It’s no wonder that, in the vastness of space and amid the destruction of planets and whole populations, finding purpose and redemption for past misdeeds should preoccupy so many rootless characters in Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War series. With his considerable talent Powell combines space opera action with these deeper shades of meaning. It’s […]
The Quantum Evolution by Derek Künsken: A Review
Derek Künsken’s series, The Quantum Evolution, so far consisting of two novels (The Quantum Magician and The Quantum Garden) is a brilliant space opera that probes the depths of a future human nature engineered to produce new subspecies. And they are wild, at times repulsive, at times capable of incredible breakthroughs in knowledge or massive […]
Linda Nagata Silver: Holding on to Human Identity
Linda Nagata has always dramatized complex ideas about human identity, but her new novel, Silver, second in the Inverted Frontier series, pushes this exploration to a new level. She combines two story-worlds to achieve this. Edges, the first book in this new series, brought us back to the world of the Nanotech Succession universe, while […]
Linda Nagata Edges: Contending Human and Alien Minds
“Against a starscape, a smudge of white light. A faint gleam, devoid of detail.” With those few words Linda Nagata begins Edges, picking up a story of human survival in a hostile universe she last explored over twenty years ago. Nagata published six science fiction novels between 1995 – 2003 but then took a long […]
Doris Lessing: Shikasta
In an era when science fiction insists on “showing” rather than “telling”, Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series challenges readers to think differently. In five books, starting with Shikasta in 1979, she produced an epic scale work more in the vein of Olaf Stapledon’s universal histories than current best-sellers, and no less dazzling and […]
