Review: Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

Review by John for Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer.

John’s quick take:    Interesting mashup of classic science fiction and hard-boiled noir detective fiction.

John’s description:     New Klondike is a seedy frontier town on Mars that sprang up due to a flood of prospectors. But unlike the original Klondike, the prospectors were not looking for gold. In an age when anything can be synthesized back on Earth, the most valuable artifacts are original alien fossils. Forty years previously two adventurers found a treasure trove of them on Mars and so began the great Martian Fossil Rush. New Klondike became a magnet for adventurers, miners, treasure seekers, scam artists, dodgy businessmen, corrupt administrators and even a few academics. Then of course there are a growing number of transfers – immortal android bodies into which lucky or successful people have uploaded their minds.

Alex Lomax is the only private eye in New Klondike. The cops are mostly corrupt and not too interested in getting their hands dirty, so Lomax makes a living tracking down killers, thieves and kidnappers among the itinerants and rogues.

A transfer asks for Lomax’s help in finding her disappeared husband - and so begins a tale of deception, treachery, conniving and murder. Along the way Lomax discovers clues to the decades-old mystery of the location of the mother lode of Martian fossils, but others are desperately seeking the same treasure and will stop at nothing to find it first.

John’s thoughts:   This was a neat idea and made for a good read. While I’m a huge fan of science fiction, noir most often leaves me a little cold, so this wasn’t necessarily a marriage made in heaven for me. But Sawyer has become a go-to author for me when I want to read something that I’m pretty much guaranteed to like – and indeed I found this story easy and quick to read and there were plenty of plot twists to keep me interested. I also loved the premise of Martian fossils being the cause of a new “gold” rush.

Not surprisingly the bits which didn’t gel quite as much for me were the noir elements and the hard-boiled detective. Stylistically it just feels like I’ve been there before - even though in this case it was transplanted to Mars and embedded in a cool plot. And as with much noir, many of the main characters don’t seem to resonate with me. So overall I did enjoy the read but it didn’t quite grab me like Sawyer’s books usually do.

I’d rate this 3.5 stars and recommend this to fans of Sawyer, those who like noir and those who like experimenting with a mixture of styles.

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Mass Market Paperback | 352 pages | 25 Mar 2014 | Ace

Review: The Qualities of Wood by Mary Vensel White

Review by Shellie for The Qualities of Wood by Mary Vensel White.

Shellie’s quick take:   A literary mystery novel set around the death of a local teenager.

Shellie’s description:  Vivian and Nowell Gardiner are young and recently married when Nowell’s grandmother passes away and they inherit her home in the country. When a local girl is found dead in the woods near their new home, the mystery begins. Naturally the newlyweds Nowell and Vivian are shocked, but each has their own self-involved concerns about their own lives, which is what the story is mainly about.

The author carries us through their trials as the couple question the shocking death and try to sort out their home for future sale. And as a matter of course suspicions and self reflection abound within both the main characters and the community – was it murder or was the death an accident?

Shellie’s thoughts:   Now for the good and the not so good. The author has great story telling skills so that I was immediately drawn in and captured; and I love atmospheric thrillers which is what I was expecting when starting to read The Qualities of Wood. However, what caught me off guard was the “literary factor”. Yep the book is literary fiction. Not that I don’t like literary fiction, but this book takes it a bit beyond what I enjoy. It goes on and on with endless descriptions and more. I was not in the mood for long explanations of the feelings of the main characters, especially in the last third of the book. I wanted some escalation, tension, and then some well-deserved resolution. By the time the conclusion was finally divulged, I had skipped A LOT. Sadly, it had started out so promising. Now of course I did read the ARC version of the book so hopefully some of the more tedious parts were edited out.

I don’t usually post reviews for books that I find disappointing but I wanted to warn other potential readers who perhaps may be caught off-guard, like I was. And although I did not enjoy the entire book, I am sure there are readers that will. So I would recommend it for readers who like dark literary fiction with a reminder that this story only finishes successfully at the very VERY end of the book. It was a bit frustrating and disappointing for me so I’d rate the book 2.5 stars. It was okay.

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Harper Collins | Trade Paperback | 320 pages | 6/17/2014

Giveaway: While the Gods Were Sleeping by Elizabeth Enslin

Giveaway for While the Gods Were Sleeping by Elizabeth Enslin. We have one copy for a US address.

Here’s the publisher’s description: Love and marriage brought American anthropologist Elizabeth Enslin to a world she never planned to make her own: a life among Brahman in-laws in a remote village in the plains of Nepal. As she faced the challenges of married life, birth, and childrearing in a foreign culture, she discovered as much about human resilience, and the capacity for courage, as she did about herself.

While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal tells a compelling story of a woman transformed in intimate and unexpected ways. Set against the backdrop of increasing political turmoil in Nepal, Enslin's story takes us deep into the lives of local women as they claim their rightful place in society -- and make their voices heard.

Elizabeth Enslin, author of While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal, grew up in Seattle and went on to earn her PhD in cultural anthropology from Stanford University in 1990. While a graduate student, she married into a Brahman family in the plains of Nepal. Inspired by local women, especially her mother-in-law, she researched women's organizing, poetics, politics, and agroecology. Her academic essay, "Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Limits of Ethnography," still inspires conversations about feminism and the ethics of research and activism.

