Emily Tesh set herself a difficult task in Some Desperate Glory. Present the reader with a young protagonist raised in a militaristic society who is all about duty, war-breeding, xenophobia, homophobia and worse, then draw her through enough world-shattering experiences to make her interesting, flaws and all, from start to finish. And Tesh hits the […]
Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard’s prose swept me through Fireheart Tiger like a single brushstroke of many beautiful strands toward a strong conclusion that came just a little too easily and a little too soon. She is a master at plunging the reader at once into a richly imagined fantasy world yet without distracting the mind with […]
Fables of Need: this census-taker by China Miéville and The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
I’m not sure what leads me to link these two books, as different and far apart in time as they are, but China Miéville’s this census-taker (2016)and Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (1938) strike me as fables of human need. I’m not even sure what I mean by that, except that each book tells a […]
Divergence and Diversity in Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen
A lot of the SciFiMonth team have featured Nophek Gloss, and as soon as I got into the book I could see why. This first novel in the Graven Trilogy startles with vivid language born of an imagination that is at once hypersensitive to details of change and alive with synesthetic richness. Essa Hansen tells […]
