As our SPSFC team finishes reading our ten quarterfinalists out of our first round allotment, I will be posting review roundups and official scores. As you read our thoughts on these ten books, keep in mind that we have a variety of tastes on this team, and a low score does not necessarily indicate a bad book. One… Continue reading SPSFC Quarterfinalist Review: Harvest by Olga Werby
As our SPSFC team finishes reading our ten quarterfinalists out of our first round allotment, I will be posting review roundups and official scores. As you read our thoughts on these ten books, keep in mind that we have a variety of tastes on this team, and a low score does not necessarily indicate a… Continue reading SPSFC Quarterfinalist Review: Dusk Mountain Blues by Deston J. Munden
I approached the last book of my SPSFC judging team’s ten quarterfinalists with some trepidation. Our extended preview had shown a smooth and engaging prose from author J.D. Robinson, but The Last Shadow opened with a grizzled detective, still struggling to move past the trauma of his wife’s disappearance a decade prior, take on one… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: The Last Shadow by J. D. Robinson
Sequela wasn’t necessarily the book that excited me most after making the first pass through my team’s first round assignment of SPSFC books, but it’s safe to say that the audacious premise and polished prose of Cleland Smith’s debut caught my curiosity like nothing else in our round of extended previews. Sequela takes place in… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Sequela by Cleland Smith
After I made my first pass through my team’s initial 30-book allotment for SPSFC, Harvest was probably the book that I was most excited to get back to. Olga Werby’s entry promised a well thought-out first contact plot with an academic lead, both of which fit firmly within my wheelhouse. So how did it go? … Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Harvest by Olga Werby
Drained is another entry in the first annual Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. It produced some division in the extended preview that we used as a first cut, but I found the writing to be smooth and the early tension to be well-built, and I was intrigued to see whether Marc Daniel Acriche’s debut would build… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Drained by Marc Daniel Acriche
After my SPSFC judging team made our first pass through the 30 books in our first-round allotment, there were a few books that hadn’t really grabbed me but that I was willing to read further to give them more opportunity. And there were a few books that I was excited to get back to. Deston… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: Dusk Mountain Blues by Deston J. Munden
I was blown away early in 2021 when I read Sarah Gailey’s short story “STET,” and while I didn’t love the ending of Upright Women Wanted, the quality of the prose, coupled with my feelings about their short fiction, was enough to convince me to read more of Gailey’s extended work. And when The Echo… Continue reading Sci-fi Novel Review: The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
My reading was seasonal, but because I have a review backlog and have been focused on SPSFC and Hugos, my review is not seasonal. And so it goes. Roger Zelazny is a name I know mostly because he blurbed my absolute favorite of all the books on my shelf (R.A. Lafferty’s short story collection, Nine… Continue reading Fantasy Novel Review: A Night in Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
The Seventh Perfection is a novella that I didn’t hear much about when it came out last year, but over the past few months, I started seeing reviews trickling in. Some of them were glowing. Some of them were mixed. But they were all intriguing. I wasn’t sure whether I’d love the book, but it… Continue reading Fantasy Novella Review: The Seventh Perfection by Daniel Polansky
