Over the next couple of weeks, SciFi Mind will move to a new hosting site, and that will take a while to get everything working again, so please be patient. I will also be switching to an email newsletter format so you will be able to get the full text of each post in your […]
Halcyon Years and Other Sabbatical Reading
Before I get to Halcyon Years and other SFF reading during my sabbatical, I’ll say a few words about other books I’ve been into. One of the pleasures of time off has been reading outside of genre as well as picking up just about anything that catches my eye. I spent a lot of time […]
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Alfred Bester wrote two important science fiction novels in the 1950s – The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. While I have some reservations about the first, I have to agree with a couple of generations of great writers that the second is one of the best scifi novels of the 20th century. The […]
Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler
Ray Nayler’s haunting novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, draws us into a dystopian world governed in most countries by AIs, and in one Federation, by a single human mind successively incorporated into different bodies to achieve a kind of immortality. While some of the AI governed countries see themselves as free and the Federation […]
The Folded Sky (White Space Book 3) by Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky, the third novel in her White Space series, tells a stand-alone story, full of grand space opera tropes, including Alcubierre-White drives that fold space for faster than light travel, space pirates, sentient ships, a diverse crew of “syster” species, and a star about to go nova. But it’s not just […]
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
In 1953 Alfred Bester won the first Hugo award for his novel, The Demolished Man. It’s easy to see why. This is a fast-paced story in an interesting world, written in tight prose and delivering a haunting climax. The Demolished Man is partly a police procedural but also a crime procedural, much like the story […]
