Author: Cherie Priest

2009, Tor

Filed Under Sci-Fi

You’ve either seen this book on innumerable store displays or heard the name. Both for good reason.

Cherie Priest takes the trappings of steampunk back to America, distorting history to make the Civil War less of a done deal and the Gold Rush more of a calamity. It’s been years since Leviticus Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine carved a swath of land out from under Seattle, releasing a subterranean zombie plague in the form of the Blight. With a brick wall separating the undead city from the ravaged Outskirts, one cannot help but wonder what’s happening on the inside… …
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Author: Ian MacLeod

2004, Ace Trade

Filed Under Sci-Fi, Literary

Once I arrived at graduate school, I immediately discovered that people read “literate” and “popular” writing differently. Those two terms, and the spaces between them, go by a lot of names. “Character based” vs. “plot based” is a big one. I once heard a newcomer (of more seasons than myself) say he was there for the “serious fiction program.” I wondered which part of my education (or my writing) I wasn’t taking seriously.

Both sides have their merits and their pitfalls. I can’t say that every book I’ve read is Dostoevsky, but that doesn’t mean I hold it to any less rigorous a standard. Any book should entertain and inspire with equal measure. It pays to stay receptive to any work of fiction that is written well.

Take the steampunk genre. When it comes to mind, your imagination settles on something akin to a refined lady hiking up her skirt as she leaps between the cars of a moving train. Not what you’d typically find in a “narrative-heavy” read, where the emotional geography between characters counts for more than the shifting position of clockwork cities. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. When you pick up steampunk, you expect you’re about to experience the unlikely adventures of a time period that never was. But believe me, it goes both ways. I’ve seen steampunk narratives every bit as thick (and characters as deep) as anything you could find under the Penguin Classics label. And sometimes, even more so. …
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Edited by John Joseph Adams

2008, Nightshade Books

Filed Under Sci-Fi, Short Stories

It’s tough to review an anthology, seeing as A.) there are myriad voices and styles in a single book B.) the selection are chosen because they are exempletive of something and presumably so because they are good or the best at whatever they were selected for C.) despite this, some entries are inevitably better than others, and it’s hard to score the whole thing without undercutting some and giving others too much credit. So, with that said, my score for this is an attempt to quantify my overall impression of this book, so take from it what you will.

I don’t read too much of this kind of sci-fi, or many sci-fi short stories at all for that matter, but when I saw the roster of authors contributing to this collection I had to pick it up. It’s got writers from all sorts of genres, from sci-fi (Paolo Bacigalupi) and fantasy (George R. R. Martin) to horror (Stephen King) to whatever genre you consider Jonathan Lethem implicated in. …
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Author: Ninni Holmqvist, translated by Marlaine Delargy

Other Press, 2009

Filed under: Literary, Sci-fi

Broadly, The Unit is relatively straightforward science fiction about a fascist society in which logic and a sensible bottom line are prized more highly than quality of life. The title—which sounds military to me—actually refers to the Second Reserve Bank Unit for biological materials.

In this society, if you are not a solid cog in the economic machine and if you have no children, you are designated “dispensable” and are conscripted into the Unit. For women, the deadline for becoming a productive citizen is age 50, for men, age 60. For all, the fate of residing in the Unit is grim: your organs are harvested and, in the meantime, you’re used a human guinea pig for any number of physical or pharmacological experiments.

Let me put on my nerd glasses for a moment and nitpick one aspect of the premise: when we live in a world becoming more overcrowded by the second, the idea that a government would threaten people’s lives in order to make them procreate makes the whole novel feel a little bit out of date.

There, now that’s done, let’s get to the rest of what is a quite interesting and mildly entertaining, not dazzling, novel. …
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Author: Peter Ackroyd

2009, Nan A. Talese

Filed under Sci-fi, Historical, Horror

I bought this book on a dorky impulse (it’s the sort of thing that occurs often), mostly because Frankenstein is one of my favorite novels, and because I had recently read John Kessel’s awesome short story, “Pride and Prometheus.” Peter Ackroyd does Shelley’s book justice, deftly weaving historical fiction into the classic’s universe. The book offers a retelling of the famous monster story. In this version, Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory is in a London warehouse (he’s from Switzerland), and he is best friends with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who of course was Mary Shelley’s husband. The mixing in of the biographical fiction is a welcome change for the familiar plot, and Ackroyd’s experience with historical fiction lends a feeling of freshness. …
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Author: Scott Westerfeld

