Like any great novel that does something really new, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, can be hard to get into. And it still feels new, at least to me, almost forty years after its publication, despite the fact that cyberpunk has become so common a sub-genre. Neuromancer is so uniquely itself that it’s hard to make the […]
Hidden Solace by Karl Drinkwater: A #SciFiMonth Review
Karl Drinkwater’s Hidden Solace is the third volume of the projected five-novel space opera Lost Solace series. Like its predecessors, Hidden Solace, transforms a familiar scifi trope (here, the prisoner trying to escape from an impossibly isolated and well-defended structure) into something exciting and new. The writing is riveting and intense and kept me going […]
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 […]
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds
Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds is a key book of short stories for understanding many aspects of the Revelation Space universe. The novels and stories within that universe follow human settlement of many star systems over several centuries. In the course of this future history, humans adapt in many ways, especially through the use of […]
The Employees by Olga Ravn, Translated by Martin Aitken
The Employees by Olga Ravn, in a beautiful translation from the Danish by Martin Aitken, requires a suspension of expectations about science fiction but nevertheless delivers a devastating impact. As a collection of statements by the crew members of a spaceship, both human and humanoid, it has little narrative drive at first, though it does […]
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 […]
