• Blog
  • About
  • Stories of Elektra
  • Great Series Read Project
  • Archive

SciFi Mind

Visions of Future Worlds

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Goodreads
  • Mastodon
You are here: Home / Blog

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: Reviews, Urban Fantasy 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: Reviews, Secondary World Fantasy 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

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: Dialogue Between Present and Future

By John Folk-Williams

Ursula K. LrGuin Always Coming Home

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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Always Coming Home, ceremonial life, culture, nature, power, story-telling, technology, Ursula K. Le Guin

Linda Nagata Edges: Contending Human and Alien Minds

By John Folk-Williams

Linda Nagata's Edges

“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 […]

Filed Under: Indie SciFi, Space Opera Tagged With: alien minds, Inverted Frontier, Linda Nagata, Nanotech Succession, neural network, robotic spaceships, subminds

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 27
  • Page 28
  • Page 29
  • Page 30
  • Go to Next Page »

Subscribe to SciFi Mind Posts



About SciFi Mind

nebula SciFiMind

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

Search SciFi Mind

Recent Posts

  • The Potency of Ungovernable ImpulsesThe Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older
  • Shroud by Adrian TchaikovskyShroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • She Who KnowsShe Who Knows and One Way Witch by Nnedi Okorafor #Wyrd&Wonder
  • Lake of Darkness by Adam RobertsLake of Darkness by Adam Roberts
  • Death of the AuthorDeath of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
  • Dissolution by Nicholas BingeDissolution by Nicholas Binge

Categories

About the Author

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.

Follow

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Goodreads
  • Mastodon

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Cookie Policy

Cookie Policy

© 2025 Copyright by John Folk-Williams · Dynamik-Gen On Genesis Framework