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Visions of Future Worlds

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Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

By John Folk-Williams

Frankenstein in Baghdad - SFF in translation

In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, it takes a neighborhood of strange characters, rather than an over-reaching scientist as with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to create a monster. And it takes a good story, whether or not it is true, just so long as it is believed. There are many stories and levels of truth in […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Reviews, Science Fiction in Translation Tagged With: Baghdad, Frankenstein, justice, Mary Shelley, narrative, story-telling, truth, war

The Contact Paradox – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)

By John Folk-Williams

Keith Cooper’s The Contact Paradox is a brilliant probing of the motives and technologies behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). If you’re like me, you might know that SETI has been going on for sixty years and that no signals have turned up pointing to an advanced civilization. And not much more. You probably […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Science and Related Books for SFF Readers Tagged With: alien civilizations, astrobiology, extraterrestrial intelligence, first contact, radio astronomy, seti

Review: Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

By John Folk-Williams

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi

Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi may be a compact novella but its powerful prose tears through the mind and heart like a sustained trumpet call of pain, anger and a kind of hope. The story can be called a fantasy, with siblings Kev and Ella, especially Ella, endowed with psychic powers that can manifest in […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Reviews Tagged With: family, fantasy, people of color, psychic powers, racism, Riot Baby, Tochi Onyebuchi

Vintage Science Fiction Month – Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

By John Folk-Williams

Destination: Void by Frank Herbert

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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: artificial intelligence, clones, computer, consciousness, Frank Herbert, Mary Shelley, robotic spaceships, technology

Science Books for Science Fiction Readers

By John Folk-Williams

Imagined Life science book for sci-fi 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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Science and Related Books for SFF Readers Tagged With: antimatter drive, exoplanets, science, science fiction, space colonies, space travel, technology

Queen of the Conquered: The Inner Violence of Power

By John Folk-Williams

Queen of the Conquered

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 […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Reviews Tagged With: colonialism, oppression, power, rebellion, slavery

Linda Nagata Silver: Holding on to Human Identity

By John Folk-Williams

Linda Nagata Silver

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 […]

Filed Under: Indie SciFi, Space Opera Tagged With: alien minds, identity, Inverted Frontier, Linda Nagata, memory

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker: Seeing the Whole of Things

By John Folk-Williams

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker

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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: cosmic mind, galaxy, myth, Olaf Stapledon, sentient beings, Star Maker, telepathy, universe

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Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

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A late-comer to the worlds of science fiction, John Folk-Williams circled around it, first by blogging (primarily through Storied Mind) about inner struggles and the mind’s way of distorting reality. Then he turned directly to SFF as an amazing medium for re-envisioning the mind and the worlds it creates. He started this blog as a way to experiment with writing science fiction and to learn from its many masterful practitioners.

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