“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 […]
Dead Memories
“Dead Memories” is the second in the Stories of Elektra series, following “People of Light 1“. These interconnected stories will appear here in draft form and will ultimately be published as a single book. 1.Peri could see Luka in her mind’s eye, and it was all wrong. Rousing in slow stages from hiber after the […]
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez
Impressed as I was by Simon Jimenez‘ beautiful and moving first novel, The Vanished Birds, I have to say I’m just staggered by his second, The Spear Cuts Through Water. Using the second person, the narrator lures “you” with intensely lyrical but dramatically apt prose into a world between worlds. One of several story tellers […]
Slipping by Mohamed Kheir – A Review for #SciFiMonth
Mohamed Kheir has written in Slipping a brilliant series of stories that drop their characters out of time and space for brief periods and interweave their narratives to challenge the limits of story-telling. The effect is like a folding of reality itself as the terms of their lives change directions in a stray encounter here, […]
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin – Vintage Science Fiction Month
I’m starting off my Vintage Science Fiction Month with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971). It is one of the most thrilling books I’ve read but also one of the most philosophical and poetic. It achieves an amazing balance in the confrontation between two opposing characters: George Orr, whose “effective” dreams change […]