01/06/2026 Guest Review from Craig Brownlie!
- Candace Nola
- 22 hours ago
- 5 min read
It’s Been A Year, Part 2
Reviews and thoughts on writing with Craig Brownlie
Running to catch up because it’s been a minute since I’ve done any reviews since 2025 has been a worse year than even 2024, which is saying something on a personal level. But I have kept reading and writing! Wonder of wonders!
Pimp My Airship by Maurice Broaddus
Loyalty of Severus by Len Berry
Science fiction is the literature of ideas. And that there is the paralyzing phrase. I could jab a fountain pen some place uncomfortable rather than hear it again, let alone type it. But here we are. Science fiction long ago moved from pulp to university. The impact on a writer of “the literature of ideas” is that any possible notion may require thinking and typing and re-thinking and typing. And overthinking…
What it means a bit too often is that if there is not a name for what you write and it happens to require more than a brain cell’s worth of electricity to read, then it belongs in the sci-fi/fantasy section. Or we will call it magical realism and slide it over into literature. So, boundaries… structure… ideas… Do they mingle? Of course, but that is so much harder…
Relax, dear reader, I’ll stop ranting because I like ideas, but I also like a good tale. Maurice Broaddus and Len Berry have both facets covered. Broaddus knows steampunk, and Berry knows space opera. And they have good ideas about how and why those stories ought to be told.
Pimp My Airship takes readers into an alternate history for America, one with a steampunk modern era because the technological advances we take for granted never occurred. The country never acknowledged the abilities of the majority of its population and instead languished in Victorian ideas about class and race.
Loyalty of Severus is an alternate history to any number of galactic epics with its populations of characters who experience and conceive of gender and sex in a variety of ways. The story fits well within the science fantasy quest format, while the world-building is intricate enough to fall closer to Frank Herbert than E.E. Smith.
These are not your parents’ pulp, even if they were reading Dick, Heinlein, or Bradbury, let alone Hal Clement. Dangerous Visions absolutely pushed boundaries, and it waved flags to make sure you knew. And it was mostly pulp, erotic pulp, plus ideas. And those works arrived when their ideas about race, sex, culture, etc., had not been explored so densely.
It’s an entirely different challenge to craft work that speaks to the same issues with skill and passion when decades have passed without sufficient progress. Not quite fifteen years ago, popular genre magazines imploded in the face of actual science fiction reality. They tried to walk the line between Harlan Ellison and contemporary taste. And they are no more.
And everything is fine now in the world, and we no longer need ideas in literature because this is paradise.
[Ye olde reviewer raises his eyes from the screen.] Ahh, fuck me in the eye socket.
Layers of commentary abound in both books. Broaddus exposes the inherent idiocy of those who find comfort in a world of steam-powered fun without considering the social engine that drove the Industrial Revolution. Berry insists on serious consideration of the inequities in rip-roaring tales of rockets and swords when the hero in other tales is always a composite stereotype of Fabio looks and Harrison Ford quips.
Both writers fulfill the necessities: dirigibles and robots, powerful artifacts and dangerous planets. Broaddus has explored this universe before in shorter works, while Berry is starting on a journey. I look forward to future contributions from both, especially when a diet of enhanced calories calls so strongly after days of screens filled with brainless drivel and heart-deadening feeds.
Lastly, a quick word in favor of fiction, all of it, because those pages are filled with ideas, however they are packaged and sold. They come in all shapes and sizes: Mary Shelley to Binyavanga Wainaina, hard science to hard-won experience, bodice ripper to ripping yarns. Cracking a book does every reader credit.
Violência by Sultan Z. White
Dystopia out the wazoo. The setting and the action made this a great first novel. I highly recommend getting in on the ground floor of White’s career. The story bobs and weaves just enough to propel us forward in a future where single combat has made a comeback. Samuel Delaney (in a book covered later on in this year-end summary) emphasizes that writing is all about how you tell your story. That innate skill is visible here.
Far Sector by N. K. Jemisin & Jamal Campbell
A beautiful take on Green Lantern straight from the belly of the beast, DC Comics. Without Alan, Hal, John, Guy, or Kyle in sight, Jemisin and Campbell weave an exceptional tale which feels more alien and more prescient than anything produced for the Corps since Tom King’s The Omega Men. Too often, superhero comics masquerade as “adult” by being about libido and ultra-violence while ignoring the only aspects capable of making the genre interesting to an actual adult- thought and morality. If your characters don’t have those on the page, then you don’t merit our attention post-puberty.
Cracking Spines: Three Decades of Horror by Jason Cavallaro
Goddamn it, Cavallaro! My TBR pile is now exponentially higher, and I’m pretty old! I remember The Book of Lists (if you don’t know, well, you now have something to read on the toilet). Let’s be clear- Cavallaro is too good for the smallest room in the house. This style of book succeeds for me on how many points I want to debate with the author. Cavallaro better be in the bar at my next convention.
What’s driving Craig apeshit:
Words that the author doesn’t understand (and their editor doesn’t either)!
I really do get it. Everyone has certain words that they have used incorrectly for decades. You don’t know you’ve been doing it, so they find their way into your writing. Find someone smarter than you and ask if they have any idea what’s going on in your writing. If you are writing above their intelligence, then maybe your expectations for your audience are inapposite or at least misguided.
Sign up for the revolution and watch your back while reading these highly recommended books
Bio: Craig recently edited the anthology Five Raging Hearts: Splatterpunk for the Soul. Look for Craig's recent work in Hotel of Haunts, Demons and Death Drops, Wands: Year of the Tarot, and Unspeakable Horrors 3. He has three books out in his Little Books of Pain series: Hammer, Nail, Foot; Thick As A Brick; and A Book of Practical Monsters. These are in addition to the re-release of his middle-grade novel Comic Book Summer. He also has a surprise zombie novel dropping early in 2026. It’s not actually a surprise to him.
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