Premee Mohamed’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a tightly written novella about a story of rebellion from oppression focused on the inner struggle from the invisible chains of psychic servitude. And What Can We Offer You Tonight, narrated by Jewel, a courtesan at the high-end House of Bicchieri, begins with one of […]
Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North – A Review
Notes from the Burning Age by Claire North is both an exciting story of spies and traitors in a post-apocalyptic Europe and a powerful study of trauma and belief. It is, above all, the story of Ven Marzouki, who survived a traumatic childhood when he witnessed the great burning of the old civilization and the […]
Six SFF Visions of Governing the Future
There have been an abundance of SFF novels depicting dystopian conditions coming in the next century but relatively few that have offered a vision of governing the future. What would it be like to live amid the surviving or transformed structures of a different world? Would ordinary people have any say or freedom? Here are […]
Machine (White Space 2) by Elizabeth Bear
There’s nothing like a scary family illness (fortunately all over with now) to take my mind far from blogging for a couple of weeks, and there’s nothing like a compelling Elizabeth Bear novel like Machine to bring me right back. Machine is the second White Space novel, following Ancestral Night, set in the Synarche universe, […]
Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk
Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times, finely translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is a uniquely fantastical search through the multiple worlds and forms of time found in the life of a fictional village in Poland during the 20th century. I’ve never read anything like it. On one level, it depicts the lives of a group of […]
By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar #WyrdandWonder
I hope no one is so jaded on Arthurian fantasy that they can’t enjoy this glorious retelling and meticulous tear-down of every facet of the over-familiar stories. Every character comes to scurrilous life in By Force Alone, as that title phrase echoes over and over throughout this dynamic, hilarious and strangely moving book. I say […]
