Lou AndersReviews

there's a short story by Scott Lynch.

More of a 3.5. A bit of a mixed bag. Some--Maul, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka--were really great. Others just felt like a rehash of the episode.

As usual I'll review each story individually and then give a wrap up. From the offset I should say however that at least five of the authors here are comic book writers that I idolize ::cough Gail Simone cough:: so this may be slightly more skewed then usual. I take my comics very seriously (which is why you rarely if ever will see me review them, I get too passionate).

"Cleansed and Set in Gold" by Matthew Sturges
A reservist member of the League of Heroes, named Wildcard because his powers are "variable", finds himself at the center of an ongoing conflict that killed the supposedly immortal hero Veraine. I couldn't quite guess the trick to Wildcard's powers. The trick is disturbing, though in all honesty I see the merit in it. While the basic premise of the story is one that floods comics on a monthly basis (uber-powerful enemy kills one of the greats and everyone else has to figure out how to stop it), the delivery is more than worth it. Wildcard felt realistic, like an ordinary guy who just stumbled into this hero gig. I did not guess how he resolved the reporter thing, or how he came to terms with his powers.

"Where Their Worm Dieth Not" by James Maxey
Death is as commonplace to heroes as rebirth is. But sometimes the knowledge that you are one of the few who can--and has--returned from death multiple times can be more torturous than anything else. Oh this story made me tear up. It hit home a lot of pertinent facts about superheroes and villains--the whole game can be very like the myth of Sisyphus. While death for most people is the final act, how often has Superman or Cyclops or any hero been brought back to life through some weird invented excuse. I guess that's part of the charm, good will always rise again. Sadly often it also means evil will rise again. Maxey does a good job sketching out the consequences of that hope and how it can break a man.

"Secret Identity" by Paul Cornell
The Manchester Guardian takes his secret identity very very seriously. At first I was really confused by this story. It was all over the place and didn't seem to connect very well. Cornell writes for the new Doctor Who, which when I read that made sense for how the story developed. The Guardian is a figure of power and protection for Manchester's gay community, which is fine except--why is the Guardian making time with the woman thief?! By the end of the story I understood better where Cornell was going, so I re-read this immediately. The disjointed nature of the segements makes more sense once the Guardian's alter-ego is fully out. Its a little campy, and since I don't read a lot of GLBT fiction (outside of yaoi) I was taken aback by the story. Not that I'm judging, but is it normal for GLBT to treat being gay as the societal norm and being straight as the 'sin'?

"The Non-Event" by Mike Carey
Gallo lived a pathetic life, but his death? His death was really something. This is told as a 'confession' by one of Gallo's cohorts and 'friends', Lockjaw. A fairly routine heist goes wrong, horribly horribly wrong. I really enjoyed this story. I liked that it looked at the opposite end of the spectrum, how people with slightly off-kilter powers don't always want to be mass murdering thugs or moralizing prigs. How the smallest change in plans could be the factor that changes a relatively harmless heist into a massacre. I would have liked to know more about Gallo (aka 'Non-Event', he neutralizes the cause-and-effect principle as well as superpowers) and Lockjaw's relationship before the heist.

"Avatar" by Mike Baron
The line between the reality of being a vigilante and the surreal life vigilantes live in comics becomes glaringly obvious to one ambitious boy. On the surface I wasn't very hopeful for this story--its premise is the argument you often hear from parents objecting to the violence of video games and comic books--but Baron handled this in a careful thoughtful manner. This wasn't a kid given over to impulsive acts or violence; he was careful to wait until he felt ready for the challenge he was planning to undertake. And I think if he had stopped after the first thug or two, things would have turned out differently. However as it turned out he got a little drunk on his 'power', his ability to take down guys bigger than himself, the 'revenge' he was seeking for years of abuse and bullying. Well he learns the hard way consequences of actions.

