The Museum of Magical Miniatures: Gallery One
Richard Marpole
With museums and art galleries across the world closed to the public, now seems like a good time to introduce a little virtual museum created just for Fantasy-Faction. Presenting: The…
China
Never Die by Rob J. Hayes – SPFBO #5 Finals Review
Geoff Matthews
*Disclaimer* Writing and reading are subjective arts. What some folks will absolutely love, others will dislike. It is a bit like Marmite in the UK—normal people dislike it intensely, but…
Asian Fantasy: SPFBO Edition
JC Kang
With Lunar New Year around the corner, I joined a group chat with SFPBO past and present finalists Rob J. Hayes (Never Die, 2019), Virginia McClain (Blade’s Edge, 2019), M.…
An Introduction to Xianxia: LitRPG’s Redheaded Stepsister
The most widely read fantasy story in history is not George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, nor even JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. That honor belongs…
Unsouled by Will Wight
The Monkey King meets Up. For a novel entitled Unsouled, Will Wight’s prototypical story has a lot of soul. I’d picked it up a couple of years ago, but each…
Descendant of the Crane by Joan He
“Tagline Intentionally Left Blank” One of my favorite parts of writing reviews is coming up with a snappy tagline that compares the book in question to iconic stories. The publisher…
Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan
Pippa
Originally written in Chinese and published in 2013, this edition of Waste Tide is translated by Ken Liu and published by Tor Books. It is also Chen Qiufan’s debut book.…
The Red Plains by G. R. Matthews
S. H. Paulus
Spoiler Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for The Red Plains. “Listen, Jiin-Wei, Taiji, I do not ask you what you can do or tell you what you cannot. Do…
Never Die by Rob J. Hayes
“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon meets The Walking Dead.” As an ethnic Chinese martial arts practitioner, I have a love-hate relation with Wuxia. My first introduction to the genre came not…
The Sword of Kaigen by M. L. Wang
The Poppy War’s darkness meets The Last Airbender’s elemental magic. Being a second world conflict between China and Japan, M. L. Wang’s The Sword of Kaigen brought to my mind…
The Blue Mountain by G. R. Matthews
Spoiler Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for The Stone Road and The Blue Mountain. “You were a diplomat, what do you know of war…” I’d like to thank G.…
Masters of Deception by J. C. Kang
Rakib Ahmad Khan
I would like to start with a confession, I haven’t read any of J.C. Kang’s previous novels and know nothing about the world in which this story takes place. I…