Wole Talabi, in his brilliant story collection Convergence Problems, offers an intriguing idea about how stories can be told. It contrasts sharply with the method made famous by James Joyce in Dubliners where characters reach a climactic moment of epiphany in which they grasp some great truth about themselves. That approach has been done to […]
True Names by Vernor Vinge
The passing of Vernor Vinge, author of the great A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, led me to go back to one of his earliest ground-breaking works, the novella True Names, first published in 1981. It’s regarded as the inspiration and first detailed working out of what William Gibson would […]
Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon
(Revised 3/31/2024) It’s a month since I came down with covid, and I’m still dealing with weird aftereffects. But an excellent way to get my brain going again came to hand in the form of The Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon. A lot of collections refer to their stories as “unforgettable” but this set of […]
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse by S.B. Divya
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and other Possible Situations by S.B. Divya, author of Machinehood and Meru, is a deeply interesting collection of fourteen stories, many quite short, all of them posing life-changing choices for each central character. The prose is supple, ranging from lushly sensuous description to stripped down action. The author perfectly matches […]
Robotic Ambitions Kickstarter from Apex
Apex Book Company will begin a Kickstarter campaign on February 21st to raise funds for a new anthology, Robotic Ambitions. I don’t usually join in campaigns like this, but Apex is an important institution in the SFF world. I’d like to help make this book possible — I have to add that I have no […]
Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
One of the things that makes Ling Ma’s stories in Bliss Montage so extraordinary is her ability to blend keen perceptions of human relationships with fantasy elements that somehow make the fantastic an intimate part of ordinary life. There is the house in “LA” the narrator shares with a hundred ex-boyfriends, the pickup date in […]
