Search Results for: David Soyka

David Soyka Reviews The Translated Man and Other Stores and Mr. Stitch

Comments 1 comment

The Translated Man and Other Stories Threat Quality Press (224; 11.99 USD; softcover 2007) Mr. Stitch Threat Quality Press (248; 11.99 USD; softcover 2010) Chris Braak Chris Braaks’s duology featuring Detective-Inpector Elijah Beckett demonstrates that you can tell a book by its cover.  These book jackets are dark, primitive and ugly; the novels are set in a steampunk Victorian metropolis called Trowth that is equally dark, primitive and ugly. It was early morning and the strained watery light that flickered…

Read More Read More

David Soyka Reviews Journal of a UFO Investigator

Comments 0 Comment

Journal of a UFO Investigator David Halperin Viking (304 pp, $25.95, Hardcover February 2012) Reviewed by David Soyka The premise here is we’re reading a diary account of the titular UFO investigator who also happens to be a troubled teenager (though, arguably, “troubled teenager” is redundant).  What starts out as a geeky outlet for outcast middle schoolers to pretend to be something other than outcast middle schoolers metastasizes into a fantastic escapade involving a self-selective group of super smart teenagers…

Read More Read More

David Soyka Reviews Prince of Thorns

Comments 7 comments

Prince of Thorns (Book One of The Broken Empire) Mark Lawrence Ace (324 pp, $29.95, Hardcover August 2011) Reviewed by David Soyka This is pretty brutal.  Relentlessly brutal, right from the opening paragraphs: Ravens! Always the ravens. They settled in the gables of the church even before the injured became the dead. Even before Rike had finished taking fingers from hands, and rings from fingers. I leaned back against the gallows post and nodded to the birds, a dozen of…

Read More Read More

David Soyka Reviews Prospero in Hell

Comments 0 Comment

Prospero in Hell L. Jagi Lamplighter Tor (347 pp, $25.99, August 2010) Reviewed by David Soyka As you might expect, L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Prospero in Hell, the second volume of her Propsero’s Daughter trilogy and follow up to Prospero Lost, is loosely based (very loosely) on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In Lamplighter’s retelling, Miranda, daughter of the magician Prospero, does not marry Ferdinand but instead becomes the virgin devotee of the Greek goddess Eurynome, which qualifies her for a life extension…

Read More Read More

David Soyka Reviews Is Anybody Out There

Comments 0 Comment

Is Anybody Out There? Nick Gevers and Marty Halpern, eds. DAW (312 pp, $7.99, June 2010) Reviewed by David Soyka The $64 question of the modern era is not whether God exists. How you answer that depends on intangibles and inferences based more on faith than the scientific method. What is nearly as imponderable is the empirical evidence of a vast universe (and possibly co-existent multi-verses) within which conditions exist (or once existed) that may give rise to life as…

Read More Read More

New Treasures: The Best of Amazing Stories, The 1926 and 1927 Anthologies, edited by Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine

Comments 3 comments

While I was wandering the aisles of the Windy City Pulp and Paper Show here in Chicago last month, I came across a delightful find… the second volume of Steve Davidson and Jean Marie Stine’s The Best of Amazing Stories, covering 1927 (above right). I snatched it up immediately, and hunted up the first volume online (above left). My fascination with Amazing Stories began with Isaac Asimov’s biographical anthology Before the Golden Age, in which he collected his favorite pulp…

Read More Read More

Frankly Frankenstein

Comments 2 comments

My guess is that even people who’ve never read the novel or seen the Boris Karloff version likely recognize that “Frankenstein” signifies a human-made scientific creation that bites back. (Though they probably do confuse which is the creator and which is the actual monster.) Here in the 21st century, what Mary Shelley depicted way back at the start of the 19th is embedded in our cultural collective consciousness, even for those people who don’t pay attention to the culture unless…

Read More Read More

My Three Problems with the Three-Body Problem

Comments 9 comments

The Three-Body Problem (Tor Books, November 11, 2014). Cover by Stephan Martiniere In the middle of trying to explain quantum mechanics to me, my physicist friend stopped in frustration and said, “This would all make a lot more sense if you understood math.” Alas, I am one of those recovering English majors who never could wrap their heads around anything more basic than simple arithmetic (and not so good at even that). Intellectually, I can intuit how mathematical prowess unleashes…

Read More Read More

The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit: The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud

Comments 3 comments

The Strange (Saga Press, March 21, 2023). Cover uncredited I wish I could take credit for the headline of The Martian Chronicles Meet True Grit for Nathan Ballingrud’s terrific novel, but according to the author, Karen Jay Fowler came up with it. I hope she won’t mine me stealing it because it is as spot on as any description I could come up with. The more prosaic version is that The Strange is a Western riff on Ray Bradbury’s vision…

Read More Read More

Exploring the Subterranean

Comments 3 comments

I founded Black Gate in 2000, and we published the first issue at the World Fantasy Convention in Corpus Christi, Texas in October of that year. We produced the print magazine for 11 years (the last issue, #15, was published in May 2011), and during that decade-plus I was keenly observant of other print magazines, especially new ones. A handful of new zines popped up during that period, but I think my favorite was William Schafer’s Subterranean magazine, which produced eight print…

Read More Read More