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The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

By John Folk-Williams

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

Malka Older, activist, scholar, teacher, international humanitarian worker and author of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses is one of my culture heroes for her ability to combine multiple activities, any one of which would constitute a demanding career for less gifted people. This is the third installment in her Mossa and Pleiti mystery series (the […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: city, language, Malka Older, mystery, relationships, ruined earth, sapphic love, space community

Dissolution by Nicholas Binge

By John Folk-Williams

Dissolution by Nicholas Binge

At its core, Dissolution by Nicholas Binge is a love story about a fiercely determined 83 year-old woman who is trying to recapture the memory and hence the identity of her husband whose selfhood has mostly disappeared. But Dissolution feels nothing like a romance. It is a tense thriller in which the titular phenomenon threatens […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: horror, identity, love, memory, Nicholas Binge, time travel, transhuman

The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

By John Folk-Williams

The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

Much like his earlier novels, The Wall and The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has created a secondary world with action taking place within a single city in his deeply interesting new book, The Sentence. On one level, this is a story about two sections of a divided city, Peruma, one ruled by a Council of corporations […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller, SFF Cities Tagged With: anarchism, capitalism, class structure, Gautam Bhatia, identity, justice, law, revolution

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

By John Folk-Williams

The Book of Elsewhere

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 […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: China Miéville, death, human, immortality, Keanu Reeves, life forms, military, rebirth

Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds: A Prefect Dreyfus Novel

By John Folk-Williams

Machine Vendetta

Alastair Reynolds has produced a fine, fast-paced thriller in Machine Vendetta, the third, and apparently final novel in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies series. The series, set in the Revelation Space universe, specifically the Glitter Band of ten thousand habitats orbiting Yellowstone, began in 2007 with The Prefect, now called Aurora Rising. We had to wait […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller, Space Opera Tagged With: Alastair Reynolds, artificial intelligence, clones, memory, murder mystery, Revelation Space, spaceships

The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar

By John Folk-Williams

The Circumference of the World

The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar is even grander in scope than its title at first suggests. Like many Tidhar novels, it is uniquely brilliant, but this one draws together in its luminous writing many perspectives that take some time to sort out. There is a young woman from Vanuatu, a mathematician in […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: alien life forms, imagination, Lavie Tidhar, religion, seeing and unseeing, universe

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Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

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