needs more demons?

In this lavish, generously illustrated book, Sean Adams offers several prominent branding and identity consultants an opportunity to discuss their work and their approach to identity design. A few consistent themes emerge, most about managing client relationships, with “listen to your client,” and “make sure you’ve identified and are reaching the real decision makers,” perhaps [...]

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Reeve’s young adult steampunk novel is set in a dystopian future where steam-powered cities literally roam the blasted earth on enormous tractor treads, devouring each other in the practice of “municipal Darwinism.” After you get past the willing suspension of disbelief required by the premise, Reeve’s world-building has a lot of lovely little details. There’s [...]

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It seems a little odd that I never read anything of Vinge’s before; several of his books have won or been shortlisted for major SF words, and the second half of this volume — written way back in ‘86! — is apparently the first explicit reference to “technological singularity” in the modern sense — a [...]

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Smith’s racy, fast-moving crime novel is a little difficult to pigeonhole. The characters take their internal lives and external situations too seriously for broad comedy — even a scene, for instance, in which a straight character accidentally pulls up a gay porn web site just as a police detective enters to question him is more [...]

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Lou Anders’ anthology of original superhero-themed short fiction caught my eye not so much because I’m in love with the genre, but because I liked the idea of a contributor list including both writers from the comic book world (like Bill Willingham, Mike Baron, Peter David, Marjorie Liu, and Gail Simone) and prose sf authors [...]

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I enjoyed these books more when I stopped thinking of them as literal, factual memoirs, and more as fiction in the uncomfortable-funny vein of Michael Scott or David Brent. Handler’s character is less a poster-girl for bad decision-making (although there’s some of that for sure) than a celebration of unchecked id. I suspect for [...]

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I usually prefer not to read a single-author short story collection straight through, but to intersperse it with other reading. Even with very good authors, I find that reading too many short stories back-to-back emphasizes repeating themes and devices. I find it often blunts the impact of individual stories.
Puchner’s Music Through the Floor is a [...]

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Harlot Charlotte finds herself catapulted from late 19th-century Denmark to 21st-century England in Liz Jensen’s odd fantasy. Charlotte is a mildly unreliable narrator somewhat given to giddiness and entirely given to elaborately structured sentences:
When Franz finally departed for a place he referred to mysteriously a the Halfway Club, I resolved to confront Professor Krak [...]

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I loved this book despite a few quibbles. It relates what happens to Charles Unwin when he is unexpectedly promoted from clerk to detective of a mysterious agency, and finds himself rather unwillingly investigating the disappearance of Travis T. Sivart, the operative for whom he served as the clerk. In typical noir fashion, it’s [...]

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I didn’t read any of the jacket copy before starting The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, so all I knew about it to start was second-hand information that it had received a lukewarm response from Huston’s fans. And admittedly it was the first of the Huston novels I’ve read that didn’t snag [...]

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