"Message from the Bubblegum Factory" by Daryl Gregory
The former sidekick to the World's Greatest Hero has a secret and a new view of life. This story kind of made me laugh in that dark way when you understand what's happening. I've wondered about what the world did before Super-Heroes. Oh comics ret-con in super-powered villains or super-heroes as far back as you please, but "Message from the Bubblegum Factor" questions whether its a chicken or egg sort of deal. And why the world suddenly went to hell once Soliton appeared. Or is it a coincidence that the lawful Good don't die, that before Soliton if someone got dropped in a vat of acid they didn't get super-powers--they died. Its all really interesting, and sure the narrator, Eddie, admits he's insane, but he's the sort of insane I can get behind.

"Thug" by Gail Simone
Which is worse--the guy who looks like a monster, but tries never to hurt anyone or the guy who looks like an angel and purposely sets out to hurt those weaker? Oh Gail made me cry, which isn't surprising since I've cried over her comics before. It took me a page or two to get used to the fact the writing/spelling is very immature (its on purpose), but I felt so bad. I guessed what was going to happen fairly quickly, but it broke my heart to see Alvin go through all that loss. He wasn't a bad guy, though he did bad things. He fell into it, because he lost his way and that one moment in his life made everything worse. The story is short, but Simone packs a lot of emotional punch into it.

"Vacuum Lad" by Stephen Baxter
Vacuum Lad thought he was for bigger things than just an Insurance publicity gimmick, but is he really ready for all his genetics entail? I may have spent some time chuckling during this story because Vacuum Lad acted just like any other teenager given powers. Also this story has a lot more 'science' involved than any of the proceeding ones, which makes sense since even I know Baxter is big on science fiction. This was a sad moment for me because I couldn't understand even a quarter of what Dr. Stix was saying, I'm really not scientifically inclined (which is why I avoid hard science fiction). I thought this was an interesting look at how people can view 'gifts' differently. Vacuum Lad saw it as his duty to the people to help keep them safe (even if it was a puff job half the time). The Damocletians saw it as a duty to keep people safe as well, but in a less hands-on manner. I wish there was more about the 'bad guys', the Earth First League. Their motivations were rather murky to me.

"A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows" by Chris Roberson
I could not, for the life of me, read this story for more than a couple pages before becoming completely bored. I thought I would at least want to read this since Roberson has written two comics I enjoy (Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love and I, Zombie.) But I suppose since this is an anthology, its bound to happen at least once.

"Head Cases" by Peter David and Kathleen David
Who said people with powers can't have regular angst-problems like the rest of us? Peter David will forever be my hero because he worked on my favorite comic book of all time--Young Justice. Plus he helped create the too short tv series Space Cases. That said this was a fun and quirky story, written with his wife Kathleen. Ari just wants to strum on his guitar (badly), Xander likes to mess with Simon's head, Simon is trying to look out for his friend Vikki who is a dissatisfied housewife. The fact they all have powers of some sort is incidental. The sideline about Ari's once girlfriend Zola was definitely interesting. I've always liked how Peter David handles banter and wit, which was in plenty of abundance. I'd like to see more short stories about these folks in fact!

"Downfall" by Joseph Mallozzi
A formerly unkillable hero dies and its up to a reformed villain to find the man behind it--even as it takes him down memory lane. Why yes this is Joseph Mallozzi who I can thank for Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Universe as well as Big Wolf on Campus! None of that should be interpreted as sarcastic--that was all sincere. This was however a surprising hit with me. Mallozzi gave a developmental depth to the story that left me feeling satisfied, as if I had just read a novel instead of a short story. There was a couple of surprises, like the ending pages, but overall I just found myself enjoying the story and hoping for the best for Marshall.

"By My Works You Shall Know Me" by Mark Chadbourn
Matt was given a new lease on life by his best friend, but is it possible that a betrayal runs deep? Mind-screw. This story is an utter mind-screw, in a really good way. And to be fair, after the first page I had a crack theory about Styx, that apparently turned out to be the truth so yeah. Told in flashbacks and recordings that Matt keeps as a sort of journal, we read as Matt reviews the previous year and his fight against Styx. This was a surprising read and the end is quite thought-provoking.

