Jeremy Zimmerman

This first novel is a charming young adult story that takes place in the shared-universe setting of Cobalt City. Cobalt City, somewhere vaguely on the northeast coast of the US, and previously detained in a number of short story collections, is the thriving home of many superheroes. In this novel, though, some recent events have caused many of the town's resident heroes to flee.

Enter the main character, Jamie Hattori, a half black, half Japanese, teen superhero, who defends her neighborhood from various threats with her father's samurai sword, plus her ability to see and talk with ghosts. This is not an origin story, though; it begins several years after Jamie's power began to manifest, and some indefinite time -- it seems like a few months -- after she took on her superhero guise, Kensei.

Jamie is a wonderfully different hero. In addition to her racial background, she's a nerd (although not a bookworm or computer geek), a lesbian, and a roller derby fan, none of which hits the traditional fantasy mainstream. I imagine that this must be tremendously exciting to read for people who are not straight white men, and who from what I've read don't get a lot of representation in the genre.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that there's more to Kensei and her powers than she realizes at first. And she is somewhat reluctant to embrace what she learns, and has to be figuratively dragged screaming into recognizing, then learning to embrace, her additional abilities. I found it a little disappointing that Jamie doesn't discover her other powers on her own, but needs to have them explained, and trained, by another hero. But that's a pretty minor quibble.

As the finale of the book approaches, it becomes very clear that there's a lot more going on than was initially apparent, and that there is a bigger picture yet unseen. Some questions are raised by the last couple chapters that do not get answered, so I'm really expecting that a sequel will appear one of these days; I'd love to read it, and learn more about all these characters and what the hell is going on in the larger world.

There are a few infelicitous phrases scattered around, which read awkwardly enough that they pulled me out of the story to wonder how the author could have said them better. But otherwise, this is a solid first novel, and I hope only the first of many.
… (plus d'informations)

Disclaimer: I am friends with the editors as well as some of the authors, and also backed the book's Kickstarter.

This is a really solid collection of Lovecraftian or Lovecraft-inspired stories, assembled by the editors of the Mad Scientist Journal e-zine. For me it gets off to bit of a rocky start, with a couple tales that suffer from a flaw common to a lot of so-so horror fiction; describing the flaw would constitute spoilers, so I'll refrain. Then again, it could be just me that is bothered by this particular narrative choice.

However, many of the later stories are excellent. The ones that stick out in my memory include "The Laughing Book" by Cliff Winnig, "In Defense of Professor Falcrovet" by Darin M. Bush, and "The Ghost Circus" by Phillip C. Gonzales. And the final tale in the collection, "Come Down, Ma Evenin' Star" by Sanford Allen, is a masterwork! Seamlessly blending far-future science fiction with magnificent, eldritch horror, all by itself it is worth the price of admission.

In short, I'm extremely happy that the MSJ editors put together this printed volume, and I'm looking forward to supporting the Kickstarter for their next volume.… (plus d'informations)

The editors of this collection are friends of mine, and I was a Kickstarter backer of this book as well as their previous four collections, so perhaps I'm a bit biased. But I have to say I thought this is their strongest collection yet. The previous anthologies were themed by situation (apocalypse, haunted/weird locations, "monsters" in society, ...), but since this collection's theme is women leaders, there is a breadth of style and genre I haven't seen in these before, and it's delightful. All the stories keep to the first-person format of "Mad Scientist Journal", the quarterly zine the editors put out, but they range from mythological Ethiopia to Napoleonic France to revolutionary Mexico, and from fantasy to cyberpunk dystopia to generation ship. It made for a very fun read, which is why I'm excited to see that the editors have launched the kickstarter for their next anthology, I Didn't Break the Lamp. I'm looking forward to that one already.… (plus d'informations)