Enslin returned to the Pacific Northwest in 1995 and earned her living as a high school and college teacher, a grant writer, and an independent consultant. She has published creative nonfiction and poetry in The Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, The High Desert Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Opium Magazine, and In Posse Review and received an Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the Oregon Arts Commission and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize.

She currently lives in a strawbale house in the canyon country of northeastern Oregon, where she raises garlic, pigs, and yaks. While the Gods Were Sleeping is her first book.

For more information please visit http://www.elizabethenslin.com, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter

A portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to the Rural Health Education Service Trust (RHEST) for projects dedicated to improving women’s reproductive health in rural Nepal.

Seal Press | Paperback | 304 pages | September 23, 2014

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Review: Transcendental by James Gunn

Review by John for Transcendental by James Gunn.

John’s quick take:   Great science fiction story but a bad ending.

John’s description:   Long, bitter wars between Earth and several other civilizations within the galaxy have finally come to an end and an uneasy peace ensues. Now a new religious movement has arisen inspired by a secretive prophet who talks of transcendence and an enigmatic machine that can take sentient beings to a whole new level. A starship embarks on a pilgrimage to the galactic edge to try and find the machine, taking a group of beings of many diverse species on a dangerous trip to the far reaches of space.

Among the pilgrims on the voyage is Riley, a bitter, cynical human war veteran who is anything but a pilgrim. He has been sent by a mysterious power player to try and identify and destroy the prophet and to discover the whereabouts of the machine. But as the ship pushes on ever further into deep space, one passenger after another falls prey to foul play. It seems that Riley is not the only secret agent among the pilgrims - the rulers of the various galactic powers must fear the consequences if the prophet and the machine come to light, and they are desperate to maintain the current status quo.

As the violence and skullduggery unfold, some of the pilgrims start to share their personal stories and the stories of their own alien races, rather like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. But who can be believed and trusted? Riley needs help but is surrounded by aliens who are unfathomable and may be hostile. He also starts to question his own motives and desires though his unknown employer seems to have left him no option but to complete his secret mission.

John’s thoughts:  This is an excellent plot which I loved. The story is complex, nicely detailed and unpredictable, and the characters - both human and alien - are well-developed and have real depth. Actually I really like how Gunn has created his aliens. The techy bits of the story are also credible and add to the story rather than get in the way of it. So what’s not to like? The ending sucks.

Did you ever take a school or college exam where you felt fully in control and thought you were doing brilliantly, only to realize that you only have two minutes left and still have a lot of ground to cover in your answer? Well, that’s a bit what it felt like reading this book or how I imagined the author felt writing it. As I got nearer and nearer to the end of the book I worried that there was still an awful lot of story that had to play out. Then in the last handful of pages everything is wrapped up in obscene haste with no apparent regard for the reader. Key pieces of the plot don’t come to a logical conclusion and some that are wrapped up are rushed and just don’t feel right.

I’m hard pressed to think of another book I’ve enjoyed so much but whose ending I disliked so much. Overall I’d have to rate this 2.5 stars. If you’re a diehard Gunn fan you may well love it. Otherwise, approach with caution, go with the flow and enjoy the story unfolding, but keep your expectations of the book’s finale really low.

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Tor Books | 8/27/2013 | Hardcover | 304 pages

Giveaway: The Shotgun Arcana by R.S. Belcher

Giveaway for The Shotgun Arcana by R.S. Belcher. We have one copy for a US resident.

John reviewed the first in the series The Six-Gun Tarot (read his review by linking on the book’s title) in 2013. Here’s John’s quick take for the book:  A clever and entertaining mash-up of cowboy Western, mysticism, mythology, urban fantasy, and horror – all set on the edge of the Nevada desert in the late 1860s, in the weirdest little town you can hope to imagine.

We also have a post where R.S. Belcher shares his thoughts on how and why he created the compelling setting that both The Six-Gun Tarot and The Shotgun Arcana have in common (link on the previous text to read this post.)

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About The Shotgun Arcana:  R. S. Belcher’s debut novel, The Six-Gun Tarot, was enthusiastically greeted by critics and readers, who praised its wildly inventive mixture of dark fantasy, steampunk, and the Wild West. Now Belcher returns to Golgotha, Nevada, a bustling frontier town that hides more than its fair share of unnatural secrets.

1870. A haven for the blessed and the damned, including a fallen angel, a mad scientist, a pirate queen, and a deputy who is kin to coyotes, Golgotha has come through many nightmarish trials, but now an army of thirty-two outlaws, lunatics, serial killers, and cannibals are converging on the town, drawn by a grisly relic that dates back to the Donner Party…and the dawn of humanity.

Sheriff Jon Highfather and his deputies already have their hands full dealing with train robbers, a mysterious series of brutal murders, and the usual outbreaks of weirdness.  But with thirty-two of the most vicious killers on Earth riding into Golgotha in just a few day’s time, the town and its people will be tested as never before—and some of them will never be the same.

The Shotgun Arcana is even more spectacularly ambitious and imaginative than The Six-Gun Tarot, and confirms R. S. Belcher’s status as a rising star.

R.S. BELCHER won the Grand Prize in the Strange New Worlds SF-writing contest. He runs Cosmic Castle, a comic book shop in Roanoke, Virginia, and is the author of The Six-Gun Tarot. http://sixguntarot.com/

Tor Books | October 2014 | Hardcover |  400 pages

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