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The Last Days of New Paris by China Miéville

By John Folk-Williams

The Last Days of New Paris

I’m a fan of China Miéville‘s fiction, but when I first started The Last Days of New Paris, I was a little baffled. There was a woman riding a velocipede/centaur heading straight into a line of mannequins in a can-can row behind which Nazis were shooting at her, all this in 1950. The prose was […]

Filed Under: Urban Fantasy Tagged With: alternate history, China Miéville, city, life forms, power, surreal landscape

Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

By John Folk-Williams

Lost Ark Dreaming

“What are we but stories that touch?” This crucial question arises early in one of the poetic interludes of this absorbing novella about the drowning world of a future Lagos – Lost Ark Dreaming by Suyi Davies Okungbowa. While most of the city is now underwater, survivors live in the Pinnacle, highest of five towers […]

Filed Under: Post-Apocalytic, Urban Fantasy Tagged With: Afrofuturist, city, dreams, family, memory, myth, Nigeria, poetry, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, transhuman

David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

By John Folk-Williams

David Mogo Godhunter

In David Mogo Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa (author of Son of the Storm) the end of the world has come to Lagos. After a war among orishas, or gods, in Orun, home of a major pantheon, hundreds of spirits have taken over most of the city in the great Falling. Much of it lies […]

Filed Under: Post-Apocalytic, Urban Fantasy Tagged With: African SFF, city, family, godpunk, gods, orisha, religion, spirits, Suyi Davies Okungbowa

The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

By John Folk-Williams

The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

Kelly Barnhill’s The Crane Husband is, in many ways a companion piece to her longer work, When Women Were Dragons. In both, the desire of a woman to break free of the normal bounds of life takes literal form, but at great cost to others. In one case, they become dragons – at times on […]

Filed Under: Urban Fantasy Tagged With: art, coming of age, family, Kelly Barnhill, obsession, robots, shapeshifter, transformation

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

By John Folk-Williams

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Set primarily in an alternative version of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Kelly Barnhill’s magnificent When Women Were Dragons tells many stories. There is the story of the mass dragoning of April 25, 1955, when over 642,987 mothers and wives stepped out of their human skins to live as dragons, and of […]

Filed Under: Urban Fantasy Tagged With: dragons, family, human emotion, Kelly Barnhill, liberation, memory, oppression, sapphic love

Monkey Around by Jadie Jang

By John Folk-Williams

Monkey Around by Jadie Jang

Here’s another great novel from 2021 I’m just catching up with. Claire Light, writing as Jadie Jang, has re-envisioned the Monkey King from the Chinese classic, Journey to the West, as Maya MacQueen, a shape-shifter twenty-something woman of the San Francisco Bay Area during the Occupy movement of 2011. Maya, while assuming human form as […]

Filed Under: Urban Fantasy Tagged With: Asian-American, identity, indigenous culture, Jadie Jang, shape-shifting

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Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

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