Picking out a message among innumerable signals or “voices” is the work of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and it’s the theme of James Gunn’s The Listeners. This is a first contact story from 1972 that Carl Sagan credited as one of the most influential in helping to launch SETI on an international scale. […]
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso brilliantly blends the story of a young man’s obsessive love for a transhuman being with a vivid depiction of a consumerist society strangling on its own trash. Skillfully translated by Sally McCorry, the novel poses powerful questions about what it means to be human. We see this world through the eyes […]
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, it takes a neighborhood of strange characters, rather than an over-reaching scientist as with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to create a monster. And it takes a good story, whether or not it is true, just so long as it is believed. There are many stories and levels of truth in […]
The Contact Paradox – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
Keith Cooper’s The Contact Paradox is a brilliant probing of the motives and technologies behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). If you’re like me, you might know that SETI has been going on for sixty years and that no signals have turned up pointing to an advanced civilization. And not much more. You probably […]
Review: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi
Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi may be a compact novella but its powerful prose tears through the mind and heart like a sustained trumpet call of pain, anger and a kind of hope. The story can be called a fantasy, with siblings Kev and Ella, especially Ella, endowed with psychic powers that can manifest in […]
Vintage Science Fiction Month – Destination: Void by Frank Herbert
January is Vintage Sci-Fi Month, but I hate to think of vintage sci-fi as confined to only one part of the year. So I’ll be making reviews of vintage science fiction, like Destination: Void and earlier classics, a regular feature of this blog. Follow Vintage Sci-Fi Month on Twitter and get in on the fun, too! As I […]
Science Books for Science Fiction Readers
Science fiction has offered inspiration for many a scientific career, but the opposite is also true. Cutting edge science stimulates good fiction as well. Here are four science books for science fiction readers that provide the practical basis for visions of the near and far future. Each of them summarizes knowledge needed to think about […]
Queen of the Conquered: The Inner Violence of Power
Kacen Callender’s Queen of the Conquered, the first book in the Islands of Blood and Storm series, is a searching story of slavery, oppression and the inner violence of power. Set in a Caribbean island chain that had been colonized hundreds of years earlier by a light skinned people known as the Fjern, the novel […]
