Who Fears Death (2010) by Nnedi Okorafor puzzled me at first. The central character, Onyesonwu, (whose name means “who fears death”) is an outcast figure, a child of rape, who is avoided by most people and as a result angry most of the time. But the story reveals her life on two levels, the physical […]
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review for #SciFiMonth
I needed to re-read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky because I was tone-deaf years ago to what the author was doing when I first opened this novel. Yeah, I was a bit turned off by characters who were spiders but more so by the narrative voice of those sections describing their evolution. There was […]
Menewood by Nicola Griffith
As Nicola Griffith, author of Menewood, second in her Hild series, said in a recent interview, she expects to be writing about this seventh century British saint (the abbess of Whitby in her later years) for the rest of her life. The character of Hild she has created through 20 years of research is unforgettably […]
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 […]
Amazing Cities in SFF – 3
To round out for now this series on cities in SFF, I’m revisiting a few novels that capture the importance of how people experience urban environments and how the massive structures affect their language and thought. A city, after all, is not just buildings and a way of physically organizing dense populations, but also a […]
The Horizon by Gautam Bhatia
In The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has written a masterful sequel to his first novel, The Wall, that brings together a close examination of the politics of radical change with the songs and stories that can sustain but sometimes also limit the imagination of what is possible in life. Directly following the climactic ending of The […]
