Alfred Bester wrote two important science fiction novels in the 1950s – The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. While I have some reservations about the first, I have to agree with a couple of generations of great writers that the second is one of the best scifi novels of the 20th century. The […]

Mohamed Kheir’s Sleep Phase, beautifully translated by Robin Moger (who also translated Kheir’s story collection, Slipping) brought to mind related neurodivergent conditions that I once wrote about on my mental health blog, Storied Mind. To experience the world as derealized is the feeling that the world around you is not quite real or completely strange […]

Death of the Author marks the second time (the first being Who Fears Death) Nnedi Okorafor has led me through a reading experience that felt interesting but not overwhelming only to deliver an ending section that made me wonder how she does it. For that ending delivers a powerful impact that changes my view of […]

At its core, Dissolution by Nicholas Binge is a love story about a fiercely determined 83 year-old woman who is trying to recapture the memory and hence the identity of her husband whose selfhood has mostly disappeared. But Dissolution feels nothing like a romance. It is a tense thriller in which the titular phenomenon threatens […]

As I was starting to take notes for this review of Gene Wolfe’s novel, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), and went back to check on a passage, I would often find that I had missed something and wound up rereading not just that one part but a long or even complete section of this […]

Much like his earlier novels, The Wall and The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has created a secondary world with action taking place within a single city in his deeply interesting new book, The Sentence. On one level, this is a story about two sections of a divided city, Peruma, one ruled by a Council of corporations […]