Tag: Speculative

Borne

April 25, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: Sometime in a dangerous, destroyed future, a woman named Rachel survives on the fringes of a ruined city with her partner. They avoid creatures great and small, fight small territorial skirmishes, and eke out a life. But when Rachel brings home a strange creature, which she names Borne, everything changes. Who is Borne? What is he – and what will he become? The Review: It is quite something to find an author relatively early in one’s adult […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature, Sci-Fi • Tags: Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Borne, Fiction, Jeff Vandermeer, Literature, review, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Speculative

The Seed Collectors

January 9, 2017 by Drew

The Short Version: The Gardener Family has secrets. After the death of the eldest family member, some of those secrets begin to come to light – secrets of paternity, of love, of how the middle generation all died on a mysterious expedition, and of real world magic. The Review: It is a goddamn shame that just as Scarlett Thomas delivers her best novel so far, one that highlights all of her eccentricities and skills in perfect measure, that American audiences are […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: 6, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Botany, Family, Favorites, Fiction, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, review, Reviews, Scarlett Thomas, Science, Speculative, The Seed Collectors

“The Dancer” & “The Speckled God”: Two from Unsung Signals

December 2, 2016 by Drew

The Short Version: Penelope D’Silva is a world-famous dancer, perhaps the best alive. But attendance at her performances is dropping, even as her filmed performances continue to sell out. What can be done to recapture the magic of live performance – and how far will Penelope go to find it? The Review: This short is an episode of Black Mirror waiting to happen. I don’t mean that to say the story reads like a film treatment – it doesn’t, at all – […]

Categories: Fiction • Tags: Advance Review, Book, Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, Horror, Marc Joan, Rab Ferguson, review, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Speculative, The Dancer, The Speckled God, Unsung Signals, Unsung Stories, Weird Fiction

Roundup, October 2016

October 31, 2016 by Drew

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn 3 out of 5 The Short Version: A young woman on the margins, working as a fraudulent psychic, lands a gig investigating a creepy house and creepy child for another woman. What ensues is a classic gothic battle for sanity. The Review: Flynn’s voice is unmistakeable and it was great to hear it again, seeing as it’s been awhile since Gone Girl and we’re likely to have to wait a while longer yet for her next […]

Categories: Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Literature, Mystery, Non-Fiction, Poetry • Tags: A Head Full of Ghosts, A Thousand Mornings, A Visit to October Country, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Contagion, Dana I. Wolff, Disease, Exorcism, Fiction, Gillian Flynn, Heidi Julavits, Horror, Literature, Mary Oliver, Metafiction, Mikhail Bulgakov, North Brother Island, Novella, Paul Tremblay, Peace, Poetry, Psychics, Religion, Review Roundup, Reviews, Roundup, Russia, Speculative, Stalin, The Devil, The Grownup, The Master and Margarita, The Prisoner of Hell Gate, The Vanishers, Thriller, Typhoid Mary

Animal Money

September 9, 2016 by Drew

The Short Version: Five economists at a conference in Latin America all receive injuries that keep them from the conference at large. In their conversations, they develop the idea of animal money – a currency that is qualitative as opposed to quantitative and also alive. The world quickly begins to spin out of control, as does the narrative, all because of one idea… The Review: Imagine a generic sci-fi B-movie. The scientist is in his lab, readying the latest attempt at some […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature, Sci-Fi • Tags: Animal Money, Book, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, Fantasy, Fiction, Lazy Fascist Press, Literature, Metafiction, Michael Cisco, review, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Speculative, Speculative Fiction, Surreal, Surrealism

The Fireman

June 3, 2016 by Drew

The Short Version: A new plague has begun to decimate humanity. Colloquially known as “Dragonscale”, it creates hypnotically beautiful black & gold marks on skin… before causing its carrier to burst into flame. When Harper Grayson, a nurse, shows the first skins of the ‘scale, her husband wants them to commit suicide – but she’s pregnant and committed to having the child. As civilization crumbles over the next nine months, she will fight to survive – and The Fireman, a figure […]

Categories: Fiction, Horror, Literature • Tags: Apocalypse, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, Horror, Joe Hill, Literature, Reviews, Speculative, The Fireman

All the Birds in the Sky

January 6, 2016 by Drew

The Short Version: Two young outsiders – Patricia (a witch) and Laurence (a computer geek) – strike up an unlikely friendship in grade school. Although fate sends them careening in opposite directions, their lives are inextricably entwined as the planet grows ever more chaotic and their reunion as adults will either save the world – or destroy it. The Review: Considering they get shelved together, sci-fi and fantasy don’t actually tend to co-exist. Sure, you’ve got magic in a modern setting with […]

Categories: Fantasy, Fiction, Sci-Fi • Tags: Advance Review, All the Birds in the Sky, Book Reviews, Books, Charlie Jane Anders, Fantasy, io9, Magic, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Science, Science Fiction, Speculative, The Tournament of Books 2017

The Invasion of the Tearling (The Tearling Trilogy, Book Two)

May 26, 2015 by Drew

The Short Version: Kelsea Glynn has made quite an impression as the new Queen of the Tearling – but the Mort invasion is coming one way or another and she’s running out of options. But as her magic begins to change her and voices from all sides begin to offer potentially dangerous options, she also begins to have strange visions of a young woman in trouble in a time and place long ago… The Review: Okay, heads up: there will be […]

Categories: Fantasy, Fiction, Literature, Sci-Fi • Tags: Advance Review, Adventure, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Dystopia, Erika, Erika Johansen, Fantasy, Fiction, Literature, Queen of the Tearling, Reviews, Sci-Fi, Speculative, The Invasion of the Tearling, The Tearling Trilogy

Find Me

February 13, 2015 by Drew

The Short Version: A virulent new disease appears in America that causes the infected to develop silver lesions and lose their memories, then rapidly lose motor control and cognitive function before death within ten days. Joy, apparently immune, is taken to a hospital in Kansas where she and several other patients wait out the epidemic. But when things take a turn at the hospital, Joy runs away and decides to head to Florida to find her birth mother, embarking on […]

Categories: Fiction, Literature • Tags: 5+, Advance Review, Apocalypse, Book Review, Book Reviews, Books, Contagion, Disease, Dystopia, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Fiction, Find Me, FSG, Laura van den Berg, Literature, Memory, Post-Apocalyptic, Psychology, Reviews, Science, Speculative, Speculative Fiction

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Raging Biblio-holism

The overwhelming urge to collect, consume, and consider books