Well, it’s a new year – and good wishes all around! After a mentally tired December when I wrote little, I relaxed while getting to know the work of Roger Zelazny – and re-reading Iain M. Banks’ Excession, the fifth of his Culture books. Some people suggest starting with other novels set in this universe […]
Children of Memory by Adrian Tchaikovsky for #SciFiMonth
By now, I just accept the fact that Adrian Tchaikovsky can write about anything in SFF and do it brilliantly. Children of Memory, which follows the award-winning Children of Time and Children of Ruin, continues this great saga of human evolution and species uplift in multiple star systems. There is a moving and exciting story […]
Monkey Around by Jadie Jang
Here’s another great novel from 2021 I’m just catching up with. Claire Light, writing as Jadie Jang, has re-envisioned the Monkey King from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, as Maya MacQueen, a shape-shifter twenty-something woman of the San Francisco Bay Area during the Occupy movement of 2011. Maya, while assuming human form as […]
Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka
Self-Portrait with Nothing by Aimee Pokwatka is a psychological mystery-thriller that uses a fascinating approach to multiple universes that can be crossed through the impact of art. At the opening of the story, we learn that Ula Frost, world-renowned artist whose work is compared to that of Frida Kalo and Georgia O’Keefe, is missing. At […]
Babel: An Arcane History by R. F. Kuang
Babel, the new standalone novel by R.F. Kuang (author of the Poppy War trilogy), has the lengthy subtitle: or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It may seem strange to talk about violence, revolution and academic translators in one breath, but make no mistake, this is a compelling story […]
The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope
Leslye Penelope takes us in the masterful The Monsters We Defy to 1925 Washington DC and its thriving but caste-bound African American elite community where spirits battle for souls. Though I could use the marketing labels (historical fantasy, romance, etc) to describe the story, The Monsters We Defy is so insightful and brilliant that conventional […]
