Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

LoveMinusEighty

Will McIntosh has been on my list of favorite new authors since his excellent 2011 debut novel Soft Apocalypse. (Incidentally, my review of that novel was also the very first review I posted on this site, back in January 2012!)

To celebrate the release of the author’s third novel Love Minus Eighty, I’m putting up a few separate posts throughout the week, including:

– my review of Love Minus Eighty (this post)

– a guest post by author Will McIntosh

– a guest post by cover designer (and Orbit art director) Kirk Benshoff

– and a giveaway!

For today, I’ll get this mini-mini-event started with my review of the excellent Love Minus Eighty. Make sure to check back here later this week for guest posts and for the chance to win a copy of the novel!

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Man in the Empty Suit by Sean Ferrell

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

ManintheEmptySuitThe protagonist in Sean Ferrell’s Man in the Empty Suit has seen and done it all. Thanks to his ability to travel in time, he’s cruised all the way up and down the course of human history. There’s not much that’ll get him excited anymore. Every year, he travels to the year 2071, the 100th anniversary of his own birth, to celebrate his birthday with dozens of younger and older versions of himself. It’s the world’s most exclusive party: only he and other versions of himself are invited.

However, on the year he turns 39, things don’t go exactly as planned: he discovers the body of his 40-year-old self, apparently murdered by a gunshot to the head. Surrounded by alternate versions of himself in varying states of intoxication, his mission is clear: he has to find out who murdered his one year older self, before it’s too late.

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Lookin’ Good: The Bread We Eat in Dreams by Catherynne M. Valente (includes Table of Contents)

Posted on June 6, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

TheBreadWeEatinDreamsI don’t get extremely excited about many ARCs anymore. Don’t get me wrong, finding any book in my mailbox always feels a little bit like Christmas morning, but some books are just special, and this one… Well, let’s just say I may or may not have been running around in little circles in the kitchen yelling “Do you know what this is do you know what this is?!” while my wife looked on in great bemusement. The surprise was even sweeter because, somehow, I had no idea this collection was in the works.

The Bread We Eat in Dreams is Catherynne M. Valente’s forthcoming collection of short fiction and poetry, due out in late 2013 from Subterranean Press. The ARC says December 31st, the publisher’s website says “due to ship in November.” Whatever the case may be, just place your pre-orders now.

Here’s the publicity copy and the full Table of Contents from Subterranean Press. Careful you don’t drool on your keyboard.

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Giveaway winners! (Antiagon Fire giveaway)

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

AntiagonFireThe winners of last week’s giveaway are:

Tom K. of Woodridge, IL

Helen D. of Mountain Top, PA

Bettany P. of Beaverton, OR

Congratulations to the winners! Your copies of Antiagon Fire by L.E. Modesitt Jr. (my review) are on their way, courtesy of the kind people at Tor.

And for those of you who didn’t win: thank you for dropping by the site and participating, and make sure to come back regularly. I should have another great giveaway ready to go in a few days…

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Reviewing With Emotion

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

TheOceanattheEndoftheLaneI absolutely love this line in today’s excellent post by Patrick Rothfuss about Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane:

I will say this. It made me smile. I laughed out loud. I cried. Not because of any particular sad moment, but because sometimes the shape a story makes is like a key turning inside me and I cannot do anything but weep.

I know this feeling so well. I have strong emotional reactions to great books, too: I laugh. I cry. Most often of all, I get chills. The best art—not just books, but music, movies, you name it—will often generate strong emotion. It’s an almost physical reaction. It’s involuntary. It’s the high all readers chase after, I think, and for some it gets ever more elusive.

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Damocles by S.G. Redling

Posted on May 30, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

DamoclesDamocles by S.G. Redling is a charming but flawed twist on first contact stories, the twist being that, in this case, the humans are the aliens who are landing on a faraway planet after a long period of cryogenic sleep. They are attempting to trace the origins of a mysterious message from an ancient race that claims to have originally seeded the Earth. Upon landing, the small human team discovers a humanoid race called the Dideto and becomes the subject of intense study.

