Literary Frontiers: Boneshaker

by Cat Connolly

Literary Frontiers is a series in the blog which gives us the chance to offer our perspective on both new and established science fiction and speculative fiction books. The series will publish around twice a month, or whenever one of us can finish and post one of our most recent reading projects. I guess that means once this November.

The selection this time is Cherie Priest's Boneshaker, nominated for a Hugo award and the winner of the Locus award for best science fiction novel. The piece is a masterpiece of Steampunk that did more than its part to breathe life into the genre.

The review follows after the (steam-powered) jump.  

Literary Frontiers: Oryx and Crake

by Sara Crow 
(Find me on Goodreads!)

 Literary Frontiers is a brand new series in the blog which gives us the chance to offer our perspective on both new and established science fiction and speculative fiction books. The series will publish around twice a month, or whenever one of us can finish and post one of our most recent reading projects.


The selection for our inaugural post is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I'll be making my way through Year of the Flood before the holiday season. Atwood is currently working on her final book in the series, which at this point will be entitled MaddAddam, and we'll be reviewing that title when it's released as well.


The review is available, just for you, after the jump (to Warp?)! Make it so!

Isabel Samaras: The Geeky Glory of the Classic Form

by Sara Crow

While wandering through my favorite quirky odds and ends shop a couple years ago, I glanced at a shelf and had to do a double-take. At first, I thought I'd glimpsed an image of classic art--a renaissance painting whose title dangled on the edges of my memory. It was an image of a lone woman in an outdoor scene, holding a silver platter, a fire dancing on its surface. A goldfinch looks on from a nearby branch. I looked again. This wasn't just any woman--this was the Bride of Frankenstein! At that moment, I fell entirely in love with Isabel Samaras's work and have been crazy about it ever since.

This is what I'd seen.
Song of the Goldfinch, by Isabel Samaras

Warning: "Adult" images after the break. You've been warned. So no bitching if you see boobies, 'kay? We're all big kids here.

"Born This Way" Offers Sci Fi Geek Gurrl Love to all Little Monsters

by Sara Crow

Lady Gaga has been my “Mommy Monster” since I first saw her video for “Bad Romance,” loaded with enough horror, feminist and silent film references to give a geek like me a complete nerdgasm. Her music has its own fun and strength on its own, but she’s constantly raised the bar with her music videos, usually revealing layers of meaning to her lyrics by the drama playing out in glorious, sublime imagery.  

Imagine my delight when I came across Gaga’s newest video, which implants a healthy dose of science fiction on top of her already established cinematic alchemy of classic film and horror/gothic imagery, enlivening the very straightforward message of “Born This Way” with a commentary on the problematic qualities of any utopia, alluding to science fiction masters such as Philip K. Dick and Ursula LeGuin in content and imagery.

The Alien's Corruption

By Sara Crow

Slightly Behind and to the Left by Claire Light

Aqueduct Press, 2010

Claire Light, from her bio at the 
Aqueduct Press website

Slightly behind and to the Left is a collection of short fiction and “drabbles,” as Light calls them—one-paragraph to half-page installments of highly conceptual flash fiction. The book is from Aqueduct Press’s series, Conversation Pieces, which examines feminism with a focus on feminist science fiction.

Light’s prose throughout this book is infused with an aura of menace and loss. She isn’t afraid to throw her characters into torturous scenarios like a mad scientist trying to see what sort of atrocity will emerge from the next diabolical experiment. She illustrates the feminist struggle for equality as a common conflict across not only gender lines, but across alien worlds as well, creating characters that struggle for much more than survival—they struggle to remain human when endowed with responsibilities of power that give them the opportunity to become monstrous.