Click. The question is always how far you’re willing to go to get what you want. Kill or be killed? Betray or be betrayed? Win or lose? At each step, you place your bets; you take the result. You don’t cry about it. There’s no one to cry to. Click. If there were anyone to [...]

Claymore first came to my attention via the scanlation exchange community.  I’m a sucker for a woman warrior story, especially a story that has such a compelling heroine as Clare.  I soon became enamored of the series not only for its original blending of archetypes that so uniquely identifies Japanese manga, but for the depth [...]

I had known about Anne Bishop’s fiction for some time before actually reading more than excerpts. Partly this is budgetary restraint on my part – so many books, so little time – and partly it’s that the opening of Daughter of the Blood, the first book in the Black Jewels trilogy, wasn’t quite compelling enough [...]

“Julie dark is Anne light and fluffy.” A common saying in Julie Czerneda’s SFF.net newsgroup. A traditional way to describe Anne Bishop’s entrance to the realms of fantasy and science fiction would be to say she burst onto the scene ten years ago with the first novel of the Black Jewels trilogy, Daughter of the [...]

Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro is a unique offering by mangaka Kiyuouki Satoko. The manga is an interesting slipstream mix of fantasy and “mad scientist” archetypes used as settings for telling a series of uplifting slice-of-life stories. The main character, “Kuro”, is a traveller on a quest to locate a witch who has mysteriously cursed her.  Frequently mistaken [...]

Winner, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel in the 2008 Preditors and Editors Reader’s Poll. Take hard science fiction, add a dash of sociology, a smidgen of satire, and a collection of misfits amongst misfits, and you have Slow Train to Arcturus by Eric Flint and Dave Freer. Slow Train is the most hopeful hard [...]

My daughter snagged this off the manga shelf at Barnes and Noble the other day and immediately gave me the puppy-dog look.  “Can I please have this?” Yeah.  Right.  Like I was going to say, “No.” The thing is, what she had keyed in to was direct evidence that not everyone making money decisions in [...]

As an author, P.C. Hodgell has had a long road to travel. The good news for readers is that, despite those trials and tribulations, she has found a new home for the stories from her Kencyr Saga at Baen Books.  The initial installment is a re-release of the first two books of the series in [...]

The reports of Evolutions’ demise were. . .well. . .okay, yeah, it was dead – but now it’s not. Confused?  I can understand.  However, stick with me a bit and let’s see if we can leverage the ”fail” and manage to do something good for readers of speculative fiction and the authors and artists who meet their needs. How [...]