Marlon James’ Moon Witch Spider King (second book of the Dark Star trilogy) impressed me at first as everything I had missed in the first novel, Black Leopard Red Wolf. There was a story of emotional depth I could link into and a brilliant character I could care about, as opposed to the strangely alienating […]
Archives for 2022
Amazing Cities in SFF – 3
To round out for now this series on cities in SFF, I’m revisiting a few novels that capture the importance of how people experience urban environments and how the massive structures affect their language and thought. A city, after all, is not just buildings and a way of physically organizing dense populations, but also a […]
Five Favorite Fantasy Novels Read This Past Year: Wyrd & Wonder
It’s Wyrd & Wonder time again and, though I’ll have other kinds of posts this month as well, I thought I’d start with this Fantastic Five meme. I’ve read a lot more than five great fantasies since last May, but here are the most recent ones (actually six) that haven’t yet been in any other […]
Eyes of the Void by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I love a space adventure that lures me on with the promise of revealing the fundamental nature of a fictional universe, preferably through a dazzling experience that only the hero has earned the right to have. Well, no one can really explain the nature of everything, at least not very clearly, so far, but Adrian […]
Belladonna Nights and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds
Belladonna Nights and Other Stories is a great way to get into Alastair Reynolds’ short fiction. Ever since reading the beautiful “Nightingale” in Galactic North, set in the Revelation Space universe, I’ve been alert to a theme of personal loss and grief caused by separation from a loved one or because of the imminence of […]
Fevered Star and Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Fevered Star is the second book in Rebecca Roanhorse’s brilliantly imagined series Between Earth and Sky. Picking up directly after the conclusion of Black Sun, Fevered Star pushes its central characters in new directions while building on their gods-driven purposes played out in a richly imagined setting that draws together elements of many pre-Columbian American […]
