If you’re new, as I am, to Larry Niven’s Known Space world, you’ll find an astonishing amount of information online about this hugely influential series of novels and short stories. Ringworld (1970) was Niven’s first novel in the sequence. There are articles about all the characters, alien species, technologies and events of Known Space as […]
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick – #VintageSciFiMonth
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Philip K. Dick asks a basic question that is all the more pressing today. What’s the difference between a human being and an android? Dick goes beyond the current debate about the potential replacement of humans by robotic software to produce creative works we feel should only […]
The Stars Undying by Emery Robin
It’s a bold idea for a debut novelist to choose the stories and legends of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar projected into a space opera. Bold, I think, because these were formidable people in life, and I’ve been disappointed too many times with thin fictional replicas of great historical figures. But Emery Robin’s The Stars Undying […]
The Oleander Sword by Tasha Suri
In The Oleander Sword, the second novel of The Burning Kingdoms trilogy, Tasha Suri has produced an even more intensely involving and brilliant book than she did in The Jasmine Throne. That first novel richly explored the many selves and identities its characters had to adopt to survive as they strove to increase their power, […]
Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith
Norstrilia (written as two short novels in the 1960s but not published as one until 1975 after the author’s death), is a unique masterpiece by Paul Linebarger who wrote under the name Cordwainer Smith. The story begins with an odd preface that throws the key elements of the book at you in the manner of […]
Amazing Cities in SFF – 3
To round out for now this series on cities in SFF, I’m revisiting a few novels that capture the importance of how people experience urban environments and how the massive structures affect their language and thought. A city, after all, is not just buildings and a way of physically organizing dense populations, but also a […]
