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Matthew David Surridge Reviews The Last Page

Matthew David Surridge Reviews The Last Page

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the-last-page-husoThe Last Page
Anthony Huso
Tor (431 pp, $25.99, 2010)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

Anthony Huso’s debut novel The Last Page is something of a problem. It’s not that it is a bad book; in many ways, it is quite a good one. In fact, it is good enough, creative enough, smart enough, that it raises expectations. You want it to be great. And that is the problem, because I don’t think it is.

The Last Page is a high-fantasy steampunk novel, and a love story. We follow the sexually charged relationship between the improbably named Caliph Howl, heir to the throne of the northern country of Stonehold, and a witch named Sena. The two of them meet at university, go their own ways, and then come together again after Caliph has become king and Sena has acquired a vastly powerful magical tome. Unfortunately, Caliph is facing a civil war against a national hero, and Sena’s book has a lock which can only be opened at a fearsome emotional cost.

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Atomic Fury: The Original Godzilla on Criterion Collection Blu-ray

Atomic Fury: The Original Godzilla on Criterion Collection Blu-ray

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bill-sienkiewicz-godzilla-criterion-cover

This week’s release of the original 1954 Japanese Godzilla (Gojira) on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection is a major step in recognition for the film in the US. Yes, that’s the Criterion Collection, the premiere quality home video release company, acknowledging that Godzilla is a world cinema classic.

As a life-long Godzilla and giant monster fanatic, I can tell you what a long journey we’ve taken to get to this point. When I became feverishly interested in Japanese fantasy cinema, beyond the boyhood love, in my early twenties, Godzilla and its brethren had almost zero respect in North America. And zero quality home video releases. Even as the awful Roland Emmerich Godzilla hit screens to howls of hatred, there was no corresponding move to get the real films out to North American viewers in editions with subtitles and decent widescreen presentations.

In the mid-2000s, the shift started. The original Godzilla, not the Americanized version with Raymond Burr, got a theatrical stateside release, and then a DVD from Classic Media. G-Fans such as myself were finally freed from having to see the movie on bootleg VHS tapes and could recommend it easily to friends, promising them that the Japanese original would blow their mind with its quality. Now, we’re getting into the big-time cineaste world with Hi-Def and the Criterion Collection.

However, I’d like to temper my enthusiasm for 1954’s Godzilla with this statement: although a great film, it is not my favorite Godzilla movie, nor is it representative of the series.

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J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another

J.M. McDermott’s Never Knew Another

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Never Knew AnotherNever Knew Another
by J.M. McDermott
Night Shade Books (240pp, $14.99 USD, trade paperback February 2011)
Reviewed by Matthew David Surridge

J.M. McDermott’s third book, Never Knew Another, is a secondary-world fantasy tale told in a sparse yet elegant style, about hunters seeking dangerous magical prey — and also about two people drawing closer to each other without knowing it, despite having to hide their true natures from the world around them. Perspectives nest one inside another; the book’s always clear, but leaves much meaningfully unsaid, and effortlessly holds the voices of its characters in a delicate balance, allowing them to contrast with each other without any given one being overwhelmed. It’s a remarkable accomplishment, and a strong, unconventional beginning to a promising trilogy.

It starts with a pair of holy werewolves, following a trail to a human city they call Dogsland. The werewolves are hunting demons, or humans with demonic ancestry. Creatures with demons in their family tree are dangerous; their sweat is acidic, and their blood can wither plants, or make normal humans very sick indeed. It’s as though they’re radioactive, potentially causing illness and death around them even if they don’t consciously intend evil. The hunters see their task as a sacred duty. Their story, though, is effectively a frame for the main action; one of the hunters communes with the memories of a dead demon-descended man, searching through those recollections for hints of the whereabouts of others of his kind. The stories of that man, Jona Lord Joni, and of the others of his kind that he knows, provide the meat of the book.

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Thomas M. MacKay Reviews The Spirit Thief

Thomas M. MacKay Reviews The Spirit Thief

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the-spirit-thiefThe Spirit Thief
Rachel Aaron
Orbit Books (327 pp, $7.99, October 2010)
Reviewed by Thomas M. MacKay

Eli Monpress is a thief, and he would be the first to tell you that he is a pretty good one. That is not the reason the wizards of the Spirit Court have put a bounty on his head and sent one of their top troubleshooters to hunt him. Eli Monpress is also a wizard, and he is giving the wizards a bad name. He is deuced hard to catch, though. He travels with a swordsman who carries a magical sword he refuses to use, a demon-possessed girl who refuses to succumb to her demon, and the voices of all the spirits that live in every tumbled rock and growing tree. And Eli Monpress has a goal – it may not be his only goal, it may not even be his most important goal, but Eli Monpress intends to have the bounty on his head grow to be the largest there has ever been.

