Still a Stranger After All

“The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words'...”

I suspect that once in a while every reviewer comes across a book for which they will have no idea what to write. A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar is one of those books. On the one hand, it is an affecting book that speaks of the power of literacy, of reading, and of stories. On the other, it is a distancing and wholly unengaging story.

A Stranger in Olondria chronicles the life of Jevick of Tyom, from his adventures as a ...

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We're Not in Kansas Anymore, Folks

“You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically... a ghost bus?! The “ghost” of a motor vehicle?”

In London, Detective Inspector Quill is about to bring down drug lord Rob Toshack, the culmination of four years of painstaking work. Toshack is arrested and taken into custody and when he is about to confess to all of his crimes, the unthinkable happens: He dies. It is a bloody, sudden death that puzzles the detectives and doctors working the case. There is something really weird happening ...

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Mixed Feelings on a 2012 Tiptree Honor Book

There are some things I do understand, very thoroughly. My body is my own. The Concordia is my own. And I will do as I please with both.

Firebrand is a Fantasy/Steampunk Romance novel that has just made the Tiptree Award’s Honor list. The Tiptree Award is an annual prize for SciFi and Fantasy with the intention to reward works that expand our understanding of gender. Well, this bombastic combination of Fantasy/Steampunk, Romance AND gender conversation has “Ana” written all over it.

After reading it though, I find myself with mixed feelings.     

When her mother dies, widow ...

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Visibility of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy

As we are approaching our first anniversary as contributors to Kirkus’ Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog, we’ve decided to celebrate by reflecting on this huge achievement. To us, this milestone is a huge achievement because this is Kirkus—one of the oldest, most prestigious review publications in the publishing world. It is a huge achievement because the Kirkus editors invited us to become regular contributors to this blog based on the content we produce on a daily basis—and have produced over the past five years—at The Book Smugglers.

And, as we cross the one-year threshold, we are ...

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Faltering Artificial Intelligence Aboard Prosper Space Station

On a Red Station, Drifting is a science fiction novella by Aliette de Bodard, and its recent nomination for Best Novella in the 2012 Nebula Awards put it on my radar. I'm glad, since this proved to be a remarkable read. 

At first glance, one can see familiar science fiction trappings in its setting and basic premise: At some point in the future, Prosper Space Station is at a crossroads point of its long existence. Its resources are depleted as one of the consequences of an ongoing war, its greatest minds called away to join the fight for the ...

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Five Traveling Sisters

I shamefully admit that covers play a huge part in the books I choose to read, more often even than author blurbs or book descriptions. Case in point: Summer of the Mariposas by Guadalupe Garcia McCall. Up until a few days ago, I had zero interest in the book because the cover, to me, screams “Contemporary YA story of summer!beaches!butterflies!” Even though I do enjoy the occasional Contemporary YA novel, it just didn’t appeal to me at a first glance.    

This changed when Summer of the Mariposas was recently announced as a 2013 Andre Norton Award Nominee ...

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Superheroes: Once More With Feeling!

I love stories about superpowered characters and am forever on the lookout for good ones. Our recent track record has not been positive, though, but I carry on! As such, it was a case of “when” and not of “if” that my ongoing quest to find good superhero fiction would inevitably lead me to read Superheroes, an anthology with 16 short stories edited by Rich Horton. 

I am glad to report that on the whole, Superheroes is a good anthology with solid stories. Best of all, unlike some of my previous forays reading superheroes stories, reading this was thankfully (mostly ...

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My Spooky Valentine

Thea’s Take:

In the small town of Ludlow, America, the heat is sweltering, the birds are dying, and middle school girls are being murdered. With each body, a crude valentine—an eponymous Paper Heart—is found, amongst strewn toys and childhood mementos. Tensions are on the rise, and parents refuse to let their children out of their homes for fear of the serial killer on the loose. For 16-year-old Hannah Wagnor, it’s just another drop in the bucket of misery that is her life. Just a few months ago, Hannah’s anorexic best friend, Lillian, died—but her ...

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'Fade to Black' Is Fading From My Mind

I believe in cash, and that men aren’t made for monogamy, that there isn’t a woman alive I can’t get into bed if I try hard enough, and never cross the Ministry. Shit like that. I believe them like crazy.

The city of Mahala is built upwards and its populace spread across different levels. The sunlit summit is for the rich, privileged ruling class, called the Ministry. The levels below are for all the rest, and the lower one goes the poorer–and darker–it gets.

Somewhere in-between the highest and the lowest levels lives protagonist Rojan ...

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Historical Fantasy Meets Western and Horror in 'The Six-Gun Tarot'

Golgotha is also a place where strange events take place–especially recently–all under the watching eyes of someone who has been there since the beginning of time, guarding an ...

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Short Fiction Full of Awesome

As these things go, I am–predictably–starting 2013 by reviewing a few short fiction pieces I should have read in 2012 but didn’t. Inspired by a few best-of lists published in December that featured short stories, I wanted to talk about three short pieces I’ve read recently: The Kairos Mechanism by Kate Milford; Scorched Supper on New Niger by Suzy McKee Charnas; and A Silly Love Story by Nicole Cipri.  

One of my favorite discoveries of 2012 was author Kate Milford. Her awesome books The Boneshaker and its loosely connected prequel The Broken Lands showcase a fantastic ...

