Samuel Montgomery-Blinn

Your new gentlewitch obsession

Revisado: 02-13-25

OK, we've obviously got more to see in this world, but it's more like Downton Abbey meets witches than it is Bridgerton meets witches. Though yes it is a little of that, too. Imagine if you will, a derelict country house, long forgotten save an absolutely bare caretaking staff. Once, it provided the central economic and social gravity of the entire area, but the lordly family had long since packed up for London. Now, though, their London house burns to the ground, and the surviving gentlewitch returns to this country estate to start over. Yes, I said gentlewitch -- in the world of Netherford witches are high society families. We have some wonderful characters here, from the majordomo to the dress-maker in town, to the more rough and tumble tavern owners, to some really, really fascinating takes on high society vampires. Toss in another huge subplot of a formerly ostracized branch of the family returning from exile to claim Netherford Hall, and the house itself may have a mind of its own...

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This is what has always been missing

Revisado: 12-12-24

Like many lovers of Celtic lore, I have encountered and sought out tellings of the the Arthurian legend. From my childhood well-worn VCR copy of Disney's The Sword in the Stone, to the cumbersome Le Morte d'Arthur, even Sam Neill's Merlin, Monty Python, and, of course, the music of Camelot. My favorite travel memories are in Cornwall, chasing the ruins of my ancestors from pagan stones in farm fields to winds at Tintagel Castle.

This is the first time in all of these stories that I have heard the telling shaped to give life to the women of lore, told through them and about them. So much is familiar and so much is startling in Natania's creative vision. The new connections between the characters and definitions of weapons had me nodding and thinking, "Of course, this makes perfect sense." In particular, Natania's marvelous reinvention of the Lady of the Lake and her origin and gifts, but also with many more characters and places in delightful ways I do not wish to spoil for future readers.

The book is from a sisterhood that calls to me: tell me more of the women behind the men in my legends. This is what has always been missing from the telling.

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Outstanding retelling and addition to Arthuriana

Revisado: 07-16-24

We get not only a fantastic addition to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights -- that of Callum, arriving weeks after Arthur has fallen and Camelot hosts only a handful of remaining heroes, and the adventure that befalls them -- but also fantastic retellings and renderings of Arthur, Bedivere, and more. We see through Bedivere's devoted eyes the young boy Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, growing into his kingship. And many other glimpses besides which I dare not begin to spoil the delight of here. Wonderful narration from Nicholas Guy Smith, and just a hint of modern snark from Grossman atop Abercrombian duels and battles and realism.

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Locke Lamora meets Dostoevsky after the apocalypse

Revisado: 07-21-15

It's a shame there are so few reviews of this audiobook, as this really was pretty fantastic. It's like: Scott Lynch's Locke Lamora meets Dostoevsky in the post-apocalypse. And as always Rudnicki is great, this one he gets to show off a range of Russian accents, cyber wolves, giants, genetically engineered bear-men and Neanderthals, and a fascinating, hilarious pair of con artists in Darger (British, what ho) and Surplus (a genetically uplifted dog, from Vermont, yeah I said it, Vermont). Really, really enjoyed it.

So, the events. Something like this, prior to the book: In the future, we create AI, and have a utopia for a time (some dispute whether this utopia reached, say, Russia or not, and for how long); the AI... yeah it grew to hate humanity. Hate hate hate. War. Destruction. Some AI is eventually exiled to the Internet/virtual world, others are physically cut off. (For example, chiefly in this story, the Russian spaceport of Baikonur. Which hates you, people. HATES you. Biding its time. Hating you.)

And then, unto this comes Darger and Surplus, somehow before the story starts having gotten themselves into the caravan of the ambassador of Byzantium heading to the Duke of Moscovy with a priceless gift. Crossing into Russia. Where Baikonur's cyberwolves have just started their own journey.

So many cons. Great world-building in Moscow, which has its own spiraling, interconnected, double-triple-quadruple-crossing schemes. In this "post-utopian" time we have some gene-splicing, and automatic weapons, and really, really, really, REALLY crazy new drugs, but horse and carriage transport.

"In Russia, there are no facts. Only competing conspiracy theories." (Paraphrase from memory one of MANY great one-liners liberally sprinkled in here on everything from politics to religion.) Just... highly recommended. Fun, smart, colorful, engaging. I really hope the forthcoming sequel (Chasing the Phoenix) comes to audio as well.

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Best new SF of 2015 so far

Revisado: 05-05-15

Star-spanning science fiction with a trio of coming of age characters, amidst complex geopolitics, mindships, set across multiple planets and cultures. Different and fresh sets of eyes -- and a few familiar ones -- on the continuing saga begun in Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds. Miles brings even more and even better accent work here, with Rafi and Ntenman being really well characterized in particular. (Ntenman's first person POV was a delight each time he came into focus.) A bit less in terms of details and focus on the "wall running" game than the tin might imply, but enough that I really want to read a short story where all those details make sense in coming out. I want to see this game in action! With historic echoes of games as memory of war tactics. Highly recommended. Also recommended: Re-listen to the prologue when you're done. Sets up plenty of action to be had in further books set in this universe.

