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My Vintage Science Fiction Month Reading List for 2021

By John Folk-Williams

Vintage Science Fiction Month Badge

I’m an enthusiastic follower of the Little Red Reviewer’s Vintage Science Fiction Month Not-a-Challenge, and this year I’ve gotten my act together a lot earlier than last, when I squeaked in at the end of the month with a review of Destination Void. The only rule of Vintage Science Fiction Month is whatever you review […]

Filed Under: Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: vintage scifi

Understanding the Alien in Eden by Stanisław Lem

By John Folk-Williams

Understanding the Alien in Eden by Stanislaw Lem

Is understanding the alien even possible for the human mind? That is the question posed by Stanisław Lem‘s Eden, a 1958 novel translated by Marc E. Heine for publication in English in 1989. And has anyone ever had a more exuberant imagination than this great Polish writer in presenting baffling alien civilizations for humans to […]

Filed Under: Science Fiction in Translation, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien life forms, alien minds, first contact, human, spaceships, Stanisław Lem

Communicating Feelings in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17

By John Folk-Williams

Communicating feelings in Babel-17

I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language and the difficulty of communicating feelings as I have when reading Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Of course, this SFF adventure from the early 1960s is all about language, the mysterious one named in its title. It’s up to Rydra Wong, […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: communication, feelings, language, poet, Samel R. Delany, spaceships

Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A New Species Emerges

By John Folk-Williams

Dawn by Octavia E. Butler Xenogenesis Trilogy

Prepare for a deep dive into the most intimate details of human-alien contact in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy. Step by step she takes you through the initial encounters between a human, Lilith Iyapo, and her Oankali captors (Dawn), the coming of age of a construct resulting from this union (Adulthood Rites) and the reconciliation […]

Filed Under: Great Series Read Project, Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien life forms, apocalypse, colonialism, gender, human emotion, Octavia E. Butler, sexuality, slavery, species, xenogenesis trilogy

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany: Poet in Dystopia

By John Folk-Williams

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany

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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: city, Dhalgren, dystopia, language, memory, mental health, poet, reality, Samuel R. Delany, sex

The Listeners by James Gunn

By John Folk-Williams

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. […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien civilizations, first contact, James Gunn, religion, science, seti, The Listeners

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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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