Of course, in order to do that he is going to have to give a lot of people pretty significant reasons to dedicate their gold to his capture. And since he is a thief, that means stealing things – and he travels to the little country of Mellinor to do just that. Mellior’s perfect because, by law, no wizards are allowed to live there. But Mellinor doesn’t have any great treasures in its treasure room worth doubling the bounty on Eli’s head, so he will have to steal something else. Something they would notice; something they would want back. Something that usually sits on the throne. Or perhaps that should be someone…

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Josh Wimmer Reviews The Darkslayer

Josh Wimmer Reviews The Darkslayer

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the-darkslayerThe Darkslayer: An Epic Fantasy, Volume One
Craig Halloran
Two-Ten Book Press (278 pp, $15, November 2009, kindle edition currently free)
Reviewed by Josh Wimmer

In the city of Bone, on the world of Bish, the warrior Venir and his friend Melegal the thief incur the mortal wrath of a royal family. The adventurers quickly get out of town, but not out of danger: the wicked nobles join forces with the most evil race on Bish, the underlings, to track the duo down and kill them.

Actually, mostly the bad guys are interested in Venir. Which would be cause for concern on his part if the big blond fighter weren’t secretly the underlings’ legendary foe, the Darkslayer.

Craig Halloran gets the macro structure of this self-published novel right. He ably juggles a cast of about two dozen characters, both good and evil, switching between their story lines with the appropriate rhythm. He shows us a good chunk of Bish, too, and delves into its history as well as his protagonist’s. Not only do we see Bone, its more multicultural neighbor Two-Ten City, two forests, and a battle-scarred wasteland, we also follow the escapades of the immortal who created the world out of boredom. And it all comes together comprehensibly and sensibly, and sets up its heroes for future outings. All of that takes work.

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SF Signal reviews The Desert of Souls

SF Signal reviews The Desert of Souls

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the-desert-of-souls-tpSt. Martin’s Griffin re-released Howard’s The Desert of Souls as an attractive trade paperback last week. A new release means additional chances to capture attention and generate buzz, so I was pleased to spot a new review at SF Signal this week.

This one is by Paul Weimer, and here’s a taste:

Desert of Souls is the debut novel from Howard Andrew Jones. Howard Andrew Jones knows sword and sorcery… Jones is also the managing editor of Black Gate, a magazine devoted to adventure fiction, swashbuckling fun with brisk pacing and high imaginative action.

So, does Jones practice what he preaches in his debut novel, The Desert of Souls? You bet! … Dabir and Asim are swept into a tale right out of the Arabian Nights that takes them from the streets of Baghdad to the titular Desert of Souls.

Desert of Souls slides easily from Historical Fantasy to sword and sorcery in surprisingly short order (with the appearance of an animated monkey) and never loses its mise-en-scene of the 8th century Middle East. Here, the characters never take the dark magic and dark doings for granted as everyday occurrences…

In addition to entertaining action that never flags — Jones seems to have taken Van Vogt’s dictum about throwing a changeup at every turn to heart — the novel’s strength is the relationship between scholar Dabir and guard captain Asim… I enjoyed this book immensely. It had me constantly invoking the opening theme song of Aladdin in my head, and the action and adventure kept me turning the pages to find out what was going to happen next. I would be extremely interested in finding out what else Dabir and Asim get up to after the events of The Desert of Souls.

If Paul were a regular Black Gate reader, he’d know that Dabir & Asim will return this August to face shape-changing assassins, a treacherous Greek necromancer, a dangerous cabal seeking ancient magical tools of tremendous power, and a vengeful spirit intent on sheathing the world in ice for a thousand years, in The Bones of the Old Ones. Life is good.

You can read Paul’s complete review here.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 3: The Warlord of Mars

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, Part 3: The Warlord of Mars

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the-warlord-of-mars-1st-editionAlthough there are still eight more books to go in the Mars series, with The Warlord of Mars I can bring to a conclusion Phase #1 of the saga: this completes the “John Carter Trilogy,” and the books that follow it take different paths with new heroes. John Carter will not return to the protagonist role until the eighth book, Swords of Mars, published twenty-one years later.

