Science Fiction and Fantasy

The following review contains spoilers.

You know, the concept of teleporting Japanese vampires (or at least Japanese vampires who can turn into mist and fly almost as quickly as if they were transforming) isn't entirely unsalvagable. At the very least, Buffy Season 8, volume 3, Wolves at the Gate, gets some good action scenes out of it. Giant Dawn fighting a giant robot of herself who mocks her tendency to cry and get kidnapped makes a great action scene that's also good for laughs.

The following review contains spoilers.

The Long Way Home, the first volume of Buffy Season 8, is a wonderful opening for the series comic book continuation. Ultimately, Season 8 on a whole will prove to be a train wreck, but the first volume is still pretty good to read.

The following review contains spoilers.

X-Men: Schism Issue 1 is the opener for one of Marvel’s most anticipated comics of the summer. The mini-series has been marketed as a showdown between Cyclops and Wolverine when the X-Men break apart into two different factions. As a premise, it’s a good one. It’s fun trying to guess which X-Men will be on which side, and Cyclops and Wolverine have a history of personal and philosophical differences as well as one of the most famous friendships/rivalries in the franchise.

In the wake of Imriel’s uneven trilogy and Moirin’s terrible one, it’s good to remember that the Kushiel’s Legacy series was a wonderful series for the first three books.

Kushiel’s Dart, the book that started it all, introduced the world to Phedre no Delaunay, an anguisette blessed and cursed to feel pleasure when she feels pain. It sounds like an utterly contrived formula for a dumb porn series, but author Jacqueline Carey writes Phedre with class and intelligence.