Subtitled: A Newbury & Hobbes Investigation

If you adore the New Dr. Who series, this is the book for you. It’s NOT Dr. Who, but it has many similarities. I’ve no idea who came up with what ideas first (or if that really matters), but you have your British Indiana Jones-type investigator for the Queen, who is being kept alive past her expiration date in our universe with a funky steampunk style life support system concocted by a genius “M” type ...Read More

Gate of Ivory opens up on the only known world in the galaxy that has magic. Science can’t explain it, and there’s no reason for it.  It Just Is. Super rational anthropology student Theadora from Pyrene is stranded on Ivory, earning money telling fortunes with her deck of cards.

Thea is a gem.  She’s pragmatic. She’ll take stories as payment for work done. She has faults. She is not athletic. She counts money like a miser, totaling paid transactions down to ...Read More

It’s just not possible for us to see and review every movie while it’s hot. So one of our readers had a great suggestion: an open thread where those who have seen the new Star Trek can tell us what they thought.

This is it. Tell us what you thought about the female characters and any gender issues or politics the movie raised. And feel free to talk spoilers.

This comment thread WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS.

Mary Janice Davidson’s mermaid series Sleeping with the Fishes (Fred the Mermaid, Book 1) is fantastic. It’s set in Boston (SQUEE!) and features the New England Aquarium quite prominently.Her delightfully snarky half-human protagonist Fred is a marine biologist utterly resistant to the charms of Thomas, the water fellow at the NEA, and Artur, the mer-prince who’s come to woo her. These delightfully silly three must combine forces to save the Harbor from becoming a poo-filled wasteland. Dude. Most romance novels ...Read More

Gah. Everfree, Nick Sagan’s closer to his Black Ep. trilogy, introduced some neat-o characters, but subsided to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion. Remember the plot? Major plague, well-to-do humans go into cryogenics, everyone else dies? After inventing post-humans, genetically engineered kiddies smart enough to save the planet? Only then one went insane and killed like half of his compatriots? ‘Member that? Kay. At this novel’s start, we find out that the post-humans have begun reanimating the world’s old movers-and-shakers, and forcing ...Read More

I’m still on a big YA kick, and went ahead through the first volume of Smith’s Night World collection. Again, Smith’s prose is gorgeously lucid, and the plots are quite fun. My one hesitation is that Smith’s got an on-going motif re: female archetypes that’s kinda making me twitch. The whole DID YOU NOTICE XXX IS SO WILD MAGIK IT MAKES YOUR TEETH HURT? THIS IS WHY THEY’RE IEXPLICABLY SEXY!!! as a means of characterization is making me a leeeeeeeetle ...Read More