Damocles switches back and forth between two points of view. Meg is the human team’s linguist and alien contact protocol specialist. Most of the novel describes her attempts to start and improve communication with Loul, a Dideto who originally posited the existence of alien life but was ostracized for it—until those aliens happened to land on the planet. Other members of the human team study other aspects of the planet and culture, but Meg and Loul are the focus of the story. All of the humans are contained in a small area, guarded by the local military and kept away from the public view, giving most of this novel an oddly claustrophobic atmosphere.

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Mr. Shivers by Robert Jackson Bennett

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

MrShiversIt’s been two months now since I read Mr. Shivers, the excellent 2010 debut novel by Robert Jackson Bennett. I tend to procrastinate when I don’t have a deadline, usually in favor of review assignments with actual deadlines. It’s a bad habit: wait too long and the details of the book become more and more vague. It also doesn’t help that I’ve read more than fifteen other novels since then. Combine that with my admittedly poor memory, and after a while, an actual sense of insecurity sets in: am I still able to write something meaningful about this book?

Still, it’s a great novel, so I’m going to try to hammer out a mini-review for this and a few other novels I’ve read and not covered here yet. I’m not going to stress out about these quite as much as usual; it’s probably better for me to write something than nothing, even if that something isn’t 100% up to my usual standards. Baby steps to writing the mini-review. Baby steps to posting the mini-review. Baby steps to ignoring my feelings of guilt about not devoting as much time to this excellent debut as to many lesser novels I’ve covered.

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The Blue Blazes by Chuck Wendig

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

TheBlueBlazesIf, like me, you were introduced to the wonderful and somewhat insane world of Chuck Wendig via Blackbirds, eagerly lapped up its sequel Mockingbird, and then found yourself desperately looking for more, well, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news—I’m just going to go ahead and say it—is that The Blue Blazes is not the new Miriam Black novel. That would be Cormorant, due out at the end of this year from Angry Robot.

The good news is that, if you liked the Miriam Black novels (which I reviewed here and here), The Blue Blazesshould be right up your alley: a dark contemporary fantasy that somehow manages to be fun and unnerving at the same time. (Bonus good news: another gorgeous cover by Joey Hi-Fi!)

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Antiagon Fire by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Posted on May 27, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

AntiagonFireMy standard spoiler warning for this series: Antiagon Fire is the seventh novel in L.E. Modesitt, Jr.’s Imager Portfolio series, and the fourth one following the adventures of Quaeryt Rytersyn. The first three novels in the series had a different protagonist and were set in the same fictional world but several centuries after the events portrayed in the Quaeryt novels.

In other words, you may want to stop reading this review if you haven’t at least read the first three Quaeryt novels: Scholar, Princeps and Imager’s Battalion. If you’d like a refresher, you can find my reviews of those novels here, here and here. (You can also find my look at the initial Imager trilogy here, and an interview with the author about the series and his career in general here.)

So, in summary: if you’re not familiar with this series yet, please check it out because it’s excellent—but stop reading this review here to avoid spoilers. And – it’s been a while since we’ve had a giveaway here, hasn’t it? You can find details on how to enter for a chance to win one of three hardcover copies of Antiagon Fire at the end of this review.

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A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Stefan (Far Beyond Reality)

AStrangerinOlondriaReading A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar was an odd experience. I’d been looking forward to this novel for a long time. In theory, it looked right up my alley. I expected to be blown away. Instead, I ended up abandoning the novel at about the midway point. Yet, even though I gave up on it, there’s also a lot to love about it. I may even find myself going back to it, one day.

Plot-wise, the novel is relatively straightforward. Jevick is the son of a pepper farmer/merchant. He grows up on a distant island, hearing stories about the mainland, many from a tutor hired by his father. This tutor also introduces him to the pleasures of reading. When his father dies, Jevick takes his place on the annual trip to the mainland to sell pepper. Once there, he becomes enamored of city life and the availability of untold numbers of books. He also finds himself haunted by the ghost of a girl, and when he seeks help from Olondrian priests, he becomes involved in the struggle between powerful cults.

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