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Visions of Future Worlds

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Embassytown by China Miéville

By John Folk-Williams

Embassytown

When I first read China Miéville’s Embassytown, which I now regard as a nearly perfect novel, I didn’t get it. The story seemed to move quite nicely to an anticlimax, I thought, where a potential massacre turns on a dime because of language. My fault – I was expecting the normal sort of adventure and […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: alien language, alien life forms, China Miéville, city, colonialism, communication, rebellion

The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

By John Folk-Williams

The Last Days of New Paris

I’m a fan of China Miéville‘s fiction, but when I first started The Last Days of New Paris, I was a little baffled. There was a woman riding a velocipede/centaur heading straight into a line of mannequins in a can-can row behind which Nazis were shooting at her, all this in 1950. The prose was […]

Filed Under: Urban Fantasy Tagged With: alternate history, China Miéville, city, life forms, power, surreal landscape

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

By John Folk-Williams

Parable of the Sower

So, another creeping infirmity makes it harder for me to focus for long on the printed (or ebook) page, and I have finally started listening to audio books. I started with two novels that, at first glance, could not be more dissimilar: Octavia E. Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and China Miéville’s The Last […]

Filed Under: Post-Apocalytic Tagged With: climate change, human survival, Octavia E. Butler, power, religion, social change, world collapse

The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville

By John Folk-Williams

The Book of Elsewhere

China Miéville last published fiction in 2016, including his fabular novella this census taker, so his collaboration with Keanu Reeves shot to the top of my list, despite my reservations about the source material. The Book of Elsewhere builds on Reeves’ (et al) 12 issue series of the graphic novel, BRZRKR, about an 80,000 year-old […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: China Miéville, death, human, immortality, Keanu Reeves, life forms, military, rebirth

Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse (Book 3 of Between Earth and Sky)

By John Folk-Williams

Mirrored Heavens

One of the great themes of Rebecca Roanhorse’s impressive third volume of her Between Earth and Sky trilogy is the struggle of humans to use godlike power without being destroyed by it. In Mirrored Heavens, the major characters either reach for such power or have it imposed on them, and all pay a heavy price. […]

Filed Under: Epic Fantasy Tagged With: city, free will, gods, indigenous culture, magic, power, Rebecca Roanhorse, transformation

Ashes of the Ancestors by Andrew Knighton

By John Folk-Williams

Ashes of the Ancestors

I was all set to take a summer vacation from blogging when I came across this gem by Andrew Knighton. Ashes of the Ancestors is a slim novella that manages to immerse the reader in a vaguely European medieval fantasy world in an original way and pose telling questions about power, friendship and love. We […]

Filed Under: Secondary World Fantasy Tagged With: ancestors, Andrew Knighton, empire, friendship, love, memory, power, religion, violence

We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed

By John Folk-Williams

We Speak Through the Mountain

We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed is the second part of the story she began a couple of years ago in The Annual Migration of Clouds. It’s another strong novella that continues the story of nineteen year-old Reid, surviving in a post-apocalyptic western Canada. The story picks up directly from where the last […]

Filed Under: Post-Apocalytic Tagged With: colonialism, community, exploitation, family, memory, plague, Premee Mohamed, ruined earth

In the Shadow of the Fall by Tobi Ogundiran

By John Folk-Williams

In the Shadow of the Fall

Tobi Ogundiran, the award winning short fiction author, has produced his debut epic fantasy, the first part of which is the novella, In the Shadow of the Fall. It is a beautifully rendered story about a young acolyte of the orisha whose attempt to commune with the gods triggers a sequence of events that almost […]

Filed Under: Epic Fantasy Tagged With: family, gods, memory, orisha, religion, shapeshifter, song, Tobi Ogundiran

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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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