Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany seems to have many detractors as a work of science fiction but I find it a powerful portrait of a fractured mind, of a poet in dystopia, of a city broken the way its main narrator feels he might be breaking. Known mostly as the Kid, because he has forgotten […]
Comet Weather by Liz Williams: A Review
I guess I’m a bit late to join the Wyrd & Wonder group, but Liz Williams’ beautiful fantasy, Comet Weather, has won me over completely from my hard edged science fictional ways. Sad to think, I never would have known about Liz Williams, or discovered this latest novels of hers, if Alastair Reynolds hadn’t mentioned […]
The Book of Strange New Things: The Alien Language of Human Connection
There is a powerful moment in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, when Peter Leigh, transported across light years to minister to a alien congregation on the planet Oasis, delivers a moving eulogy about a man he has hardly known. The scene captures Peter’s ability to get to the core of the life […]
Red Desert Series by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli: A Review
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli’s Red Desert four-part series reads like a single captivating novel with a fascinating character named Anna Persson at its core. She’s an exobiologist sent on a mission to colonize Mars, yet her impulsive, angry, headstrong nature breaks the psychological mold of an astronaut and plunges her into one difficult situation after […]
The Listeners by James Gunn
Picking out a message among innumerable signals or “voices” is the work of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and it’s the theme of James Gunn’s The Listeners. This is a first contact story from 1972 that Carl Sagan credited as one of the most influential in helping to launch SETI on an international scale. […]
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso
Nexhuman by Francesco Verso brilliantly blends the story of a young man’s obsessive love for a transhuman being with a vivid depiction of a consumerist society strangling on its own trash. Skillfully translated by Sally McCorry, the novel poses powerful questions about what it means to be human. We see this world through the eyes […]
