Archive for the ‘Reviews of books’ Category
The Children of the Sky
{4.5/5} “Broodkenning was an essential part of Tinish civilization, a cross between marriage counsellor, animal breeder, and reconstructive surgeon… It took real skill to properly recommend which puppies should go with which packs or whether a whole new pack should be made. It took ever greater talent to create well-functioning packs from adult singletons and […]
A Fire Upon the Deep
{5/5} “Old of heart traveled to the town, and came back not just younger, but smarter and happier. Ideas radiated from the town: weaving machines, gearboxes and windmills, factory postures. Something new had happened in this place. It wasn’t the inventions. It was the people that Woodcarver had midwifed, and the outlook he had created.” […]
Behemoth Book Two: Seppuku
{4.5/5} “He should have known it would be no use arguing with her. She wasn’t interested in assessing the odds of success. She wasn’t even balancing payoffs, weighing Atlantis against the rest of the world. The only variables she cared about came from inside her own head, and neither guilt nor obsession were amenable to […]
Behemoth Book One: B-Max
{4.5/5} “It’s not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It’s not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a write-off. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running […]
Maelstrom
{4.5/5} “She’d been astonished to learn that there was life on the moon: microscopic life, some kind of bacterium that had hitched a ride with the first unmanned probes. It had survived years of starvation in hard vacuum, frozen, boiled, pelted by an unending sleet of hard radiation. Life, she’d learned, could survive anything.” Maelstrom […]
Starfish
{4.5/5} “Outside, she watched the others change. They moved around her without speaking, one connecting smoothly with another to lend a hand or a piece of equipment. When she needed something from one of them, it was there before she could speak. When they needed something from her they had to ask aloud, and the […]
Towers Fall
{4.5/5} “Towers sometimes lost great chunks of themselves to offensive spells, or in failed hostile takeovers. Such wounds caused the Towers pain, hindered their movements and damaged their systems; bad wounds could take years to heal. She though, too, of what Xhea had said when she first discovered the living Lower City’s presence: that it […]
Hunted
{4.5/5} “I stepped on a Balrog when it was in a dispersal phase — actively looking for a new host. Now, it’s happily bonded to me and reproductively dormant. Entirely. Almost. It would only spread to someone else if the chance was too promising to pass up: a host so superior, the Balrog had to […]
Defiant
{4.5/5} “I don’t want to die, she thought, and realized it was true. Not that she could stop it; but perhaps she could die standing. Perhaps she could look that death in the face — not just shake and shiver until the darkness came over her and swept her away. She could die like a […]
Radiant
{4.5/5} “‘Towers need Radiants. They’re born rarely, and are never allowed to change their citizenship. But the human body isn’t designed to hold that much energy. So much life force… the magic kills them in the end.’ To Shai he added, ‘That’s what happened you, yes?’” Radiant by Karina Sumner-Smith, published in 2014 Unlike everybody […]