Ann Leckie has written a strange and compelling story in Translation State that is set in a part of her Imperial Radch universe different from what we know from the Ancillary novels. For all its trappings of space opera and bizarre species, it’s very much a captivating story about family, loneliness, friendship, and the need […]
Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Lords of Uncreation is the third and final volume of the Final Architecture series, including Shards of Earth and Eyes of the Void. What draws me most to this series are the amazing descriptions of the encounters of the Intermediary Idris Telemmier with the creatures of unspace, a level of space beneath the […]
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh set herself a difficult task in Some Desperate Glory. Present the reader with a young protagonist raised in a militaristic society who is all about duty, war-breeding, xenophobia, homophobia and worse, then draw her through enough world-shattering experiences to make her interesting, flaws and all, from start to finish. And Tesh hits the […]
Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott – Book 2 of The Sun Chronicles
Kate Elliott’s Furious Heaven is a big, richly detailed reworking in space of the career of Alexander the Great, though you don’t need to know that background to enjoy this epic space adventure. At more than 700 pages, it’s long but never tedious, and each chapter repays close reading. In this volume Sun Shan, daughter […]
Meru by S.B. Divya, The Alloy Era, Book I
Meru by S.B. Divya is an intriguing space opera that presents a future Earth, ruined by humans, and now dominated by evolved sentient beings, known as alloys. A distant planet, named Meru, is evolving primitive life forms and has oxygen in its atmosphere, but humans, in their baseline form, are forbidden to settle there or […]
Isle of the Dead by Roger Zelazny – #VintageSciFiMonth
Every January is Vintage Science Fiction Month, the not-a-challenge created by Andrea at the little red reviewer and Retro Rockets podcast as well as Red Star Reviews. It’s definitely one of my favorite scifi celebrations. The original idea was to comment on science fiction written before your birth year – but I believe “vintage” came […]
