Look, I can’t pretend to keep up with the outpouring of fine SFF writing we are now witnessing, so I’m dipping into the recent past to discuss a pair of stories that are so perfect in their way that it’s hard to write about them. Nghi Vo is a storyteller of dazzling gifts, and her […]
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 […]
Border City: Lavie Tidhar’s Central Station
Lavie Tidhar creates a border city, a liminal place in Central Station that captures in great human depth a future world of interwoven nationalities, identities, destinies and lives. The city around Central Station, a vast spaceport in what was once called Israel or Palestine between the Arab and Jewish areas is one of many blended […]
Human Connection in The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez
Simon Jimenez‘ The Vanished Birds is an amazing novel that takes you from humble beginnings on an agrarian planet across thousand-year time spans, multiple worlds, journeys through folded space, then by instant travel into mysterious dimensions beyond time and normal reality into the depths of human connection. It offers powerful and lyrical testament to the […]
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso brilliantly blends the story of a young man’s obsessive love for a transhuman being with a vivid depiction of a consumerist society strangling on its own trash. Skillfully translated by Sally McCorry, the novel poses powerful questions about what it means to be human. We see this world through the eyes […]
