Kage BakerRezensionen

Josep e Lewis sotto attacco

mendoza inghilterra 1500

Mendoza e Alec
2300

Mendoza e Joseph
villaggio indiano
america 1700

Not what I was expecting. Very slow build up followed by lots of action at the very end.½

I'm not sure how to describe this book. I enjoyed it a lot. I purchased it new not long after it was published and shortly before the author's untimely death. I didn't realize it was a children's book because the author had been writing fantasy and science fiction for adults. I set is aside not intending to wait 14 years before reading it!

I'd guess this is written with a ten year old audience in mind, but I certainly enjoyed it as an aging adult and think it is one of the sweetest children's books I have read in a very long while. An adventure story with a treasure hunt, and very memorable characters. It has many pen and ink drawings which took me a while to appreciate. Nice short chapters that let me read this easily at my leisure. Recommended

This is a weird one. The general format is chapter-long episodes of "be careful what you wish for... you'll get it," but instead of gradually going to hell, things actually get better as plot bumps along. Increasingly complicated, but better.

Easily the best part of this book is the setting. The entertainingly and lovingly dysfunctional Martian colony manages to toe a narrow line between the hackneyed utopian-or-dystopian space colonies of other sci-fi.

The elements of magical realism kicking in at the end didn't come out of nowhere, but they were unexpected and didn't do it for me. I think I'd have to go back and reread the whole book through that filter for it to work.

This was one of the best books I read in 2010. I think Baker did a marvelous job of creating plausible details of what colonizing Mars would be like, tackling the economics behind such an endeavor (at least better than anyone else I've read), and sketching out likable and believable characters. If I ever re-read this (and I think it is likely I will do so), I will revise my rating to 5 stars.
Update (3/29/2013) - So, I re-read it and gladly give it five stars. It was every bit as enjoyable the second time around as it was the first. But my enjoyment was tempered by the knowledge of Baker's death, and regretting that there will never be a sequel.

A secret cabal of high-tech cyborgs with instructions from the future, operating throughout all of human history: beat that as a science fiction premise.

I did feel the plot, engaging and moving as it was, had enough material for a short story, not a novel. But it's a debut, and I will definitely pick up more volumes in this series.

Recommended to fans of Connie Willis!

Funny and elegiac—an engaging combination. Kage Baker is still growing on me as an author, but she sure is fun to read.

Baker really thrives in shorter pieces: she's vastly less likely to get cutesy with her material. At its best this series is very, very good. Exemplary work. At its worst its still pretty good.

Quick and entertaining read. A little heavy on the western as sci-fi theme at times, but at least it was up front about it.

This one is my favorite of The Company series.

Baker, Kage. The House of the Stag. Tor, 2008. Lord Ermenwyr 2.
If you like sword-and-sandal fantasy that effortlessly blends the narrative patterns of pagan and Christian myths, you can’t do better than Kage Baker’s The House of the Stag. It tells the story of Gard, an orphaned half-demon, who escapes from slavery to marry a saint. I know. Spoilers. But they won’t spoil the fun because Baker has a droll sense of humor that emerges from the romance and adventure when you least expect it. Four stars.

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It's a flawed story--see the other LT reviews--but this is one of my favorite books. You just cannot miss Kage Baker's love of Los Angeles and LA's history as she tells this rather disorderly tale; it almost makes me wish I knew the places the's describing.

No bully is a match for a dreadful ghost, nor for two determined ladies with a cannon.

A collection of reviews from Tor.com, covering sf movies from the silent era. Amusingly written, covers a time ignored by most except devoted cinephiles. She included info on where to find them (admittedly quite some time ago), which is good. Some of them sound fairly entertaining.

I ought to be writing a positive review of 'Sky Coyote'. It's original, surprising and clever. The ideas are huge and complex. There's a vein of quiet humour through the whole thing and, underneath that a growing sense of alienation from The Company. The characters and the overall story arc move forward and we get a richly imagined historical setting.

Sounds like great Science Fiction doesn't it? And, in its way, it is great Science Fiction. It just isn't great Science Fiction that I could enjoy.

I struggled to become engaged with the story or the people in it. I think that was mostly because Facilitator Jackson tells the story in a sort of tongue-in-cheek folk myth mode. I can see that this is partly because it matches the fake Sky Coyote persona that he has taken on and partly because it echoes his own growing alienation from his work and with the people driving The Company. Whatever the reason, the effect it had on me was to keep me at an emotional distance from the story. I stayed interested in the growing doubts about The Company but in a 'hurry up and get on with it' kind of way. I found some of the 'this is how I tricked an entire tribe into believing I was their God and convinced them to walk away from everything they knew and become Company assets' a little tedious. It was clever but bloodless.

At the end of the book, I found myself admiring Kage Baker's vision and imagination but not feeling a strong urge to continue with the series, especially as the next book is set in Hollywood and so is almost bound to be another exercise in gaslighting.½