The complete list of books I read it 2008 is in poll form here.

( top books of the year )

The Chains that You Refuse is a collection of 22 genre short stories, covering all ends of the spectrum. With the exception of high fantasy, I think pretty much every subset of the sff genre is represented. Unfortunately, that also means that there’s no real unifying theme to the book.

There are several stories I really liked-“Gone to Flowers” (sci ( Read more... )

I have very little to add about the plot that I didn’t cover in my post on Ink and Steel. While you can read Ink and Steel without reading Hell and Earth, I’d still recommend reading them together. I still don’t like the Stratfrord Man duology as much as I do the first Promethen Age duology or New Amsterdam, but it’s quite good. I think, though, ( Read more... )

Though the first two Promethean Age books are set in modern times, the third moves back in time to the early days of the Prometheus Club during the later years of Elizabeth Tudor’s reign.  Kit Marley (later Christopher Marlowe) was a spy in the service of Elizabeth and the Prometheus Club, and wove magic into his works that helped strengthen ( Read more... )

It begins in 1899 with a vampire detective aboard a Zeppelin, migrating to the colonies, and ends in 1903 with Tesla and Paris. I say this first and in relative isolation because there are a few people who won’t care about anything I have to say beyond that.

A collection of six stories ranging from short story to novella length, creating a ( Read more... )

Set seven years after the war between the fae and the Promethean mages has ended, Whiskey and Water takes the attention somewhat away from the fae, ditching most of the Arthurian aspects, and refocuses some of it on the machination of hell and its denizens, as a poet comes from hell to claim vengeance for the death of his lover during the war, ( Read more... )

This is a very complex book, and one that has to be read carefully, and as such, it's hard for me to think of a way to write it up without having to pause while describe one thing to explain ten other things connected to it so that it can be fully understood, and the author is very, very into turning genre tropes on their head and crushing normal ( Read more... )