I suppose one little month can’t get much worse than this past November. Following soon after the depressing election came a bureaucratic nightmare threatening health insurance, a case of shingles and, by far the worst of all, the death of a close relative after a long illness. But the one book that brought back a […]
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafur #SciFiMonth
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafur adds to the great Africanfuturist epic Okorafur began in Who Fears Death (and which she continues with her new novella, She Who Knows). This is a prequel that describes the destruction that led to the world of the first novel, with its sharp division between light and dark […]
Future’s Edge by Gareth L. Powell, A Review for #SciFiMonth
OK, I’m glad to be part of SciFi Month again, and I will get to my review of Gareth L. Powell’s Future’s Edge, but I have to say how hard it is to write anything in the wake of the US election. I guess you have to be a US citizen of strong liberal values […]
Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
Who Fears Death (2010) by Nnedi Okorafor puzzled me at first. The central character, Onyesonwu, (whose name means “who fears death”) is an outcast figure, a child of rape, who is avoided by most people and as a result angry most of the time. But the story reveals her life on two levels, the physical […]
Embassytown by China Miéville
When I first read China Miéville’s Embassytown, which I now regard as a nearly perfect novel, I didn’t get it. The story seemed to move quite nicely to an anticlimax, I thought, where a potential massacre turns on a dime because of language. My fault – I was expecting the normal sort of adventure and […]
The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville
I’m a fan of China Miéville‘s fiction, but when I first started The Last Days of New Paris, I was a little baffled. There was a woman riding a velocipede/centaur heading straight into a line of mannequins in a can-can row behind which Nazis were shooting at her, all this in 1950. The prose was […]
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
So, another creeping infirmity makes it harder for me to focus for long on the printed (or ebook) page, and I have finally started listening to audio books. I started with two novels that, at first glance, could not be more dissimilar: Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and China Miéville’s The Last […]
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
China Miéville last published fiction in 2016, including his fabular novella this census taker, so his collaboration with Keanu Reeves shot to the top of my list, despite my reservations about the source material. The Book of Elsewhere builds on Reeves’ (et al) 12 issue series of the graphic novel, BRZRKR, about an 80,000 year-old […]
