Read and Recommended…

Kameron Hurley.

Not that I haven’t read some other stuff too, recently (on which, more as soon as I’m done with Dark Defiles and can grab a decent amount of time to write it down.  Promise.).  But.  Kameron Hurley.

There’s been a lot of talk about some of the first novel shortcomings of God’s War, and some of it perfectly well-founded, but it’s all utterly beside the point.  Kameron Hurley’s writing is the most exciting thing I’ve seen on the genre page since I picked up Peter Watts’ Blindsight five years ago.  It has some of the same characteristics as Watts’ work, too – an eye for the casual brutality of the universe we inhabit, an unrelenting critique of the stupidity and cruelty so common in human behaviour and, twined in with all this, a thin, tightly wound thread of empathy and yearning after something better, something humane, in the face of all that horror.

What Hurley’s writing has (and it’s something not one in a dozen genre practitioners seems able to generate) is passion.

It doesn’t hurt that there’s also a rare freshness to the material, and a heady dash of high octane noir worked into the mix.

I am, as of now, officially an addict.