From the moment an enemy fighter squadron breaks out of the sky for a sneak attack on a key industrial park, Kate Elliott’s Unconquerable Sun delivers an intricate yet fast paced adventure like few I’ve ever read. The 20 year-old Princess Sun, heir to Chaonia’s terrifying queen-marshall, Eirene, is put to the test again and […]
King of the Rising by Kacen Callender: A Review
Freedom from slavery has a cost, not just in human lives but in the internal torture of mind and morality brought on by lifetimes spent in forced repudiation of one’s language, culture, religion and self-esteem. For an ex-slave to have a position of privilege in the midst of this history of oppression is all the […]
Alien Cells in Mind: Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Tade Thompson, a psychiatrist who is also a prolific writer, has created an original interpretation of a classic science fiction theme in his Rosewater, the opening novel in the Wormwood trilogy – that of first contact on earth as alien cells enter human minds across the world. An alien mass hits the earth in Hyde […]
A Diné Antihero in the Sixth World Series by Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse’s two book series, The Sixth World, is at once a brilliant evocation of the Diné homeland and a strong character study of a young woman who feels stranded between the worlds of human and immortal. She is an antihero at once reveling in and resisting her supernatural powers. Trail of Lightning and Storm […]
The Dystopian Lawyer Series by Christopher Brown
Christopher Brown’s two-book set (Rule of Capture and Failed State) about his hapless yet strangely effective dystopian lawyer, Donnie Kimoe, may come too close to our dystopian present for comfort, but they also shine with ideas about a better way to envision the future. As he put it in a recent essay in Literary Hub: […]
Becky Chambers’ Space Community as the Good Society
Becky Chambers takes a real chance in Record of a Spaceborn Few. She sets aside conventional adventure plots to create a convincing human society in space that is actually hopeful. Hopeful, but not easy. From the outset of this novel, third in the Wayfarer series, we are reminded of how fragile life can be on […]
