During the recent Coode Street podcast interview with Premee Mohamed, she came up with an interesting phrase that seemed to capture what happens in her latest novel, The Siege of Burning Grass. She said that while juggling all the demands on her time, she often felt like one of her characters being “seduced into usefulness.” […]
Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
“What are we but stories that touch?” This crucial question arises early in one of the poetic interludes of this absorbing novella about the drowning world of a future Lagos – Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. While most of the city is now underwater, survivors live in the Pinnacle, highest of five towers […]
David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
In David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (author of Son of the Storm) the end of the world has come to Lagos. After a war among orishas, or gods, in Orun, home of a major pantheon, hundreds of spirits have taken over most of the city in the great Falling. Much of it lies […]
The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao
Having been blogged out, read out, burned out and whatever else I can think of as down and out recently, I was determined to give myself a long summer break, determined that is until I picked up The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao. I could not put this debut novel down. The powerful clash […]
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older
The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, author of the remarkable The Centenal Cycle, is a many-layered book that becomes more and more interesting upon closer examination. On the surface, it is a very good mystery about the search for a missing man. It is also a fine relationship story about the investigator, Mossa, […]
Ringworld by Larry Niven – #VintageSciFiMonth
If you’re new, as I am, to Larry Niven’s Known Space world, you’ll find an astonishing amount of information online about this hugely influential series of novels and short stories. Ringworld (1970) was Niven’s first novel in the sequence. There are articles about all the characters, alien species, technologies and events of Known Space as […]
