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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5418400" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 217: May 1995part 5/8The role of books: The armless maiden, edited by Terri Windling is a collection of reframed fairy stories focussing on child abuse, edited by someone who suffered from it herself. This means it sometimes makes uncomfortable reading, and the preachiness may get in the way of the stories, but that doesn't mean that the craftsmanship is bad. Quite the opposite, if anything. It's just a question of if you can find something like this enjoyable or cathartic reading. Cats paw by L. A. Taylor is a victorian flavoured mystery, low key but with good character development and excellent artwork. It's old fashioned air contrasts quite a bit with more irreverent modern attitudes of the other books being reviewed, and as is often the case, this contrast turns out to be a positive overall. The book of earth by Marjorie R. Kellog is the start of an elemental themed quartet of books. That's already pretty overdone as an idea, and that the story is pretty standard makes this feel like just another cliche ridden fantasy book. Do we want to stick around and see if future books improve? Doc Sidhe by Aaron Allston is unsurprisingly a fantastical twist on Doc Savage. It hits pretty much the notes you'd expect, taking a guy from modern day earth as the viewpoint character and throwing him into this pulp fae realm with the Doc & his other companions. The sexism & racism of the originals is toned down, of course, and it maybe has too many supporting characters that don't get properly developed. John nevertheless finds it highly enjoyable. Pulp isn't dead, it's just a little diluted. Voices by John Vornholt is a Babylon 5 novel. It focusses on just a few of the show's cast, and takes them places the show probably couldn't due to budget constraints, while keeping them consistent with established characters. That already puts it up on far too many books from tv series. That is also tells a pretty decent story and fills in a bit more of the setting makes it a quite good result for the series. Let's hope the editorial control stays good on this line. No earthly sunne by Margaret Ball is another fae themed book, combining music based magic, computer programming and time manipulation in it's plot threads. All of these elements are handled quite convincingly, showing the author did her research, and the story is pretty well done as well and full of variety in moods. No objections there.</blockquote>

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