SpaceGypsies

Cairo
G. Willow Wilson, writer
M.K. Perker, artist
Urban fantasy
November 2007
Vertigo Comics
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1734-1
Format: Trade paperback
accquired: purchased

this review cross-posted from On a Pale Star: A Book Blog for Speculative Fiction

 The blurb, from the back of the book:

A stolen hookah, a spiritual underworld, and a genie on the run change the lives of five strangers forever on the streets of the Middle East’s largest metropolis.

Cairo interweaves the fates of a drug runner, a down-on-his-luck journalist, an American expatriate, a troubled young student, and an Israeli soldier as they race through the bustling present-day Cairo to find an artifact of unimaginable power, one protected by a dignified jinn and sought by a wrathful gangster-magician. But the vastness of Africa’s legendary City of Victory extends into a spiritual realm—the Undernile—and even darker powers lurk there…

The review:

Cairo opens with a man telling a story. I’m a bit of a sucker for storytellers, so honestly, that was all it took to hook me into the graphic novel. Of course, it helps that the story he’s telling starts with “So today, I hit one of those stoned camels with my truck.”

I’ve never thought of camels being stoned before, or of drug runners crashing into them while trying to smuggle drugs into Israel…but now I have, and it makes perfect sense. Cairo is like that; full of situations I haven’t thought of before, but that slot right into reality perfectly, even if it’s jinn and the Undernile we’re talking about.

Ashraf is, I think, the perfect introductory character. He’s a drug runner, unrepentant about it, but knowing he ought to walk away. As he sits smoking with a hookah, telling his mother about his day, you get a feel for his personality, and when the scene pans out and Ashraf gets up to leave and you realize that he’s been talking to her grave, Ashraf suddenly has depth.

The story of his day leads to the next character we meet, an injured Israeli soldier who was found in the desert by a group of Bedouin heading into Cairo. When Tova wakes up in their care, she’s grateful they cared for her. When she realizes where they are headed, her response is an appropriate “fuck.”

Cairo is like this—one person’s story blends with another until we’ve met all five. Kate and Shaheed meet on a plane ride from the U.S. to Cairo; pretty soon we as readers realize that Kate is an idealistic middle-class young woman and it’s not hard to make a leap to “naïve” as she talks to Shaheed. Shaheed, though, is less transparent and it’s not until the narration follows him more closely that you realize that he’s very troubled, indeed.

Soon we find that Ashraf knows a journalist, Ali… and then Ali meets Kate, and Shaheed meets (and gets conned by) Ashraf, who has a run in with Tova. And like that, five disparate characters are connected and Wilson manages to make it feel completely natural. It would’ve been easy for this to feel contrived, so I’m impressed at how well orchestrated this string of meetings was.

The plot is pushed forward by Ashraf’s drug-running history coming back to bite him in the butt and a jinni (in, and then not in, a hookah). It’s a fantastic blend of the region’s mythology and religion with modern day Cairo. Shams, the jinn, is not at all the comedic blue guy from a Disney movie. He’s motivated, earnest, and a teacher–an example of a benevolent jinni.

Shams, benevolent being that he is, helps these five—one in particular—reach their potential. At one point in the story, he tells Shaheed that he manipulates probabilities, rather than creating items or events from scratch. With the cast he had to work with, I’m inclined to think that guiding this group might have been a bit like herding cats. They each have free-will, and own their own choices, but with some gentle and un-subtle nudges from Shams, they learn that they can choose differently than they have in the past. The message for readers isn’t subtle, but I think that’s okay. Sometimes we need clue-by-fours to smack us over the head with an idea, particularly a worthy one.

Wilson’s story is beautifully complimented by Perker’s art. The characters and setting are rendered beautifully, the panels accenting and expanding the text to make the entire story rich and nuanced. If you haven’t gathered by now, Cairo is not stereotypical comic book/super hero fair. There are no spandex or leather-encased vigilantes here, just excellently drawn men and women and a jinni who want more from life than what they’ve already experienced.

If you get the chance to read Cairo, do. It’s well worth your time.