2009, Simon Pulse

Filed under Young Adult, Sci-Fi, Historical

I don’t really read all that much sci-fi, and even less so niche stuff like steampunk, but if I had to pick a go-to subgenre, steampunk would be my choice. I like the alternate history, low-tech tech, Victorian atmosphere, and funky gadgets. When I learned about Westerfeld’s alternate history of the First World War, battled between an axis of machinists (“Clankers”) and an alliance of nations who rely on biological machines of war (“Darwinists”), I was intrigued. I don’t usually give much credence to book trailers–they are usually rather dumb and tend to commodify books a little more than is to my taste–but the one for Leviathan tickled my fancy. (I’ve embedded it below if you care to watch.) …
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Author: John Burnside

2009, Nan A. Talese

Best ebook deal: Barnes & Noble

Filed under: Sci-fi, Literary

The Glister begins with a contemplative rumination about the ravaged state of the world in which the story takes place. It’s a city near an old chemical plant where the land and people have “soured,” turning bizarre in creepy ways. The city’s divided into two parts: Innertown, the slums, and Outertown, where the rich people live.

The character whose perspective the narrative inhabits first is Innertown’s lone policeman, a sad, troubled man named Morrison. After setting the scene, Morrison slowly recounts the frightening story of a boy who went into the poison woods to find the devil and never came back. Since then, a total of five boys have disappeared.

Mentioning a crime to solve is slightly misleading; The Glister is more of an extension of that initial rumination than it is a plot-driven mystery, and it’s definitely not a Morrison-centric detective story. But Burnside, who’s written more poetry than prose, does his ruminations well, and he spends a lot of time on an interesting, if slightly disjointed, coming-of-age story involving an Innertown teenager.

It’s often compelling and interesting, and often beautifully written. The two halves—mystery and coming-of-age—don’t quite make a whole, but it’s still worth a read. …
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Author: Bernard Beckett

2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Best ebook deal: Sony eBook Store

Filed under: Sci-Fi

Genesis takes the form of a four-hour oral examination for entrance into a nebulously prestigious institution called The Academy, and it takes less than four hours to read. The novel’s setting is the kind of dystopian future that won’t surprise you. The world has been ravaged by political and environmental disasters, there’s mention of a virulent plague, and there’s something called the Downfall, presumably when the worst disasters coincided.

Against this backdrop and that rather boring sounding structure, Genesis turns out to be a quick, heavily philosophical novel about the ethics and existential questions of artificial intelligence. And it’s quite a bit more gripping than that might sound. …
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Author: Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters

2009, Quirk Classics

Best ebook deal: Sony eBook Store

Filed under Literary, Sci-fi

What I most enjoyed about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was how it was delivered almost as an enhanced edition of the original text. Most of Austen’s original novel was intact, and Grahame-Smith more or less selectively modified the book. This transformed the story into something different, while ensuring it remained potted in the same soil. In Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Winters takes a very different approach. This novel is very much a rewrite and not a modification. Sea Monsters is essentially a mashup of Austen’s novel and Beauty and the Beast, “Pirates of the Carribbean” and “Bioshock.” It’s still a pretty fun read though. …
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Author: Michael Rubens

2009, Pantheon

Best ebook deal: Barnes & Noble

Filed under: Sci-Fi, Humor

Rubens’s biggest credit in his “About the Author” note is as a writer and producer on The Daily Show. So the conceit is clear: this will be a funny TV guy writing a funny sci-fi novel.

There are two ways this can go. The author can use the wide boundaries of the genre as an excuse to take wild risks with the plot and characters, and so short-circuit the usual novelistic learning curve. Or he could be a funny person who thinks that writing a novel is easy, and doesn’t put nearly enough work into it. Unfortunately, Yrnameer is the latter, and Rubens turns in an uninspired, shapeless mishmash.

The premise is derivative to the least—it reads like a compilation of sci-fi’s greatest hits. The plot is barely there. The characters are two-dimensional. And, possibly worst of all, it’s just not that funny. There’s evidence of a humorous mind at work, but there’s a big difference between being funny on TV or in person, and being funny in a novel.

Rubens’s humor is ill-suited for the novel form, and it seems that he is, too. …
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