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'The Constantine Affliction': Thoughtful but also Underwhelming

“Why privilege the natural? We can do so much better than that.”

It’s 1864 and London is a city of transformation and change, where scientific marvels coexist with disasters and maladies. The Constantine Affliction is one of the latter, a mysterious “disease” that physically transforms its surviving victims into the opposite gender effectively altering the very fabric of society and its gender-related expectations forever.

Nobody knows how it all started but an intrepid duo of protagonists—Pimm, a drunken aristocrat with an interest in criminology and Skyler, a journalist who hides her gender behind a male byline—is about ...

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A Book Smuggler Wants a New 'Insignia'

Taken at face value, S.J. Kincaid's Insignia is a competent, albeit derivative, science fiction novel about underdog teenager Tom Raines, who is given the chance to prove himself by joining a military program to become part of an elite team of teen virtual combatants during World War III.

World War III is a bloodless war: spacecrafts are remotely controlled by virtual warriors in a fight between Corporations who have aligned themselves with either the Indo-Americans or the Russo-Chinese (we know this via very clumsy info-dumps disguised as school lessons). There are obvious parallels with Harry Potter (Kirkus’ official ...

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Jonathan Strahan Assembles a Mixed Bag of Magical Delights in 'Under My Hat'

It is a truth universally acknowledged that anthologies tend to be a mixed bag of excellent stories, bad stories and everything in between. Under My Hat: Tales From the Cauldron, a YA anthology edited by Jonathan Strahan and featuring 17 short stories and one poem by an spectacular line-up of writers, is exactly that: a mixed bag of delights. The theme of the anthology is “witchery” and thankfully, each author approached the theme differently, avoiding repetitiveness. Under My Hat is a well-balanced collection of dark and light, funny and sad, contemporary and historical, realistic and fantastical.

One of the lightest ...

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Max Gladstone's Delightfully Misleading 'Three Parts Dead'

“Before this case is over, Abelard, you may have to choose between the city you believe you inhabit, and Alt Coulumb as it exists in truth. What choice will you make?”

Oh, you misleading cover, you! I almost did not read Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead because everything about the cover screams urban fantasy, which I haven't been in the mood for lately. That said, Three Parts Dead is a legal thriller in a fantasy setting, featuring a bunch of well-written female characters. Before I go back to that last point and scream HALLELUJAH, here is the gist ...

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In Praise of Frances Hardinge

A few months ago, I was visiting my favorite bookstore and asked the friendly bookseller for recommendations of awesome Middle Grade books (my exact words). I was promptly handed a copy of Frances Hardinge’s Fly By Night.

Frances who? you might be asking yourself–pretty much what I said a few months ago. Well, Frances Hardinge is an award-winning British author with five books published thus far: Fly By Night (2005); Verdigris Deep (or Well Witched in the U.S.) (2007); Gullstruck Island (or The Lost Conspiracy) (2009); Twilight Robbery (or Fly Trap) (2011); and A Face Like Glass ...

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'Prepare to Die': Not Your Average Superhero Story. Worse.

I admit I have a fascination for stories about superhumans and I’m always on the lookout for new novels featuring super-powered characters. This fascination stems from all the potential inherent in such stories, from examining the roles super-powered people might play in human society to the effect that super-powers can have on one’s psyche—a great example of the latter is the ongoing Extrahuman Series by Susan Jane Bigelow. Of course, navigating this subgenre of SFF can be a minefield; often, the bad (and the ugly) stories overpower the good ones.

Case in point... Prepare to Die! by ...

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Reefsong: Severance's Childhood Classic Stands the Test of Time

When Ana and I sat down to figure out what old-school, non-white/European science fiction novel to review next, one childhood favorite immediately jumped to mind: Reefsong by Carol Severance. I couldn’t recall much of the novel, other than that the protagonist had crazy biologically engineered tentacles for hands and the book was set on a distant planet inspired by Polynesian cultures. And, oh yeah, I remember that I really loved the book. Thanks to the power of ebooks, Reefsong has been saved from out-of-print purgatory and is the subject of today’s review.

See what Science Fiction and ...

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The Book Smugglers’ Top 10 Most Highly Anticipated SFF Reads for Fall/Winter 2012

Only a few weeks ago we shared our Half-Year Mark List of Favorite Books (so far) of 2012. Now summer is almost gone and as September (aka the Month of DOOM during which ALL THE BOOKS are published) approaches, we are getting super excited about what the second half of 2012 has in store.

Without further ado, here are our Top 10 Most Highly Anticipated SFF Reads for Fall/Winter 2012!

Read the last Book Smugglers on their list of pre-'Hunger Games' inspired novels.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

When we say that we’ve been dying for The ...

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Jim Hines Kicks Off New Series with ‘Libriomancer’

Jim Hines is a speculative fiction writer and renowned author of the Jig the Goblin books as well as the Princess series, featuring fairy tale princesses kicking ass. His latest, Libriomancer, is out this week and is the first in the urban/contemporary fantasy Magic Ex Libris series.

To celebrate its release, we invited Hines for a chat, Book Smuggler-style.    

Read the last Book Smugglers on their review of 'Servant of the Underworld.'

Your new book features a secret organization founded by Johannes Gutenberg over five centuries ago to protect the world against supernatural beings, such as vampires. It also ...

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