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 […]
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 […]
Doris Lessing: Shikasta
In an era when science fiction insists on “showing” rather than “telling”, Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series challenges readers to think differently. In five books, starting with Shikasta in 1979, she produced an epic scale work more in the vein of Olaf Stapledon’s universal histories than current best-sellers, and no less dazzling and […]