"Call Her Savage" by Marjorie M. Liu
Namid only wished to remain in peace in the mountains to forget the bloody past. Unfortunately sometimes facing your past is the only option. I was mightily confused at first by this story. I know nothing about the 'crystal skulls' myth/legend (except that it was part of a very bad Indiana Jones movie) so the mentions of the skulls and what was almost, but not quite world history threw me for a loop. This one felt more abrupt than the other stories, it began mid-action and kept refocusing about different things. A lot of details were contained in this story, but I wanted to know more about how the crystal skulls effected Namid and others.

"Tonight We Fly" by Ian McDonald
A shout out from an old enemy is all Mr. Miracle really needs. This was a sweet story about a hero (and villain) who both grew old and dissatisfied with the way the world evolved. It had that 'In my day!' ring to it. Despite this being one of the least 'superheroic' stories in the anthology (as far as actions go), I think this presented itself really well; superheroes grow older, just as villains do and everybody wants one more moment to relive their glory days don't they?

"A to Z in the Ultimate Big Company Superhero Universe (and Villains Too)" by Bill Willingham
There isn't a synopsis that would give this justice, the title pretty much says it all. For anyone who reads DC or Marvel titles regularly, many of the heroes and villains presented in here will sound familiar in many ways. Which is on purpose. This read like a Big Publisher crossover event--that is, it was all over the place in terms of story, focus and such. I liked how Willingham (who writes Fables for Vertigo, a comic everyone should read) organized the story--ABC order according to the character's name--and tied it together.

My three favorite stories were "Thug", "Head Cases" and "Downfall", though noticed a trend amongst the majority of the stories--that is a great many of them dealt with heroes who were gigantic jerks. Either as the main character, a catalyst for the action or holding some plot relevance. This was a little disconcerting for me since seeing heroes as 'bullies' or 'glory-hounds' kind of makes me despite them.

Surprisingly this anthology is probably one of the best put together I've read in a long time. Other than Roberson's story I enjoyed all the stories to some degree. They covered the vastness that is 'superheroes' and certainly proved that you can take a similar premise and make it entirely different but interesting in more than a dozen ways.

Karn, Thianna, and Desstra travel to the Thican Empire to retrieve the Horn of Osius. Thica used to be divided into dozens of city-states. However a century ago, the city-state of Caldera discovered the Horn of Osius and used it to enslave the wyverns and conquer the rest of Thica.

Thianna meets her mother's side of the family, while Karn and Desstra befriend some Thicans who want to free their cities from Calderan rule.

Stories of Karn and Thianna's adventures have been swirling around Norrøngard for months. After hearing the rumors, the Dark Elves send an elite team of Underhand agents to retrieve the second Horn of Osius so that they can control all dragons. Desstra is in training to be an Underhand agent, and she'll do anything to secure the Horn for her people.

Orm sends Thianna to prevent the Dark Elves from getting their hands on the second horn. But when Thianna goes missing, Karn will need to travel to the city of Castlebriar to find her.½

If you love Star Wars, and especially the television show The Clone Wars, then you will absolutely love this little anthology.

This series of stories is set in The Clone Wars timeline, and man is it good. We visit many familiar faces and continue learning more about their stories. Yoda, Padme, Ahsoka, so many good characters are revisited! It's a great way for nostalgic feeling for old fans and a great way to make new ones. It is also an amazing way to dive into some old stories in a new light. Especially with a variety of new authors to check out since they each bring their own spunk to this marvellous universe.

I highly recommend picking this book up if you love Star Wars! I loved sneaking back into the magical world I grew up with.

Four out of five stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Disney Publishing Worldwide for providing me a free copy of this book in exchange of an honest review.