Visit the author’s Website. Visit the artist’s Website.

Road to Hell
Krista D. Ball
Science Fiction
December 2011
Mundania Press
ISBN: 978-1-60659-286-1
155 pages, according to my e-reader
format: electronic
accquired: author sent it for review

This review is cross-posted from On a Pale Star: A Book Blog for Speculative Fiction

The blurb, from the publisher:
Captain Katherine Francis is about to disobey every Ethics Law the Union of Planets throws at her. After the Union’s enemy destroys her home planet and murders her family, she makes the decision to bring an end to the war–whatever it takes.

When an opportunity arises to ally with the neutral Alliance and turn the tide of war, Katherine throws aside her moral code, partners with a known spy, and risks sacrificing the very core of who she is.

And when faced with choosing between her conscience and stopping the bloodshed, she realizes that, either way, she’ll lose.

The review:
Shortly after Road to Hell opens, Katherine Francis, captain of the space port Perdition, receives terrible news about her family’s fate in the on-going war that is costing millions of lives and slowly chipping away at the Union of Planets. She’s devastated. More than devastated, she’s furious, and she nurses that rage until it’s what sustains her.

The Union’s Fleet Command puts out a request that all captains come up with a “local action plan” that might help the war end sooner, and Katherine begins to toy with an idea that skirts the Ethics Law, bending it without breaking it. And then, there’s an opportunity that goes against everything she’s been taught about honesty, trust, ethics, and the higher ground.

Bereft of her family, with her estranged wife somewhere out near the front, Katherine is faced with a question: just what are her ethics–the codes and values enforced by the Ethics law and the foundation of her and of the Unions’ way of life–worth?

We all know what the road to hell is paved with, and Krista Ball, by way of her tall, strong, grieving captain, reminds us that “hell” isn’t just a physical place but a state of mind and of being. Katherine decides that ending the war and defeating the Coalition is an end that will justify her means. What she doesn’t expect, I think, is just how much her methods will cost her personally and how much her decision will ripple outward to affect others in her life.

It wasn’t easy to read Captain Katherine Francis’ struggles in this novel, but I’m glad that I did, even my own personal moral code wouldn’t have struggled with what to do as Katherine’s did. She’s well written and consistent even as she does things that she never, ever dreamed she would do. I very much appreciated her character development even as I found that I sometimes had more in common with her (much less morally rigid) cohort-in-espionage, Salim.

Salim is a Coalition exile, both familiar to Katherine and utterly, utterly foreign. Not being Union means Salim hasn’t been raised on the strict Ethics Law, and doesn’t have the same boundaries as those he live among. He breaks Coalition codes for the Union and does so to benefit himself: agreeing to decode only in return for upgrades to his access to technology or for similar rewards. Early on Katherine comments that she’s fine with Salim as long as she remembers that “he will do what benefits him most.”

Of course Salim becomes her go-to person when she decides to go full-out, ignore the Ethics Law, and end the war. They are excellent foils to one another.

I’m not going to spoil the book and tell you if her plan comes to fruition and her end goal is met because while it is important, it is not really the point of the novel. Katherine’s constant struggle to reconcile herself to this path she’s chosen, her horror at the bad (very very bad) events that occur because of her choice, and even her inability to change a lifetime of conditioning and habits to effectively lie, those are the important parts of the story.

When does practicality win out over ideals? What would you do if you were told you have carte blanche to act as you want, as long as you don’t get caught? What are your personal morals and ethics worth? What’s your price?

Visit the author’s Website. Follow the author on Twitter.

Georgia’s story is not about your momma’s vampire or your teenage sparkling vampire.  It’s about a new – old vampire!

Love this part from the book!

 The smell of the best became like aged bourbon.  It was rotten and harsh.  It tasted like burnt wood, with a swirl of sugar through it.

Remnants of Life takes us along in the adventures of Samantha/Samoda from the world we understand of life into the other world of after ‘death’.

