsible for.
Read the rest of this review »
Every Dead Thing
I forget when or how I first came across this book, and I’ve been wanting to read it again for quite some time now so that I could write up a coherent review of it. Just never got around to it. Well, the 17th book in the series that grew from the roots of this book was recently released in the UK (US release coming mid-October), and so I figured this was as good a time as any to dive back into this one, and find out if it would be just as good this time around as I remembered it being the first time.
Read the rest of this review »
Electric Forest
At first glance you’d think ELECTRIC FOREST by Tanith Lee would be a fluffy YA Sci Fi short novel. You would be wrong. Tanith Lee doesn’t know how to do fluffy, that’s your first clue. Instead we get a dark, cyberpunkish, Science Fiction story with seriously flawed characters, a world that is beautiful on the surface but has a dark undercurrent, and a question about the ethics of life-extending science.
Read the rest of this review »
Best Fantasy Books
These books are absolutely the best Fantasy books we’ve ever read. You might notice that nowhere in that statement did we qualify this list as being “the best fantasy books of all time”. That would just be silly. We’re not trying to elucidate any differences between The Lord of the Rings and The Worm Ourboros, or how one might apply to them a comparison of books in A Song of Ice and Fire or The Wheel of Time. Suffice it to say, there are some books out there with History (capital H), but we’re just going to talk about those that have EBR history (lowercase h), because those are the ones we really care about. Yeah?
Read the rest of this page »
The Last Tsar’s Dragons
If you’re reading this review, the odds are good it’s because at some point you read a book with a dragon in it–and realized that most subjects could benefit from dragons, such as: endless political machinations, the Napoleonic Wars, and yes even tacos.
Everything’s better with dragons.
And now that list includes Russian history.
“The dragons were harrowing the provinces again. They did that whenever the Tsar was upset with the Jews.” Jane Yolen wasn’t planning on writing more dragon stories but when these lines popped into her head, the image of leathery wings in dark northern skies wouldn’t leave her. We should be grateful for the whims of creative fate because THE LAST TSAR’S DRAGONS (Amazon) is a well-written, clever novella that’s worth your time.
Read the rest of this review »
Thin Air
So it’s been a while since we’ve had a new Richard Morgan book, yeah? Even longer since it was a science fiction book, as Morgan spent a bundle of time trying his hand at the grimdark fantasy genre with A LAND FIT FOR HEROES (EBR Archive). In general, we here at EBR haven’t been particularly enamored with any of his stuff. Fantasy, Science Fiction, or otherwise. It’s just all sat itself solidly in the middle of mediocrity for us. So, if I’m being completely honest… I put this off for a while. And when I finally decided to bite the bullet and pick it up, I wasn’t overly surprised by what I found.
Read the rest of this review »
