Fantasy & Sci-Fi Book Reviews & Community
We close out the sixth annual Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog-Off with four semifinalists, the highest rated books in our batch. We will share the scores when we name the finalist on…
Now is the winter of our discontent… All right, it’s not winter, and whether contented or not with today’s outcome, the nine authors still in the Fantasy-Faction batch can stop…
The last month of Phase I of the SPFBO is always a nail-biter for authors who remain in the competition, and it is with great sympathy that we say goodbye…
The third group to be eliminated in this year’s SPFBO includes some really creative and ambitious explorations of intriguing themes, from gender roles to capitalism, to the nature of power…
Each SPFBO, Mark Lawrence makes a Wordle of the titles entered that year. The biggest words represent those used most often, and Fantasy-Faction got our share of the books with…
* Disclaimer * As my friend and colleague GR Matthews has written in these introductions many times, reading is a subjective exercise. Some readers will see classical character and narrative…
“I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.” That is the punchline of a Monty Python sketch in which the Pope and Michelangelo argue over…
Fantasy-Faction has been part of the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO)—a fantasy fiction competition sponsored by Mark Lawrence—from the beginning, and as the sixth round of the competition kicks off, we’re…
The 5th Annual Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off (SPFBO5) closed with a bang this year. The winner, M. L. Wang’s Sword of Kaigen, tied for the highest ever score and was the…
This book slayed me, in a good way. First, the writing was beautiful and subtle, the sort of prose that sinks into your bones without being flashy or purple. I…
Two reviews… on the same day? Yes indeed. These are the final two reviews for this year’s SPFBO. The fifth—that’s five years of SPFBO goodness and some truly awesome books.…
Tai Kulga lost the rebellion and his best friend on the same day, stripping him of his will to live even as a strange power flooded his bones. When the…
A. M. Justice
Geoff Matthews