By now, I just accept the fact that Adrian Tchaikovsky can write about anything in SFF and do it brilliantly. Children of Memory, which follows the award-winning Children of Time and Children of Ruin, continues this great saga of human evolution and species uplift in multiple star systems. There is a moving and exciting story […]
Archives for 2022
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds is a key book of short stories for understanding many aspects of the Revelation Space universe. The novels and stories within that universe follow human settlement of many star systems over several centuries. In the course of this future history, humans adapt in many ways, especially through the use of […]
Monkey Around by Jadie Jang
Here’s another great novel from 2021 I’m just catching up with. Claire Light, writing as Jadie Jang, has re-envisioned the Monkey King from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, as Maya MacQueen, a shape-shifter twenty-something woman of the San Francisco Bay Area during the Occupy movement of 2011. Maya, while assuming human form as […]
One Day All This Will Be Yours by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Welcome to the end of time, says the amusingly ruthless narrator of One Day All This Will Be Yours, the brilliant 2021 novella by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Of course, if you were hearing this greeting in person, you wouldn’t have long to live because this sole inhabitant of the end of days and choke-point for time […]
Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka
Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka is a psychological mystery-thriller that uses a fascinating approach to multiple universes that can be crossed through the impact of art. At the opening of the story, we learn that Ula Frost, world-renowned artist whose work is compared to that of Frida Kalo and Georgia O’Keefe, is missing. At […]
The Employees by Olga Ravn, Translated by Martin Aitken
The Employees by Olga Ravn, in a beautiful translation from the Danish by Martin Aitken, requires a suspension of expectations about science fiction but nevertheless delivers a devastating impact. As a collection of statements by the crew members of a spaceship, both human and humanoid, it has little narrative drive at first, though it does […]