Karn and Thianna are each on the run from enemies chasing after them across a Norse-inspired fantasy world when they decide to team up. Karn is good at tactics and strategy, while Thianna has the knowledge and practical skills to survive in a land of ice and snow.

Essentially just a retelling of some story arcs from the show. Pretty pointless. We could've gotten some new stories about the clone wars, but got a rehash instead.

Lots of famous authors and lots of good stories, really you can't go wrong with this one

2 1/2 stars: I didn't particularly like it or dislike it; mixed or no real interest

From the back cover: Darkness has fallen on the galaxy. But there is always light.... An epic clash between the forces of light and dark, between the Galactic Republic and the Separatists, between brave heroes and brilliant villains. The fate of the galaxy is at stake in the Emmy Award winning animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In this exciting anthology, eleven authors who are also fans of the series bring stories from their favorite show to life. Relive memorable moments and stunning adventures, from attempted assasinations to stolen bounties, from lessons learned to loves lost.

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This book was different than I expected. I expected it to be new stories from the animated series, or animated series stories "from a different point of view" (which is another anthology series going around Star Wars). Instead, this just seemed to be certain episodes, made into written form. I had little to no interest. It was a very fast read, but didn't do much for me.

A few quotes I liked:

If you were against the war, if you were a partisan, if you were young, if you were everything Padme' was, you had to keep your face callm, reserved. You could show a bit of passion, but just a bit. Too much and you were too emotional. Too little and you were a protocol droid.

And this is why she believes in the Republic. It is not without corruption. It is not without darkness. But there is good at its core. And just because something good has darkness doesn't mean you abandon it. Just because there is darkness in something does not mean you don't love it. You show it love, you show it light, and you hope it chooses the light.

The surprise in his eyes, well, surprised her. It seemed that men who tried to push her around were always surprised when she fought back.

In a strange way, this pirate who had nearly killed us, certainly tried to capture us, and almost betrayed us felt like...well, like a new friend. He'd believed in me, and he'd listened to me. He'd seen what I'd been having so much trouble seeing: that almost a Jedi doesn't mean never. It means someday. Someday soon. Pausing at the top of the ramp, Hondo looked back, met my eyes, and nodded at me. I nodded back at him.

Slowly, calmly, Obi-Wan exited the chamber to begin disobeying the Council's orders.

"Master....what happened?" [Anakin, to Obi Wan, after Satine died]
The words came with a struggle. He didn't want to talk. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But he knew he needed to speak. He knew it was important that Anakin hear it. "I lost someone important to me." Obi Wan said. "and I understand anger in a way I never have. I know how difficult it is to not give in to it."
Anakin held his gaze a long time, struggles of his own evident on his face.½

My review of this book can be found on my Youtube Vlog at:

https://youtu.be/oOMWV6su1CE

Enjoy!

Thrones & Bones: Frostborn is a Norse-influenced fantasy about a 12-year-old farmer's son named Karn and a 13-year-old girl named Thianna whose father is a frost giant and her late mother was a human. The book opens with a dire chase scene.

"Thrones and Bones" is the board game Karn is obsessed with rather than farming. His father is the elder of twins, and Karn's uncle is quite bitter about being the second son. If Karn were actually paying attention to what his uncle tells him, he might not have followed his uncle down to a barrow and then followed "dear" uncle's instructions. This leads to the uncle getting his wish, and Karn having to run for his life with three draugr (undead rotting corpses) after him.

Thianna is skillful, but faces prejudice from some of her father's people because she's shorter than a normal frost giant (and looks like her mother). She is most reluctant to accompany her father to trade with humans, but that's how she meets Karn.

Thianna also has to go on the run from the same villainesses (who naturally think of themselves as righteous warriors) who were responsible for her parents meeting. They want the little horn Thianna inherited from her mother.

As will probably satisfy video/computer game enthusiasts, Karn's obsession helps to save the day more than once as soon as he begins to think of his surroundings as a game board and his attackers as playing pieces. Thianna's strength, magic, and practical knowledge also save the day several times. They make a good team.

