Before I get to Halcyon Years and other SFF reading during my sabbatical, I’ll say a few words about other books I’ve been into. One of the pleasures of time off has been reading outside of genre as well as picking up just about anything that catches my eye. I spent a lot of time […]
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Alfred Bester wrote two important science fiction novels in the 1950s – The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. While I have some reservations about the first, I have to agree with a couple of generations of great writers that the second is one of the best scifi novels of the 20th century. The […]
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
In 1953 Alfred Bester won the first Hugo award for his novel, The Demolished Man. It’s easy to see why. This is a fast-paced story in an interesting world, written in tight prose and delivering a haunting climax. The Demolished Man is partly a police procedural but also a crime procedural, much like the story […]
The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older
Malka Older, activist, scholar, teacher, international humanitarian worker and author of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses is one of my culture heroes for her ability to combine multiple activities, any one of which would constitute a demanding career for less gifted people. This is the third installment in her Mossa and Pleiti mystery series (the […]
Dissolution by Nicholas Binge
At its core, Dissolution by Nicholas Binge is a love story about a fiercely determined 83 year-old woman who is trying to recapture the memory and hence the identity of her husband whose selfhood has mostly disappeared. But Dissolution feels nothing like a romance. It is a tense thriller in which the titular phenomenon threatens […]
The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia
Much like his earlier novels, The Wall and The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has created a secondary world with action taking place within a single city in his deeply interesting new book, The Sentence. On one level, this is a story about two sections of a divided city, Peruma, one ruled by a Council of corporations […]
