January is Vintage Sci-Fi Month, but I hate to think of vintage sci-fi as confined to only one part of the year. So I’ll be making reviews of vintage science fiction, like Destination: Void and earlier classics, a regular feature of this blog. Follow Vintage Sci-Fi Month on Twitter and get in on the fun, too! As I […]
Science Books for Science Fiction Readers
Science fiction has offered inspiration for many a scientific career, but the opposite is also true. Cutting edge science stimulates good fiction as well. Here are four science books for science fiction readers that provide the practical basis for visions of the near and far future. Each of them summarizes knowledge needed to think about […]
Queen of the Conquered: The Inner Violence of Power
Kacen Callender’s Queen of the Conquered, the first book in the Islands of Blood and Storm series, is a searching story of slavery, oppression and the inner violence of power. Set in a Caribbean island chain that had been colonized hundreds of years earlier by a light skinned people known as the Fjern, the novel […]
The Book of Strange New Things: The Alien Language of Human Emotion
There is a powerful moment in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, when Peter Leigh, transported across light years to minister to a non-human congregation on the planet Oasis, delivers a moving eulogy about a (hu)man he has hardly known. The scene captures Peter’s ability to get to the core of the life […]
Linda Nagata Silver: Holding on to Human Identity
Linda Nagata has always dramatized complex ideas about human identity, but her new novel, Silver, second in the Inverted Frontier series, pushes this exploration to a new level. She combines two story-worlds to achieve this. Edges, the first book in this new series, brought us back to the world of the Nanotech Succession universe, while […]
Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker: Seeing the Whole of Things
Considering the convulsing world of 1937 on the eve of World War II, Olaf Stapledon introduced Star Maker with a powerful rationale for science fiction in a time of crisis: “…[P]erhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human […]
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: Dialogue Between Present and Future
When Samuel R. Delany reviewed Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home on its publication in 1985, he referred to science fiction as a dialogue between present and future. That happens to be a good way of thinking about this unique work. It is part imaginary ethnography and part literary anthology of a people, the […]
Linda Nagata Edges: Contending Human and Alien Minds
“Against a starscape, a smudge of white light. A faint gleam, devoid of detail.” With those few words Linda Nagata begins Edges, picking up a story of human survival in a hostile universe she last explored over twenty years ago. Nagata published six science fiction novels between 1995 – 2003 but then took a long […]
