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.
Read more

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.

Read more

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.
Read more

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.

Read more

My very first review here on FanaticSpace was for Kelley Armstrong’s Waking The Witch, the 11th book in her Otherworld series. It seemed like a natural fit for me to pick up the series’ newest release, Spell Bound (Book 12 in the Otherworld series), which picks up right where the last book ended, finally providing the needed answers to the questions that the previous book left me with.

And when I say that it picks up right where the last book ended, I mean it literally. I was afraid I’d need to go back and re-read Waking the Witch before heading back into the Otherworld series, but I didn’t need to fear. Within the first chapter, the reader not only gets that resolution that I was left hanging, waiting for, with the prior book, but you are also thrown directly into a natural progression of the series’ arc that Kelley Armstrong began with it.

Read more

“Russ Reynolds, that’s me. You probably remember my name from when I ran the country for three days.”

Wikiworld is a quirky short story that doesn’t play around with throwing you directly into the world that Paul Di Filippo has created.

Read more