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Fantastic spot-on sf of Mars and our own Earth

Revisado: 01-26-15

This one's really fantastic. Shiner’s 1980s debut novel, right in there with Neuromancer and Bruce Sterling and the others of the cyberpunk movement with which he was a big part, and with a real solid hard sf space mission to Mars element as well, finally in audio. I think I've finally found an audiobook that I can point to when someone asks about "Hey I liked this book The Martian what else you got?" It’s a lot, lot more f'ed up than The Martian; bigger cast (there’s the titular Mars colony) and a couple decades into a further, weirder future with cyberpunk influences (brain implant tech, corporations, genetic drift, psychedelic drugs, …). I’m a huge, huge, raving Lew Shiner fan, and Rudnicki is one of my favorites, and both he and Gabrielle de Cuir are fantastic on this one, as always. This one's aged uncannily well, as Shiner's extrapolations (crumbling Soviet Union fragmenting, collapse of US government space program and rise of private space interests) hit the bullseye all too well.

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Just when you think you've seen every zombie novel

Revisado: 01-26-15

Zombies are not typically my bag, yet somehow I've read or otherwise heard or gotten to a lot. I wasn't expecting too much from a self-published book, but de Cuir as narrator piqued my interest enough to check it out and I ended up enjoying this quite a lot. While there are some "staples to the point of trope" of the genre here (motley cast of characters assemble! bring in zombies! scare and run! sometimes we lose somebody! oh by the way some other human survivor’s are either going psycho, or trying to reinstate the 50s!) there’s also some really unique wrinkles, the main one being that for some reason, alcoholics and others with an addiction gene have some level of resistance to being detected by the zombies. There's also the "THANK GOD SOMEBODY FINALLY" character who has actually read Max Brooks, and we get the fun of comparing notes a bit between fiction and (this fictional) reality. Also, on that "motley crew" this one has a lot going for it. It's diverse in age, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, disposition, goals. And de Cuir brings it all to life, with some additional nice production touches such as radio static effects, that really take this audiobook up a couple notches. It's a refreshingly original wrinkle in the zombie apocalypse subgenre -- who knew that Alcoholics Anonymous would be ready for this?

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Another surreal expedition into the uncanny

Revisado: 05-12-14

In Authority, VanderMeer pivots from the first-person journal of the unnamed biologist (read by Carolyn McCormick) which introduced “Area X” in Annihilation to an exploration of a different, though as uncanny and surreal, terrain: the organization which sent her into “Area X” in the first place, the Southern Reach itself. We do see the biologist often in Authority, but it is through the eyes of agent/operative John Rodriguez (aka “Control”), newly appointed acting director of the Southern Reach, interrogating her after her reappearance along with the other survivors of the expedition depicted in Annihilation. Control finds offices in decay and disarray, a shrinking staff divided into factions loyal to the previous director and “lifers” who are in it for the weird science and/or have nowhere else, really, to go. Throughout, Control reports his progress and findings — often couched — to The Voice, a shrouded, mysterious figure known only as a (digitally masked) voice on the phone. The cast of characters here each have layers and motivations — usually inscrutable — of their own: Grace, the assistant director who believes the previous director is still alive; Cheney, the head of the science department; and fellow scientist Whitby, who frequently acts as Control’s guide. I found the Southern Reach in Authority to act as both a metaphor for the many fragments of our own labyrinthine consciousnesses while also a rejection of such abstraction or disaggregation; an organization gone feral after decades of attempting to understand the incomprehensible, having stared too long into the abyss. Meanwhile Control’s expedition into its hierarchies and storage rooms and film archives plays with and against reader expectations: again we must question the reliability of our narrator, of the purpose and use of evidence and rationality in the context of such a narrative in the first place. VanderMeer creates mystery, unease, and an escalation of the compulsion behind this series: what is “Area X”?

