A numbers geek reading SFF to maintain some hope in this world.
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The dust may have just settled in the failed war of conquest between the Holy …
I started this last night and so far it has a political setup reminiscent of A Memory Called Empire. This book is the winner of the 2024 Compton Crook Award.
Hench is a lot more serious and deep than you'd expect from some of the flippant descriptions. I went in wanting something as light escapism. That's not what I got, but it was certainly worth a read, and I liked it far more than a few other things I've picked up recently that looked better on the surface.
The dust may have just settled in the failed war of conquest between the Holy …
Winner of the 2024 Compton Crook Award
All her life, Kyr has trained for the day she can avenge the destruction of …
The first half of this book reads like a very predictable standard space opera, then it takes a turn for the wild. There are a lot of great ideas here, and my only criticism is that the pacing in the second half was awkward. Tesh rushed through some segments that could have used more detail, yet lingered on other parts way too long.
It was magic. In every world, it was a kind of magic. "No maids, no funny talking, no fainting flowers." …
Rex is seven foot tall at the shoulder, bulletproof, bristling with heavy calibre weaponry and his voice resonates with subsonics …
From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to …
In the town of Night Vale, there’s a faceless old woman who secretly lives in …
This book was pleasant enough, but it lost all of its momentum before it ran out of pages, so the ending just felt weak. I was personally at a place that I wasn't wanting a very challenging read, and this worked very nicely.
Viv’s career with the renowned mercenary company Rackam’s Ravens isn’t going as planned. Wounded during …
A stunning collection of novellas and short fiction from the award-winning, critically acclaimed and best-selling author of the Quantum Evolution …
The Stunning conclusion to the Venus Ascendant series, from the world of The Quantum Magician. …
This book is filled with sorrow and loss, but also hope. The two books of this series are beautiful. The detailed worldbuilding meshes well with the sibling series, but is separate enough to be fresh and new. Künsken lovingly handles issues of gender identity, poverty, and the crimes people commit for survival, sometimes with a gentle caress and sometimes with a fist to the face. He explores how governments react to those self-preserving crimes, and also how the governed may deal with their intuitions. There is a lot of hard SF here too. Near-future science on a vivid and believable Venus drive the story.
The first in a ground breaking new science fiction series from the best-selling author of …
I tend not to like prequels, so even though I enjoyed Künsken's Quantum Evolution series, I put off reading this for too long. As I mentioned in a previous comment, I went into this confident that I knew the book I would be getting, but ended up being completely wrong. The book explored several concepts I wasn't expecting from this writer, most notably a gender identity story, and did it so deftly that it appeared effortless. The pacing of the book was deliberate and slow, but Künsken painted such a wonderful picture of the society and the people in it that it was nice to linger for a while. There are many pages devoted to the the physics of Venus, both in the clouds and on the surface, and I imagine that some readers may get impatient, but I found them creative and interesting. This is one of my two …
I tend not to like prequels, so even though I enjoyed Künsken's Quantum Evolution series, I put off reading this for too long. As I mentioned in a previous comment, I went into this confident that I knew the book I would be getting, but ended up being completely wrong. The book explored several concepts I wasn't expecting from this writer, most notably a gender identity story, and did it so deftly that it appeared effortless. The pacing of the book was deliberate and slow, but Künsken painted such a wonderful picture of the society and the people in it that it was nice to linger for a while. There are many pages devoted to the the physics of Venus, both in the clouds and on the surface, and I imagine that some readers may get impatient, but I found them creative and interesting. This is one of my two most favorite reads from 2023 and I'm eager to get into the next volume.
Every Sunday, fans of a dog named Ducky and his Daddy head over to read their newest conversation at the …
Faced with a coming apocalypse, a woman must reckon with her past to solve a …
This is in the same universe as The Space Between Worlds, but the main characters from that book purportedly only make limited appearances, which is disappointing to me. I was drawn to the characters in that book far more than the world. #SFFBookClub
The first in a ground breaking new science fiction series from the best-selling author of …
I'm a little under halfway and have encountered a couple things I wasn't expecting. First, it is radically different from its sibling series, The Quantum Evolution. Second, there is a gender identity story here and it is being told extremely well up to this point. Any time I think I understand Derek Künsken he shows me how wrong I am.