In 1953 Alfred Bester won the first Hugo award for his novel, The Demolished Man. It’s easy to see why. This is a fast-paced story in an interesting world, written in tight prose and delivering a haunting climax. The Demolished Man is partly a police procedural but also a crime procedural, much like the story […]

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 […]

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 […]

I was all set to take a summer vacation from blogging when I came across this gem by Andrew Knighton. Ashes of the Ancestors is a slim novella that manages to immerse the reader in a vaguely European medieval fantasy world in an original way and pose telling questions about power, friendship and love. We […]

We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed is the second part of the story she began a couple of years ago in The Annual Migration of Clouds. It’s another strong novella that continues the story of nineteen year-old Reid, surviving in a post-apocalyptic western Canada. The story picks up directly from where the last […]