P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn returns to the alternate Cairo of 1912 featured in A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015. This time Clark has given us a full-length novel that offers much deeper insight into the richness of this remarkable world. Special Investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi of the […]
New Atlantis by Lavie Tidhar: Dystopian Journey to Hope
New Atlantis is a beautiful novella by Lavie Tidhar that makes visual poetry out of the detritus of our own lost civilization in a future earth reshaped by vast climatic changes and disasters. It is the story of a journey by a young Mai, as told to us by her aged self. Like Tidhar’s Central […]
The Wall by Gautam Bhatia, Book One of The Chronicles of Sumer
Gautam Bhatia’s The Wall is an intricate and compelling cross between fantasy and fable that strikes at something deep within human nature, a yearning to break through the barriers that hem us in. In the world of The Wall, the barrier is a literal one, vast, black, blocking out every sign of a world beyond. […]
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey – Vintage Science Fiction Month
Every now and then a book surprises me, especially when searching through the often dated fiction for Vintage SciFi Month. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight, first in a mighty line of 23 novels set in the Pern universe, is one of those. It’s a surprise because I’m not a big fan of fantasy, yet I keep finding […]
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 […]
Human Connection in The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
Simon Jimenez‘ The Vanished Birds is an amazing novel that takes you from humble beginnings on an agrarian planet across thousand-year time spans, multiple worlds, journeys through folded space, then by instant travel into mysterious dimensions beyond time and normal reality into the depths of human connection. It offers powerful and lyrical testament to the […]
