I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language and the difficulty of communicating feelings as I have when reading Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Of course, this SFF adventure from the early 1960s is all about language, the mysterious one named in its title. It’s up to Rydra Wong, […]
Pushing the Boundaries of Mind: Science Books for SFF Readers – 3
One of the reasons I’m drawn to science fiction is to see how writers explore boundaries of mind and consciousness. I mean not just the sort of psychic powers that were popular to write about 40 or 50 years ago (or superheroes today) but testing the limits of human consciousness. While sff fiction uses standard […]
A Diné Antihero in the Sixth World Series by Rebecca Roanhorse
Rebecca Roanhorse’s two book series, The Sixth World, is at once a brilliant evocation of the Diné homeland and a strong character study of a young woman who feels stranded between the worlds of human and immortal. She is an antihero at once reveling in and resisting her supernatural powers. Trail of Lightning and Storm […]
The Dystopian Lawyer Series by Christopher Brown
Christopher Brown’s two-book set (Rule of Capture and Failed State) about his hapless yet strangely effective dystopian lawyer, Donnie Kimoe, may come too close to our dystopian present for comfort, but they also shine with ideas about a better way to envision the future. As he put it in a recent essay in Literary Hub: […]
Multiple Worlds in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Doors of Eden
Prepare for a wild ride through multiple worlds and fracturing reality in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s latest riveting novel, The Doors of Eden. The winning characters of this fantastic science fiction universe never know when a sudden drop in temperature signals a break in reality through which will pour creatures of one alternate earth or another. Sometimes […]
Becky Chambers’ Space Community as the Good Society
Becky Chambers takes a real chance in Record of a Spaceborn Few. She sets aside conventional adventure plots to create a convincing human society in space that is actually hopeful. Hopeful, but not easy. From the outset of this novel, third in the Wayfarer series, we are reminded of how fragile life can be on […]
Agency by William Gibson: Acting in the Time of the Jackpot
William Gibson’s Agency, building on ideas, setting and characters in The Peripheral, is all about the individual’s capacity to act, or agency. Trouble is everyone in the story seems to lack it or at best remains mystified about whether or not they have any agency. So how do you tell a story in which the […]
Fantasy City: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles (1934), translated by Celina Cieniewska for a 1989 edition, is one of those completely original works that defies categorization. I guess I would call it fantastika. It’s a linked collection of stories about a boy’s view of his Polish hometown filtered through the adult mind of an amazing writer. […]