I think my favorite adventure was when they had to flee into a ruined city and meet Orm the enormous dragon. Orm just loves playing cat-and-mouse. These 'mice' give him a bigger workout than he anticipated. Thianna puts her mother's horn to good use. The name of the ruined city sounds like 'Sardeth,' which amused me because Orm is the doom that came to Sardeth and one of famed horror writer H. P. Lovecraft's short stories is 'The Doom That Came to Sarnath'. If it's a homage, I like it!

Karn and Thianna do get captured. How they turn the tables on their respective captors was a lot of fun.

I enjoyed Fabio Tassone's narration. If there is a downside to listening to an audio book, though, it's not learning how to spell the names of characters who aren't listed on the box.

Book one is enjoyable enough that book two should be worth encountering.½

Read years ago, lost, found, re-read. The Paul Di Filippo story stuck with me, and there's a good introduction to the Darger and Surplus setting.

Lots of really good stuff in here. I particularly liked the short stories "Plotter and Shooters" and "Sideways from Now" by [a:Kage Baker|53193|Kage Baker|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1224057034p2/53193.jpg] and [a:John Meaney|427315|John Meaney|http://www.goodreads.com/images/nophoto/nophoto-U-50x66.jpg], respectively. It's good to know that the science fiction short story is still alive and kicking.

Giving *voice* to Star Wars.....

I enjoyed this light bit of the GFFA mostly for Jim Cummings voicing the carefree pirate Hondo. Having just been to Black Spire Outpost (i.e. Disney's Galaxy's edge) it's also another bit of the world building for the Star Wars land - there are many references to that locale, along with some rather silly action featuring Hondo, Han and Chewie.

I read this at bedtime with my 9-year old son and we laughed and cried through much of it. If you or your kids liked Hondo from The Clone Wars series and Rebels, you're sure to love this book.

This third in a trilogy is a fast-paced, action oriented fantasy with fun characters that use their brains. Highly recommended. It has a glossary with pronunciations to help pronounce the names of the characters.

I must admit that this book took a while to get into. I'm glad I stuck it out, because it did improve once I got past the character introductions which took longer than it needed to. The book takes place in a Nordic fantasy world reminiscent of the Scandinavian countries. Thankfully there is a map because it helps the reader get the lay of the land. There are two main characters, Karn and Thianna. Karn is the son of a farmer who would love to spend all his days playing a board game called Thrones and Bones. Thianna is a half-breed frost giant who detests her human side. She has an inferiority complex because, at 8 ft. tall, she is short for a giant.

Karn lives in the low farmlands of Norrongard. Thianna lives in the mountains of Ymiria. Their lives intersect when they arrive at a market fair to barter goods. Given that Karn is human and Thianna is a frost giant, they don’t expect to get along so well. They enjoy the festivities together then part ways. Their lives cross again when Karn finds himself on the run from the Afterwalkers, aka the undead. Thianna saves him numerous times and then realizes she can use some help also as she flees a huntress who wants Thianna’s magical horn.

There is much more to this book. It’s loaded with mythical creatures like wyverns (dragons) and trolls. From the moment Karn meets Thianna, the action never slows down. I appreciate the author not jamming all the action into the very end like so many authors do. He keeps it steady all the way. I also like the ancient feel of the story and the unique Nordic setting. This is true fantasy to the core.

An excellent follow-up to the first book, adding a new character and new locations. I wasn't sure about the new character at first, but I very much liked that Karn and Thianna were allowed to progress -- they had their character development and sort of learned their lessons in the first book, and I'm glad they weren't sent back to square one, taught the same lesson over again, or anything like that. Also A+ more dragon content, Orm was already my favorite character. I thought the modern style of humor was a bit out of place, but I'm sure the middle-grade target audience won't care and will love it!

A couple of the stories were pretty good and there were some interesting concepts, but on the whole it felt like the authors were trying to condense novel length ideas into 20 pages or so.

