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Visions of Future Worlds

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Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse by S.B. Divya

By John Folk-Williams

Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse

Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and other Possible Situations by S.B. Divya, author of Machinehood and Meru, is a deeply interesting collection of fourteen stories, many quite short, all of them posing life-changing choices for each central character. The prose is supple, ranging from lushly sensuous description to stripped down action. The author perfectly matches […]

Filed Under: Short Fiction Tagged With: choice, consciousness, cyborg, evolution, love, neurodiversity, pain, S.B. Divya, transhuman, uploaded minds

Locus Ballot 2023: Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels and More

By John Folk-Williams

Locus Ballot 2023

Time to pick from the long list of nominees for the Locus ballot 2023, covering work published in 2022. It’s a big list, since it represents the consensus judgment of a large group of reviewers at Locus magazine, and I can’t pretend to have read it all. I think part of the purpose of such […]

Filed Under: Favorite SFF Tagged With: Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alastair Reynolds, Kelly Barnhill, Lavie Tidhar, Linda Nagata, Maurice Broaddus, Nicola Griffith, R.F. Kuang, Simon Jimenez, Tasha Suri

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh

By John Folk-Williams

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 […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: alien life forms, artificial intelligence, coming of age, family, identity, multiple worlds, spaceships, trauma

Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott – Book 2 of The Sun Chronicles

By John Folk-Williams

Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott

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 […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: battle strategy, destiny, galactic empires, identity, Kate Elliott, power, space governance, transhuman

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

By John Folk-Williams

The Mimicking of Known Successes

The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older, author of the remarkable The Centenal Cycle, is a many-layered book that becomes more and more interesting upon closer examination. On the surface, it is a very good mystery about the search for a missing man. It is also a fine relationship story about the investigator, Mossa, […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: city, human survival, Malka Older, relationships, ruined earth, sapphic love, space colonies

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

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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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About the Author

A late-comer to the worlds of science fiction, John Folk-Williams circled around it, first by blogging (primarily through Storied Mind) about inner struggles and the mind’s way of distorting reality. Then he turned directly to SFF as an amazing medium for re-envisioning the mind and the worlds it creates. He started this blog as a way to experiment with writing science fiction and to learn from its many masterful practitioners.

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