The SF Site: Featured Reviews Archive

The reviews are sorted alphabetically by authors' last name -- one or more pages for each letter (plus one for Mc). All but some recent reviews are listed here. Links to those reviews appear on the Recent Feature Review Page.

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Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Rich Horton
Set some 35 years after the close of New Amsterdam, about 1938, Sebastien and his companions, chief among them Abby Irene and her not quite friend Phoebe Smith, have taken up residence in London. But it is a changed London, occupied by Germans -- or, really, Prussians. For in this changed history, there is no Hitler, but there is a Hitler analogue -- and sort of a Bismarck successor -- and England is under his sway.

Dust by Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
One of the forms from which science fiction and fantasy emerged was the medieval romance in which a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, abides by strict chivalric codes of conduct while on a quest in which he fights and defeats monsters and giants, thereby winning favour with a lady. There is often an allegorical aspect to the quest and the various opponents overcome, and a sense that the whole enterprise and its outcome are pre-ordained. Now put this description in purely science fictional terms...

Undertow by Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
The author does an extraordinary job of juggling a dozen balls -- political mayhem, exotic tech, ethical dilemmas, probability magic, cultural milieu, social interactions between both HUMAN friends, enemies and rivals and ALIEN ones. She creates a beautifully coherent world, and exhibits the true storyteller's gift of creating truly alien aliens -- because she understands humans so well.

New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Nathan Brazil
This book is presented as a series of loosely connected novellas, centred around the crime solving adventures of Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, and Sebastian de Ulloa. Garrett is a flint hard, caustic tongued, forensic sorceress, and de Ulloa is a thousand year-old wampyr, something like a bisexual Hercule Poirot. Beginning separately, but eventually combining talents and causes, the pair make their unique way through six stories, set at the turn of the 20th century. But this is a world in which sorcery is an every day fact of life.

Carnival by Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Paul Kincaid
There was a time, not so long ago, when British science fiction was in the doldrums. What lifted it out and established what has been called the "British renaissance" was a rediscovery through the works of such as Iain M. Banks and Colin Greenland of the excitement of traditional SF tropes and topics. Of late we have started to see that same reappraisal of core science fictional ideas in some of the younger American writers like John Scalzi and Elizabeth Bear. This novel is a perfect example of such a return.

Carnival by Elizabeth Bear
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
Politics, intrigue, spy games, genetic engineering, love affairs, betrayals... lions and tigers and Bears, oh my. This is something different from her yet again and one has to stop and admire the sheer scope of creativity evidenced here. This is a novel of social science fiction, something built on a potentially hard SF basis which segues into something that Ursula K. Le Guin might have tried if she were writing this sort of thing.

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