Behind a suitable mechanoid science fictiony cover, Projections: Science Fiction in Literature & Film, edited by Lou Anders, collects essays from leading critics and writers. Michael Moorcock, Robert Silverberg, Jonathan Lethem, Robert J. Saywer, Michael Swanwick, David Brin, John Clute, James Gunn, Michael Resnick, and others discuss a variety of topics from Leigh Brackett to Star Wars, Harry Potter to Star Trek, and all points in between.

The quality of the essays varies greatly. Some meander without getting to any point. From several of the contributors, I've read superior essays elsewhere. Highlights include the two bracketing essays from Michael Swanwick, Brin on Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, Moorcock's remembrance of Leigh Brackett, Mike Resnick on Burroughs, a history Australian sf by McMullen, and Jonathan Lethem's thoughts on science fiction.

Most of the essays in this volume are reprints and often feel dated. The copyright dates range from 1984 to 2004. This could have easily been fixed by placing the copyright information with the essays themselves. To make matters worse, the reader is not made aware that the essays are reprints until they see the permissions listing at the end of the book.

From the 1940s through the early 1980s, the anthology of original short stories served as the backbone of the science-fiction field, reaching its zenith in the 1970s with original anthology series such as Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, Terry Carr's Universe, and Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions. Fresh ideas and new writers often emerged from these books, which were sold in bookstores and therefore able to reach mass audiences. Recently several new series – Polyphony, Adventure, and Leviathan to name a few – have premiered to revive the formerly moribund format. With Fast Forward 1: Future Fiction From the Cutting Edge, acclaimed editor Lou Anders joins the fray.

Behind the dazzling John Picacio cover, Fast Forward opens strongly with the Hugo-winning Robert Charles Wilson's "YFL-500," a tale of futuristic art and the dreams that fuel it. Several stories throughout equal the quality of the first. In "Aristotle OS," Tony Ballantyne presents an insightful glimpse into a world-changing operating system. Elizabeth Bear pens a unique take on alien invasion and childhood autoerotic asphyxiation with "The Something-Dreaming Game." "Jesus Christ, Reanimator" by Ken MacLeod, possibly the best short-story title of the decade, posits the inherent conflicts in the Second Coming.

In his introduction, Anders states that his goal is to emulate previous groundbreaking science-fiction-anthology series, most notably Fredrick Pohl's Star SF (six volumes from 1953 to 1959) and Damon Knight's Orbit (21 volumes, 1966-1980). If successive volumes equal the quality of this excellent debut, Fast Forward will go a long way in achieving Anders' hope and might even inspire a new generation.

(This review originally appeared in The Austin Chronicle, February 23, 2007.)

If the internet had never been invented, what might have taken its place? A 2003 collection of SF what-if stories attempts to answer that question. If the world was run by Imperial China, the abacus might still be the primary means of calculation. Chemistry or biology, instead of electronics, might create new data storage. "Cloud storage" might be accomplished literally, with programmable weather!

Some of these worlds had a Net, but have been pushed on to a post-apocalyptic scenario. Few of the stories predicted analogs for the morass of trolls and malware that the net actually became or the ubiquity of the Internet of Things in quite the way it's actually worked out. More jacked-in bio connections, fewer apps and selfies. One story does at least recognize that the main content sent over the Net is porn and makes it the primary use of virtual reality, even before gaming. Other stories focused more on replacement computation methods than on a different kind of WWW, like the Fleming/Bond WWII pastiche where Einstein had been a geneticist instead of a physicist and all our mechanical infrastructure (transport, communication, calculation, armament) was bio-engineered.

I liked a few of the stories, but most were just OK and didn't really meet what I was expecting the theme of the book to be.

Anders' anthology about life in a world where superheroes exist is great! He chose both writers who have worked primarily in comics and those who have worked primarily in prose, and all were entertaining. For anyone who thinks comics are just silly kid stuff, read it and weep.