Matthew Hunter

There’s not a lot that can be said about this movie. It’s probably the best of the prequels, but that’s not saying much. In fact, the best thing that can be said about this movie is that it doesn’t suck. I enjoyed most of it, although some moments were severely wince-inducing. The lightsaber battles were a minor disappointment, with camera tricks and plot events being used to “explain” the outcome rather than actual skill, but they weren’t awful.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was almost universally panned by fans of the original trilogy, and deservedly so. Hopes, and expectations, were high following the smashing success of the earlier films and the intervening two-decade improvement in technology. What the fans received was not what they had desired: a children’s movie that replaced many of the most popular elements with a cute kid and a racist portrayal of a repulsive amphibian.

In my earlier review of Coyote, I described it as a fairly normal interstellar colonization story with a hint of politics in the background. Coyote Rising, the sequel, makes those politics somewhat more explicit, but they are still far short of actually driving the story in a manner similar to, for example, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That’s not a good thing when the point of the story is supposed to be the politics.

Consequences is a Retrieval Artist novel. The series (with two previous books) is set in a universe where humanity interacts on a regular basis with many alien cultures of varying degrees of strangeness. Many of these alien cultures have strange laws or taboos that humans can be subject to horrible penalties for violating – whether they know that they are violating the alien’s laws or not. This conflict of interest has spawned a small, but significant, industry: making people “disappear” for the purposes of evading the consequences of breaking an unjust (by human standards) alien law.

Cassandra Kresnov, the lovable combat android with an electronic copy of a human soul, is back. But her old masters, the League governments, want her dead, and they may just have left an off-switch hidden in some part of her electronic brain. When your own brain can be hacked over a wireless network, being almost as strong as Superman won’t help much. To thwart them, Cassandra will have to go into hiding while she searches for the enemies trying to turn her off permanently.

Ursula K Leguin’s EarthSea trilogy broke new ground in the fantasy genre, and has truly earned a place of honor. Unfortunately, as with many television adaptions, the Sci-Fi Channel’s attempt to bring that story to the television screen preserved almost nothing of that. Although the miniseries is less bitter and painful than Tehanu, it lacks the qualities that made the original trilogy such a wonderful creation. It also lacks the special effects to effectively carry out the magic that is such a vital component of EarthSea.

Incubus Dreams is the latest Anita Blake book, and weighs in at a surprising 600+ pages; most of the prior books in the series have been 300-400 pages. The Anita Blake series has been having difficulty lately, with many of the fans hanging on desperately to the hope that the current trends – that is, towards more sex and less of everything else – will reverse themselves. Unfortunately for those with such hopes, the cover does little to suggest improvement; a woman in lingerie, blindfolded and bound to a chair.

In The Chronicles of Covenant the Unbeliever Donaldson wove a compelling tale of a fantasy world threatened by a malevolent being known as Lord Foul, and capable of defending itself ultimately through the intervention of one man – a man outcast from human society, a man whose survival demands that he abandon hope and forsake love, a man who does not even believe that the Land is real. In The Second Chronicles of Covenant the Unbeliever, he returned to the Land when it is threatened once more.

The Dark Tower is the final volume of Stephen King’s Dark Tower Cycle, a work that has taken over 20 years to complete. For fans of the series, this concluding volume comes with great relief as well as great joy; at times it seemed impossible to consider that the series could ever be finished. It must have seemed the same to King as well, for it was clearly his magnum opus, incorporating and unifying so many of his other words that told their own pieces of the tale.

Told in a particularly dry and witty voice, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel chronicles a brief resurgence in English magic, thanks to the queer friendship and rivalry between the two most prominent English magicians of the Napoleonic Era. Fiction is woven so well into the rich tapestry of legend, myth, and poetry that it is impossible to discern where one leaves off and the next begins. Exquisitely footnoted with tidbits of tangential information, this is a fantasy novel for historians, and a history book for fantasists.