At the end of the thrill-ride of The Gods of Mars, John Carter lost his love Dejah Thoris in the Chamber of the Sun within the Temple of Issus. A whole year must pass before the slow rotation of the chamber will allow Dejah Thoris to escape. She may not even be alive, since the last moments that John Carter witnessed, the jealous thern woman Phaidor was ready to stab Carter’s love. Did she kill Dejah Thoris? Or did the noble Thuvia take the blow instead?

Readers hung on through the middle of 1913 until Burroughs brought a conclusion to the John Carter epic at the end of the year and made his hero into The Warlord of Mars.

Our Saga: The adventures of Earthman John Carter, his progeny, and sundry other natives and visitors, on the planet Mars, known to its inhabitants as Barsoom. A dry and slowly dying world, Barsoom contains four different human civilizations, one non-human one, a scattering of science among swashbuckling, and a plethora of religions, mystery cities, and strange beasts. The series spans 1912 to 1964 with nine novels, one volume of linked novellas, and two unrelated novellas.

Today’s Installment: The Warlord of Mars (1913–14)

Previous Installments: A Princess of Mars (1912), The Gods of Mars (1913)

The Backstory

With a cliffhanger ending to The Gods of Mars, Burroughs was ready to roll with the conclusion. It was a ferociously busy time in his life: All-Story rejected his second Tarzan novel — one of the most comically blockheaded decisions in the history of magazine fiction; he quit his day job and became a full-time author; his third son John Coleman Burroughs was born; days later, his father George Tyler Burroughs died. In the middle of all this, ERB plunged back to working on Mars. He never developed an outline for the trilogy, and so he took the wrap-up of John Carter’s story as it came, daydreaming down on paper.

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Book Review: Orson Scott Card’s Keeper of Dreams

Book Review: Orson Scott Card’s Keeper of Dreams

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keeperdreamsKeeper of Dreams (Amazon, B&N)
Orson Scott Card
Tor (656 pp, $16.99, 2008)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Orson Scott Card’s novels (in hardcover, several autographed) own the lion’s share of the top shelf in my main bookcase. Though he is one of my favorite authors, I’ve read enough of his work to know that it can be, at best, inconsistent. Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead are science fiction classics and also modern classics of children literature. As a teenager, in tears when Ender and Valentine bid each other farewell in Speaker, I thought, “I want to write like this someday.”

But Card does not always hit the mark, either. Xenocide and Children of the Mind are nowhere near classics, even though they are part of the same series. While I have enjoyed all of the Ender’s Shadow books (featuring the secondary character, Bean, from Ender’s Game), they don’t possess the same magic, either. In some ways, they are better than the originals – better character motivation, better structure, better dialogue – but they are not classics. They are not better stories, just better plots.

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David Soyka Reviews Prospero in Hell

David Soyka Reviews Prospero in Hell

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prospero-in-hellProspero 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 and youth preserving elixir she can share with her father and eight siblings, the results of various Prospero marriages over the centuries. Until Miranda becomes a full-fledged “Sybil” of the Eurynome cult, however, there is insufficient quantity of the elixir available to share beyond her immediate family members. Consequently, the Prospero offspring who marry and have children are doomed to watch them live out their mortal lives. Except, of course, Miranda who must of necessity remain unattached as a condition to continue to receive her elixir allotment.

Flash forward to the present day and Miranda is still not a Sybil, with little idea how she is supposed to be deemed worthy. In the meantime, Miranda runs Prospero, Inc., a multinational corporation that maintains business contracts among magical entities designed to avoid “natural disasters” such as hurricanes and earthquakes these sprites would normally unleash, thus allowing human existence to continue and perfect its technological progress.
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The Last Dragonslayer (if only it were true)

The Last Dragonslayer (if only it were true)

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laOf potential interest to readers of this space is my review of The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde over at the SF Site.

This is one of those books where you know exactly what to expect. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I know what to expect from Häagen-Dazs rum raisin ice cream and just because the high-fat content is not necessarily the best thing to consume doesn’t make the experience of eating it any less enjoyable.

If you’ve somehow managed to miss the Jasper Fforde juggernaut, he is the author of several serial parodies that variously poke fun at super agents and literary theory (Thursday Next), detective noir and kid stories (Nursery Crime Division) as well as dystopias and Wizard of Oz allusions (Shades of Grey). Think whimsical. Think smart-ass. Think about that unkempt guy in college who never attended classes but was obviously pretty smart and never at a loss for a wisecrack.

You’re thinking Jasper Fforde.