FANTASY SHORT STORY COMPENDIUM REVIEW: Arcanium Unbounded - Brandon Sanderson

Release Date: 24/11/16
Publisher: Gollancz

SYNOPSIS:

Welcome to New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller Brandon Sanderson's first collection of short fiction.

These wonderful works, originally published individually, have been collected for the first time and convey the true expanse of the Cosmere. Telling the exciting tales of adventure Sanderson fans have come to expect, Arcanum Unbounded include the Hugo Award-winning novella 'The Emperor's Soul', an excerpt from the graphic novel 'White Sand', and the never-before-published Stormlight Archive novella 'Edgedancer'.

The collection will include nine works in all:
'Edgedancer' (Stormlight Archive)
'The Hope of Elantris' (Elantris)
'The Eleventh Metal' (Mistborn)
'The Emperor's Soul' (Elantris)
'Allomancer Jak and the Pits of Eltania' (excerpt; Mistborn)
'White Sand' (excerpt; Taldain)
'Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell' (Threnody)
'Sixth of Dusk' (First of the Sun)
'Mistborn: Secret History' (Mistborn)

This superb collection also includes essays and illustrations which offer an insight into the numerous worlds in which the stories are set.


REVIEW:

When you hit the new year, after a heavy swath of reading over the holiday period you sometimes want something a little lighter or smaller to dip into whilst you get ready to expound the sheer volume of what the previous year had in store, sort of a book diet if you will. Its at times like this that short stories become a firm favourite for many readers and when an author that many love brings together a collection, its like a special buffet that allows you to pick and choose.

What this title brings together is a whole set of tales from his Cosmere series and its a book that I soon found myself lost within the pages, only to emerge once I'd finished each story. They're well written, help to delightfully expand the Cosmere and all round give the reader that special treat to help ease them back into work with magical outings to help take them away during travel time or work breaks. A magical offering and one that I'm pleased I saved for the new year.

SCIENCE FICTION REVIEW: Tau Zero - Poul Anderson

BOOK BLURB:

The epic voyage of the spacecraft Leonora Christine will take her and her fifty-strong crew to a planet some thirty light-years distant. But, because the ship will accelerate to close to the speed of light, for those on board subjective time will slow and the journey will be of only a few years' duration. Then a buffeting by an interstellar dustcloud changes everything. The ship's deceleration system is damaged irreperably and soon she is gaining velocity. When she attains light-speed, tau zero itself, the disparity between ship-time and external time becomes almost impossibly great. Eons and galaxies hurtle by, and the crew of the Leonora Christine speeds into the unknown.


REVIEW:

It might be short, it might be compact but if there's one thing that you have to say about Anderson is that its always well written. Throwing mankind into what currently is an impossibility it’s the way that he brings the human emotional conflict into his writing that makes this an absolute must read. Its gritty, its science is clearly explained and above all there’s characters that the reader can easily identify with. It’s comes as no surprise why this has been recommended as a modern great and makes this essential reading for all fans of the Sci-Fi genre.