I was sent a copy of Christopher Herz’s Pharmacology to review on FanaticSpace. After reading it, I’m not sure why. Most of the reviews on the site are genre fiction of some kind, but I couldn’t say what genre this story could be. It seems to be an attempt at literary fiction.

Perhaps it was my love of Ready Player One, because Pharmacology deals with a certain amount of nostalgia.

The problem is that RP1 did nostalgia right, with explanations of the more obscure references. I’m not sure if Pharmacology did anything right. It certainly didn’t do anything for me, other than annoy and make me wonder if there was supposed to be a point.

I’ve become more and more interested lately in good shifter stories, especially with a kick-ass heroine at the helm. So when I received “Frayed – A Madison Lark Novella” from new author (and fellow reviewer over at BookCountry), Blakely Chorpenning I was happy to find that kind of heroine in Madison “Fray” Lark, a leopard shifter. This novella starts off something that could turn into a long-running and interesting shifter series.

A while back I was sent a review copy (Disclosure: At no cost to myself.) of The Settlers of Catan by Rebecca Gable (translated into English by Lee Chadeayne). To be honest, this review should have gone up already, but for some reason I thought it was coming out next week. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know how I got that idea. My apologies to the kind folks at Wunderkind PR.

The book is based on an ingenious strategy board game called, duh, The Settlers of Catan created by Klaus Teuber. The game sets itself apart from other strategy board games by encouraging cooperation. Winning isn’t achieved by defeating the other players, but by working with them to grow your settlement.

Story

A raid on the coastal village of Elasund, followed by a particularly harsh winter, pushes the Elasunders to face some hard facts. Their village can’t support them all. The rocky fields and its poor soil can’t supply enough grain, nor the sea enough fish to feed them year round. If they face another winter as hard as this one, many will not survive. After seeking the wisdom of their gods, they decide to search for a new home.

UPDATE: Added links to Ernest Cline’s Site, and a link to RP1 on Amazon.

UPDATE 2: Added a correction to the show notes of a mistake I made in the podcast.

This weeks podcast contains another interview. This time we talk to Ernest Cline. Ready Player One comes out August 18th, but you can listen to what the author thinks about the book now.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:10 — 30.6MB)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:16 — 25.2MB)

Interview With Revivors Series Author James Knapp

Our first Podcast interview and a great show. I got a chance to talk to James Knapp about his Revivor Series, which I loved, and I’m sharing it with you.

It’s the least I could do after all you and I have meant to each other, right?

Epic fantasy, as a genre, usually runs either hot or cold for me. I would devour everything fantasy that came my way for decades until I hit, in my opinion, the bottom of the barrel, and ended up with a run of spectacularly bad epic fantasy.

So, in turn, I avoided picking up fantasy for many, many years, until I ended up reviewing Patricia Briggs’ reissue if her first book, Masques, here on FanaticSpace. That book reminded me how much I loved the genre, and it was time to give fantasy, in particular epic fantasy, another chance.