Crossfire

Miyuki Miyabe, 1998 [Deborah Stuhr Iwabuchi and Anna Husson Isozaki, 2005]

(December 2017)

I'm branching out! (Slowly.) I've a guest review of this over at Rachel Cordasco's excellent SF in Translation site. It was an interesting, if often flawed, read. The book. Not the site, which is excellent. Did I mention that?

Heat, Flesh, Trash

Heat - Khairani Barokka & Ng Yi-Sheng (eds), 2016
Flesh - Cassandra Khaw & Angeline Woon (eds), 2016
Trash - Dean Francis Alfar & Marc de Faoite (eds), 2016
(July 2016)

Three 'urban anthologies' from Fixi Novo reviewed over at Strange Horizons.

Rapture

Kameron Hurley, 2012

(November 2012)

So, those Bond parallels. Within the first five chapters our main protagonist has managed to screw two separate women immediately prior to screwing them over. Fortunately though neither has a pathetically transparent innuendo as a name, and this first is ‘older, and plumper’ and covered with scars while the second ‘truly was unremarkable in every way’. Not exactly Slavic supermodels then.

Infidel

Kameron Hurley, 2011

(November 2012)

The sequel to God’s War, which I saw described on another blog as a book, ‘in which Space Muslims are endlessly violent’. This is a lovely turn of phrase, completely accurate, and an almost perfectly enticing sales pitch. Seriously, they should put that on the cover of the next edition. I mean that with no sarcasm whatsoever. Anyway, round two of Angry Space Muslims coming up.

God's War

Kameron Hurley, 2011

(July 2012)

Sometimes when I’m playing CIV I like to give my leaders deliberately overblown and bombastic names: Tharg the Mighty, Gutpunch the Terrible, Cocksmash the Worldfucker. You get the idea. Those are purely for my own personal amusement though; it takes a pretty high level of chutzpah to give your debut novel a name like God’s War. You can be farily certain this isn’t going to be a delicately wrought meditation on beauty, loss, and the impermanence of the human condition.

Thank fuck for that.