Review: Smash or Pass by Birdie Schae

A square crop of the front cover of Smash or Pass by Birdie Schae.
I really love the cover art for Smash or Pass. Shoutout to Rebecca Mock who did the art.

The sight of her in the golden morning sun is something straight out of a painting. I’m no artist, but even I feel the urge to capture this moment, if only to bottle up the calming warmth that fills my belly.

Chapter 7: Never Wake A Girl Up At An Ungodly Hour
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Review: The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed

A square crop of the front cover of The Republic of Memory by Mahmud El Sayed.
This particular front cover design for The Republic of Memory is pretty good. Certainly much better than the one the UK edition (published by Orion/Gollancz) got.

Nupol wasn’t a language, not really. It was an argot. A cant. A cryptolect. Although it was loosely based on Inglez, the one language that most people in most berths were familiar with, its vocabulary come from everywhere. Dead Earth languages and multilingual puns. Backslang and gender reversal. Vera, after a certain point you stopped learning it and started cooking it up. It wasn’t language, it was music. Improvisation. The prattle of the disenfranchised, the palaver of the dispossessed, the lingua of the underground. And, like all underground languages, it was made to be disguised.

Chapter Two: Damietta, 23 of 25
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Review: There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm

The audiobook version of the front cover of There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm.
This is the front cover design for the traditionally published version of There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. I like this design more than the original self-published edition cover. Jacket design by Michael Morris.

“There are Unknowns with antimemetic properties,” Quinn goes on. “There are ideas that cannot be spread. There are entities and phenomena that harvest and consume information, particularly information about themselves.

You take a Polaroid photo of one, it’ll never develop. You write a description down with a pen on paper and hand it to someone, but what you’ve written turns out to be hieroglyphs, and nobody can understand them, not even you. You can look directly at one and it won’t even be invisible, but you’ll still perceive nothing there. Dreams you can’t hold on to and secrets you can never share, and lies, and living conspiracies. It’s a conceptual ecosystem, of ideas consuming other ideas and…sometimes…segments of reality. Sometimes, people.”

page 14, Marie Quinn
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Review: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

A square crop of the front cover of The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
I appreciate the considered simplicity of the front cover design for The Correspondent. Jacket design is by Anna Kochman and the illustration is by Gemma Koomen.

And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing to someone?

page 46, Sybil
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