For me, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a treasure — along with The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven, I think, her finest work in science fiction. It brings together so many of her themes in a complex story that is beautifully written and deeply engaging. Themes like coming home, […]
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s tour de force, Elder Race, we first encounter Lynesse (Lyn), Fourth Daughter of the tough minded Queen of Lannesite, climbing the steep rugged slopes of a mountain to call forth a powerful wizard. As only the fourth daughter, Lyn is never taken seriously, but she is determined to change that by destroying […]
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
With a cascade of luminous and psychologically intricate prose, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace picks up shortly after the conclusion of A Memory Called Empire. It’s another brilliant book that I find even richer than the first volume of this series on the Teixcalaan Empire and its remote satellite, Lsel Station. The two novels […]
Communicating Feelings in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17
I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language and the difficulty of communicating feelings as I have when reading Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Of course, this SFF adventure from the early 1960s is all about language, the mysterious one named in its title. It’s up to Rydra Wong, […]
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany: Poet in Dystopia
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany seems to have many detractors as a work of science fiction but I find it a powerful portrait of a fractured mind, of a poet in dystopia, of a city broken the way its main narrator feels he might be breaking. Known mostly as the Kid, because he has forgotten […]
