Ray Nayler’s beautiful novella, The Tusks of Extinction, focuses on a handful of very different characters whose lives converge on a hunting expedition in the Russian taiga at least a century in the future. That convergence manages to speak volumes about human nature, greed, memory, family bonds, the connection of living things to the earth […]
The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord
The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord, the latest in her Cygnus Beta novels, is unlike any science fictional work I’ve recently read. It depicts familiar elements: a vast scale of galactic politics, a humanoid diaspora in space, a climate-changed Earth where cities are being enclosed in protective globes and many current nation states have […]
Neom by Lavie Tidhar – A Review
In the helpful afterward to his hauntingly beautiful new novel, Neom, Lavie Tidhar describes his process of writing it as one of discovery. He wrote about a robot going to the flower market of the bustling city of Neom to buy a single rose. But why? He had to write another story to answer that […]
H.G. Wells’ Things to Come – the 1936 Film
H. G. Wells wrote the screen adaptation of his future history, The Shape of Things to Come, to give a dramatic setting to his sweeping vision of a world first devastated by war then resurrected by a corps of brilliant engineers. The result was Things to Come, a 1936 film produced by Alexander Korda and […]
The Shape of Things to Come by H.G. Wells
On with Vintage Science Fiction Month! H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933) purports to be the “dreamed” history of the next hundred and fifty years of human experience. Be warned: it’s serious future fictional history without a character or action-driven plot, though there are a few strong personalities who take the spotlight […]
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: […]
