Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

This is the forum for featured reviews. Check out the description on the blog on the main page and come back here to chat about the content of the reviews if you wish. 

Rhonda

I think this is a good idea, but ultimately, comments on the reviews themselves would be the way to go to stimulate more instant discussion. Forum talk is a bit quiet everywhere it seems, I have the feeling most discussion has shifted from forums to comments on blogs, and behind the walls of FB, Twitter and the likes.

On a side note, why don't all blog posts get a short mention on the main page, only some? I was under the impression the blog wasn't updated a lot because of that.

I agree with comments on the reviews would be best.  It's on our list but we have a number of hurdles to get over first as well as a long list of other upgrades.  Basically the plan is to make every review it's own forum thread but accessible from the novel page and integrated into the blog so we can feature the best ones on the blog.  Rhonda will be able to "flip a switch" to have it display on the blog with the comments already started etc.

The blog list on the home page, footer and sidebar is broken.  My company (where we host WWEnd) made some security changes to our servers that broke it.  We're looking for a solution/replacement but as with everything on WWEnd we just don't have the kind of time we need to address everything we need/want to do.  Not a great situation but we'll get it fixed.... eventually.

There has been so much fuss made, everywhere, of the fact that the book uses almost exclusively female pronouns -- to the extent that a lot of people think that this is what the Ancillary books are all about. Someone elsewhere captured this perfectly:

This is what I told someone else:

One of my reasons for really loving the Ancillary books is the resonance it strikes with me. Breq supposedly has no personality, no feelings -- no identity. She is just muddling through the best she can, in a world that seems mostly alien, with people all around her she is trying to understand, based on verbal, non-verbal, and physical clues that she is struggling to parse.

And yet what the reader gradually comes to realize is that this "unfeeling", "soulless" character is in fact far more human than all the real humans around her; that she is setting a shining standard for them in terms of caring and compassion which most of them -- and indeed she herself -- do not even recognize.

As someone who was severely bullied as a child, who struggled mightily to parse the world and all the people who seemed to be so different from me (and who, to some extent, still struggles with that), these books really have a resonance for me.

Furthermore, they include some fantastic worldbuilding, some excellent character development, some enticing mystery subplots, and a bit of space opera (my favorite). To me, they include all the things that I like most in my SFF. 

This why I want so much for people to be able to get past all the hype about the female-pronouns and read the books in the hope that they might feel that resonance, too.