Get it here at Amazon

Or Get it in Print here 

Check out her website and publishers web site:

www.georgialjones.com

www.blackwyrm.com

MidSouthCon-30 was so much fun!  One of my favorite people, Stephen Zimmer, had some great insight into his world.  Check out the video below!  I love this guy!

check him out here: http://www.stephenzimmer.com/

The 18th book in Fandemonium’s arsenal of Stargate SG-1 novels is out. Written by Sabine C. Bauer, Transitions falls shockingly short.

Sabine Bauer is not a newbie to the Stargate franchise. Her first novel, Trail by Fire, was the first Stargate book Fandemonium ever published, and I decided right then and there that I really liked her work. Later she wrote Survival of the Fittest, another fantastic SG-1 story, and then she took on Atlantis with Mirror Mirror. Trial by Fire was very accurate as far as the franchise canon goes. It is set in season seven and does very well at playing into Daniel’s return from Ascension and Jack’s previous encounter with our friend Baal. After having endured the work of American authors who didn’t know their Jaffa from their Tok’ra, I adored Bauer’s well researched and original story, and my favorite original character of all time. It is truly worthy of it’s own review, which I promise I will get to.

Mirror Mirror was a little different from Trial by Fire as far as plot style. It is in some ways psychological test of the characters. The characters encounter a device that fractures time, spitting each character off though all the potenial forks in the road that they could have taken. For instance, we see what could have happened to Elizabeth Weir if, after waking to rotate the ZPMs, the statis chamber wouldn’t work again and she is left alone in a sleeping city as seen in ‘Before I Sleep’. While it is a season two story and I am not as well trained in Atlantis canon as some fans I know, I didn’t find any obvious errors and I really enjoyed the book.

Survival of the Fittest is definitely the meatiest of Bauer’s first three books. I really enjoyed the depth of the story, and it is still among my favorite books of the novel series. However, it has a canyon-sized plot hole. According to events that the characters mention, the main antagonist, the ever annoying Colonel Simons, should have been in jail along side his pet Goa’uld. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way for Bauer to have sidestepped this gaping hole and still keep all of her puzzle pieces. It was a real shame but I forgave her and I highly recommend the book.

Transitions, however . . . . I think that Bauer bit off much more than she could chew. Transitions is an SG-1/Atlantis crossover novel, and it is the first of its kind. Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen wrote Blood Ties, which is basically an Atlantis novel that includes Daniel Jackson. (I highly recommend it!) Transitions however is a true two full cast crossover. This made reading fun but not in a good way. Every time something huge happened on Earth with SG-1, the next chapter would send you to Atlantis until another cliffhanger chapter sent you back. In most stories this works really well, but in Transitions, the related events taking place between Earth and Atlantis took much too long to come together despite the prologue that attempted to provide the trigger event for the whole book.

I was so excited about this book when I first started hearing about it because it is the first book to bring back Cassandra Fraiser, the adopted daughter of the late lamented Dr. Janet Fraiser. Fans only saw Cassie three times during the course of the series, but it is a widely held belief that she is an integral part of SG-1′s life outside of Cheyanne Mountain. I became a lot more skeptical when I realized that the book would also be a crossover. I mean, that’s a lot to cram into 341 pages. It is a truly daunting task, which is no doubt why no one has tried it before! Plus, I really feel that Cassie should have been on the cover of this book!

Sometimes the devil is in the details, but for Transitions the devil is in the timing. The story is set right after SG-1′s season 8 concluded. The Goa’uld are decimated and declawed, the Replicators have been destroyed, Brigadier General Jack O’Neill has been offered another promotion and a position in Washington, Daniel Jackson is packing to go to Atlantis, Teal’c is on Dakara helping to establish the new Jaffa nation, and Sam Carter is trying to figure out what she is going to do next without her team. This is a perfectly fertile place for this novel, and it does a really good job of filling in that gap of time before season nine when the show returned and for fans, it was a nightmare without explanation. Not only does it show how we got there, but it also goes a long way to explain why Sam chose to lead R&D because Cassie was going through a “tough time.” Unfortunately filling in that gap is the only thing this story does well. Read the rest of this entry »