Hemstreet, God Wave (2016)

Patrick Hemstreet, The God Wave. HarperVoyager, 2016. Pp 401. ISBN 978-0-06-241950-7. $24.99.

Reviewed by Don Riggs

Patrick Hemstreet’s first novel, The God Wave, is a fast read, even though my time for reading it was limited to the bus rides to and from work mornings and evenings, and I was usually writing in my copy with a ballpoint pen during those half-hour intervals. I was writing because I was marking sample passages for this review much as I do when teaching a book in a science fiction class, one of which I was teaching as I was reading The God Wave. As a result, many of my initial impressions came from the relationships between Hemstreet’s novel and what I had been teaching in class recently. My first reaction was: a Golden Age SF story, both from the standpoint of style and from its definite status as a “hard science fiction” novel. In certain ways, I was reminded of Asimov et al., both in positive and negative ways.

Vaughn, Kiss for a Dead Film Star (2016)

Karen Vaughn, A Kiss for a Dead Film Star and Other Stories. Brain Mill Press, 2016. Pp. 111. ISBN 978-1-94208-338-2. $12.95.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

The seeming inextricability of the forces of love and death, of eros and thanatos, are ones that have haunted the human condition since before stylus was put to clay. They are almost cliché at this point, but Karen Vaughn takes these ideas, pulling them this way and that, until she has this book—a collection of short stories that, each in their own way, confront the possibilities of the ineffable.

Andrew Hook, punkPunk! (2015)

Andrew Hook (ed.), punkPunk!. Dog Horn Publishing, 2015. Pp. 218. ISBN 978-1-90713-389-3. £12.99.

Reviewed by Małgorzata Mika

Published in January 2015 by DogHorn Publishing, punkPunk! is a collection of short stories unified by a peculiar cultural phenomenon whose name formulates the title of the book. Defined as an “eclectic mix of stories” (7), its main purpose is to present punk “not simply [as]a static component of history, but a process of evolution and revolution.” Such a statement holds the promise of entanglement and literary engagement far exceeding the chronological reiteration of forms and styles.

Fogg, Lilies of Dawn (2016)

Vanessa Fogg, The Lilies of Dawn. Annorlunda Books, 2016. Pp 71. ISBN 978-1-94435-412-1. $7.99.

Reviewed by Cait Coker

The novella is an underappreciated form; too often a reader can look up from a novel’s “soggy middle” and wish that some content had been streamlined, or finish a short story and wish that there had only been more. Vanessa Fogg’s The Lilies of Dawn is exactly the right size for the story that it wants to tell, a deliciously atmospheric tale that blends fairy tale and fantasy. I read it through in one sitting and you should consider doing the same.

The eponymous lilies of dawn grow in splendid isolation in the countryside, treasured for their use in medicines, and watched over by the Dawn Priestess. Kai is the latest in the long line of such priestesses, but she is preoccupied with a flock of destructive, mystical cranes that are slowly destroying each year’s crop, and the failing health of her mother. Without the medicine distilled from the lilies’ nectar, her mother, and many others, will die.