Others: Mixed The Baroque Cycle, Book 1 of 8 In which Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and courageous Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe -- in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight. Also contained in Quicksilver: Volume One of The Baroque Cycle
Genres: fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction
Lists: …
Thomas Burnett Swann
1976 · 160 pages · 3 reviews
Others: NegativeWill-o-the-wisp - the light that danced across the Devon Moors - enticing the good puritan people to death and devilment...For up on the tors dwelt the infamous Gubbings who crucified their victims, murdered and bewitched... Were they really warlocks, or were they creatures of fantasy from another time, another planet? Robert Herrick, poet, vicar and pagan, the golden giant with a lusty heart, dared to brave the moors and challenge the ancient myth... Cover artist: Chris Achilleos
What made the match, strongest first
Norman Spinrad
1986 · 256 pages · 2 reviews
Others: PositiveGenetic warfare and the invasion of Europe by mutants from outer space are the tenets of this science fiction novel written as if the author had been Adolf Hitler
What made the match, strongest first
Marlon James
2019 · 640 pages · 1 review
Others: PositiveTracker is known far and wide for his skills as a hunter: "He has a nose," people say. Engaged to track down a mysterious boy who disappeared three years earlier, Tracker breaks his own rule of always working alone when he finds himself part of a group that comes together to search for the boy. The band is a hodgepodge, full of unusual characters with secrets of their own, including a shape-shifting man-animal known as Leopard. As Tracker follows the boy's scent--from one ancient city to another; into dense forests and across deep rivers--he and the band are set upon by creatures intent on destroying them. As he struggles to survive, Tracker starts to wonder: Who, really, is this boy? Why has he been missing for so long? Why do so many people want to keep Tracker from finding him? And perhaps the most important questions of all: Who is telling the truth, and who is lying?
What made the match, strongest first
David Mitchell
2004 · 528 pages · 8 reviews
Others: Leaning positiveFrom David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; an ambitious journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing the mendicant and violent family of his star author; a genetically modified “dinery server” on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation -- the narrators of Cloud Atlas hear each other’s echoes down the corridor of history, and their destinies are changed in ways great and small. In his captivating third novel, David Mitchell erases the boundaries of language, genre and time to offer a meditation on humanity’ s dangerous will to power, and where it may lead us
What made the match, strongest first
Ryan Collett
2026 · 1 review
Others: MixedNewly laid off George’s internet bill is in his ex-boyfriend’s name. He’s got a spider-infested apartment, and two of the six dogs he’s walking in London have just escaped. It’s pure undiluted stress that sends him into a spiral, all the way to the year 1300. When he comes to, George recognizes the same rolling hills of Greenwich Park. But the luxuries and phone service of modernity are nowhere. In their place are locals with a bizarre, slanted speech in awe of his foreign clothes, who swiftly toss him in a dungeon. Despite the barbarity of a medieval world, a servant named Simon helps George acclimate to a simpler, easier existence—until a summons from the King threatens to send his life up in flames. George Falls Through Time isas much an inward journey as an outward one: an immersive exploration of identity and dislocation that pits present-day sensibilities against a raw and alien backdrop, a strangely perfect canvas for the absurd anxieties of our modern lives. It's a profound meditation on the nature of desire perfect for fans of Madeline Miller and The Ministry of Time.
What made the match, strongest first
Natasha Pulley
2021 · 416 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveA time twisting alternative history that asks whether it's worth changing the past to save the future, even if it costs you everyone you've ever loved. Joe Tournier has a bad case of amnesia. His first memory is of stepping off a train in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. The only clue Joe has about his identity is a century-old postcard of a Scottish lighthouse that arrives in London the same month he does. Written in illegal English—instead of French—the postcard is signed only with the letter “M,” but Joe is certain whoever wrote it knows him far better than he currently knows himself, and he's determined to find the writer. The search for M, though, will drive Joe from French-ruled London to rebel-owned Scotland and finally onto the battle ships of a lost empire's Royal Navy. In the process, Joe will remake history, and himself.
What made the match, strongest first
Mixedcompared to some of his other works this one did lose me in places where the author went on some tangents not necessarily the tangents about science fiction but the story kind of meanders with the characters wandering around doing some various things that I didn't find to be as interesting as I would like
