Essa Hansen’s Azura Ghost, second book in The Graven series, marks an enormous step up from her already impressive debut, Nophek Gloss. This new story takes us deeper into the mysterious multiverse of the Graven, an ancient race of vast accomplishments that disappeared ages ago but left numerous traces both in architectural and technological remnants […]
Slipping by Mohamed Kheir – A Review for #SciFiMonth
Mohamed Kheir has written in Slipping a brilliant series of stories that drop their characters out of time and space for brief periods and interweave their narratives to challenge the limits of story-telling. The effect is like a folding of reality itself as the terms of their lives change directions in a stray encounter here, […]
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – A Review
Never having read Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, I picked up her Piranesi with no preconceptions about the sort of book it might be and promptly fell in love with it. It’s a masterful fable about life in this world that introduces us to the mind of a narrator who proclaims himself to […]
Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds – A Review
Alastair Reynolds brings us back to the Revelation Space universe with the magnificent Inhibitor Phase. It’s a story about sacrifice, redemption, rebirth and basic human bonds of friendship, love and loyalty that builds to a powerful conclusion. Now, a confession here. When I started reading science fiction seriously almost 20 years ago, Alastair Reynolds and […]
The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo #WyrdandWonder
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 […]
City in Time: Tade Thompson’s Rosewater Redemption
Tade Thompson begins Rosewater Redemption, the concluding volume of his Wormwood trilogy, with a kind of fugue, an almost musical prelude in which the major characters re-enter the story, each changed by what has gone before. We see Rosewater in all its multiplicity, through the eyes of each character, as a city in time, experienced […]