Narrated by Bronson Pinchot for Blackstone Audio, the audiobook is, again, fantastic, cementing my feeling that Pinchot is one of the best narrators in the business (from non-fiction like How to Build an Android: The True Story of Philip K. Dick’s Robotic Resurrection to the wide-ranging accents of Tim Powers’ On Stranger Tides and Last Call, to Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree). Pinchot’s characterizations of Grace (annoyed, Southern, mistrustful of Control), Cheney (bombastic, seemingly oblivious), Whitby (hesitant, waffling, couching), linguist Jessica Hsyu, and indeed “Ghost Bird”, the biologist from Annihilation are all spot-on. On the latter it’s really, really interesting to get a third-person perspective on the biologist, who remains a bit flat in affect but with something else waiting underneath. Pinchot also does something a bit subtle in the first chapters: he starts voicing Control’s dialogue with a soft Hispanic accent, which slowly disappears until being read with a neutral accent. Is his identity so quickly swallowed up by the Southern Reach? It’s just one more of the layers-within-layers that draws us ever deeper in. As the sense of unease, of wrongness, of looking where we should not be looking grows (to me drawing connections between the Southern Reach of Authority and the Coburn National Laboratory and Observatory in Robert Jackson Bennett’s American Elsewhere), Pinchot’s narration matches it, tension for tension, finally bursting apart like a puffball mushroom and letting the ideas aloft like spores across the terroir of the transformed landscapes, closing after a novel with a more thriller pacing of half-hour chapters with an extended last chapter three times that length which is impossible to put down. In the end, Authority like Annihilation stands alone; one can read the other without having read (or having to read) the other; reading Authority without Annihilation may if anything add to the mysteriousness at hand, though of course each offers additional layers of context for the other. Also: both novels offer by their final pages a certain closure to dramatic arcs of decision and action, while of course inviting (if not compelling!) further expeditions.

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Lagos, where nothing works and everything happens

Revisado: 04-18-14

Lagoon By Nnedi Okorafor is the World Fantasy Award winning author’s first novel for adults since 2010′s Who Fears Death. Narrated By Ben Onwukwe (known for his role in London’s Burning) and Adjoa Andoh (known for her roles in Dr. Who and EastEnders) for Hodder & Stoughton, the audiobook is really well done. Onwukwe handles most of the mainline narration, with Andoh providing the introduction and filling in for a few vignettes as well as providing all of the female voices “inline” with Onwukwe’s reading. Both narrators display quite a range, from multiple “American” accents to diverse African (Nigeria, Ghana, pidgin English) to British ex-pats and more; from simple dialogue to guttural screams, both actors give fantastic performances. At first, the “inline” insertions are a bit jarring, but as the audiobook progresses it becomes more natural and seamless to the ear. Inspired by “Wizard of the Crow, Under the Dome (the novel), Nollywood movies, and District 9″, Lagoon is a story of first alien contact, Lagos, Nigeria, and (principle among the protagonists) Adaora, a marine biologist. Okorafor’s aliens are different — upon high-magnification examination, Adaora discovers that they are not composed of cellular material at all, but rather billions of tiny metallic crystals — who can shapeshift, read thoughts, and are quite serious when they say that they bring “change” — a keyword refrain that I read as an homage to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Written with a cinematic sensibility, along with the primary thrust of the story (Adaora, rapper Anthony, and soldier Agu trying desperately amidst the chaos of rioting Lagos to bring alien ambassador Ayodele together with the popular but ineffective Nigerian president) there are many, many sub-plots afoot, from a “born-again” church’s bishop hoping to use Ayodele, to small-time 419 scammers preparing to upgrade to kidnapping, to (as is perhaps a defining characteristic of Okorafor’s work to date) the intersection of science fiction and mythology: ghosts, gods, trees, animals, the ocean itself. Highly recommended.

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An intense journey into a surreal landscape

Revisado: 02-04-14

When I started reading about this book, I spent far too many hours trying to come up with my dream narrator for it. Somehow I never considered McCormick, the voice of The Hunger Games, but from the first line she is fantastic. Her laconic, detached mainline narration perfectly suited to the biologist's clinical, scientific mind, and it is the biologist's narrative voice, through the structure of the novel as her definitive account left in a journal, which, detail by detail, flashback by flashback, brings depth both to the mysteries of "Area X" and to her character. McCormick does not employ too much in the way of vocal gymnastics to differentiate the few characters -- just enough to characterize them effectively and succinctly as, one presumes, the biologist herself might do. The principal exception to this is her work on the voice of the psychologist, the designated leader of the expedition, which is given a decidedly (almost British-schooled?) formal turn, a flavor which makes McCormick's outstandingly dynamic work with her later in the novel stand out all the more strikingly. On the story: from the first pages, the narrative -- of an all-female 12th expedition to a mysterious "Area X" after 11 previous and mostly catastrophic expeditions -- is driven by a compulsion, a both scientific and inescapably personal curiosity to answer the question of: what lies at the tower's base? This tower, which is not even supposed to be here, which does not appear on any map or in any record of "Area X"? This curiosity grows further into fear-yet-we-must-see territory as the first foray into the tower reveals strange words written, glowing, breathing, alive? on the walls of the tower, heading down. We find the mysteries of Area X and "The Southern Reach" growing deeper and broader both down into and in the surrounding, increasingly surreal landscape beyond the tower, setting up and leading naturally into further explorations in the successive books, but the biologist's journal stands alone as a completed arc, a completed story of inquiry, discovery, and transformation. It is a fantastic book and audiobook, highly recommended.

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