Who Fears Death (2010) by Nnedi Okorafor puzzled me at first. The central character, Onyesonwu, (whose name means “who fears death”) is an outcast figure, a child of rape, who is avoided by most people and as a result angry most of the time. But the story reveals her life on two levels, the physical […]
Embassytown by China Miéville
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 […]
The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville
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 […]
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
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 […]
The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves and China Miéville
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 […]
Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse (Book 3 of Between Earth and Sky)
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. […]
Ashes of the Ancestors by Andrew Knighton
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 […]
We Speak Through the Mountain by Premee Mohamed
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 […]
