With a cascade of luminous and psychologically intricate prose, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace picks up shortly after the conclusion of A Memory Called Empire. It’s another brilliant book that I find even richer than the first volume of this series on the Teixcalaan Empire and its remote satellite, Lsel Station. The two novels […]
Archives for 2021
Lagoonfire and The Inconvenient God by Francesca Forrest
Here are the first two completely captivating Tales of the Polity: the novelette The Inconvenient God and the short novel Lagoonfire. Their author, Francesca Forrest, suggests there will be more stories in her interview with the Little Red Reviewer. And I hope to see them soon. Forrest has a uniquely fascinating imagination that blends charming […]
Linda Nagata’s Pacific Storm: A Review
I put off reading Linda Nagata’s Pacific Storm for a while because I was so enamored of her far future epics that I wondered about a nearish-future thriller set in Hawai’i awaiting the arrival of a powerful hurricane. Well, once I got into the story, I couldn’t let go. Pacific Storm has that feel-it-in-yours-bones tension […]
A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark
P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn returns to the alternate Cairo of 1912 featured in A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. This time Clark has given us a full-length novel that offers much deeper insight into the richness of this remarkable world. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the […]
New Atlantis by Lavie Tidhar: Dystopian Journey to Hope
New Atlantis is a beautiful novella by Lavie Tidhar that makes visual poetry out of the detritus of our own lost civilization in a future earth reshaped by vast climatic changes and disasters. It is the story of a journey by a young Mai, as told to us by her aged self. Like Tidhar’s Central […]
Parallel Worlds of Blackthorn Winter by Liz Williams
In Liz Williams’ wonderful fantasy, Blackthorn Winter, sequel to Comet Weather, a lot can happen in the blink of an eye. A winter landscape can turn to summer, an ancient ruin can become a mansion full of dinner party guests, an empty auditorium a maze with a charging minotaur. For the four Fallow sisters, as […]
