After yet more downtime caused by, first, the misery of a post-covid illness, something like a cold from hell, and then happy times during a special family birthday gathering, I managed to start reading again with Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. I was so impressed with her earlier The Monsters We Defy […]
True Names by Vernor Vinge
The passing of Vernor Vinge, author of the great A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon the Deep, led me to go back to one of his earliest ground-breaking works, the novella True Names, first published in 1981. It’s regarded as the inspiration and first detailed working out of what William Gibson would […]
Blade – Inverted Frontier 4 by Linda Nagata
In previous novels of the Inverted Frontier series (Edges, Silver and Needle), Linda Nagata often posed the question of what it took to retain humanity in the face of alien power. In Blade Inverted Frontier 4 (out of a projected 5 volume series) she confronts as never before the potential of human destructiveness. Is it […]
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review for #SciFiMonth
I needed to re-read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky because I was tone-deaf years ago to what the author was doing when I first opened this novel. Yeah, I was a bit turned off by characters who were spiders but more so by the narrative voice of those sections describing their evolution. There was […]
Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov: A Re-Reading for #SciFiMonth
To finish up my re-reading of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, this week I’m looking at his Second Foundation. The novel, published in this form in 1953, is a reprinting of two novellas published in Astounding magazine in 1948-50. This third novel may not have quite the dramatic impact of The Mule (in Foundation and […]
Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 by Sandra Newman
I hesitated to put up this review of Julia by Sandra Newman since I recently indicated that my reviewing time, limited due to illness, would be devoted to books that really inspired me in some way. Well, this one didn’t, but it was the last commitment I made to NetGalley, so I wrote a brief […]
