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Queen of the Conquered: The Inner Violence of Power

By John Folk-Williams

Queen of the Conquered

Kacen Callender’s Queen of the Conquered, the first book in the Islands of Blood and Storm series, is a searching story of slavery, oppression and the inner violence of power. Set in a Caribbean island chain that had been colonized hundreds of years earlier by a light skinned people known as the Fjern, the novel […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Reviews Tagged With: colonialism, oppression, power, rebellion, slavery

Linda Nagata Silver: Holding on to Human Identity

By John Folk-Williams

Linda Nagata Silver

Linda Nagata has always dramatized complex ideas about human identity, but her new novel, Silver, second in the Inverted Frontier series, pushes this exploration to a new level. She combines two story-worlds to achieve this. Edges, the first book in this new series, brought us back to the world of the Nanotech Succession universe, while […]

Filed Under: Indie SciFi, Space Opera Tagged With: alien minds, identity, Inverted Frontier, Linda Nagata, memory

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker: Seeing the Whole of Things

By John Folk-Williams

Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker

Considering the convulsing world of 1937 on the eve of World War II, Olaf Stapledon introduced Star Maker with a powerful rationale for science fiction in a time of crisis: “…[P]erhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: cosmic mind, galaxy, myth, Olaf Stapledon, sentient beings, Star Maker, telepathy, universe

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: Dialogue Between Present and Future

By John Folk-Williams

Ursula K. LrGuin Always Coming Home

When Samuel R. Delany reviewed Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home on its publication in 1985, he referred to science fiction as a dialogue between present and future. That happens to be a good way of thinking about this unique work. It is part imaginary ethnography and part literary anthology of a people, the […]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Always Coming Home, ceremonial life, culture, nature, power, story-telling, technology, Ursula K. Le Guin

Linda Nagata Edges: Contending Human and Alien Minds

By John Folk-Williams

Linda Nagata's Edges

“Against a starscape, a smudge of white light. A faint gleam, devoid of detail.” With those few words Linda Nagata begins Edges, picking up a story of human survival in a hostile universe she last explored over twenty years ago. Nagata published six science fiction novels between 1995 – 2003 but then took a long […]

Filed Under: Indie SciFi, Space Opera Tagged With: alien minds, Inverted Frontier, Linda Nagata, Nanotech Succession, neural network, robotic spaceships, subminds

Doris Lessing: Shikasta

By John Folk-Williams

Doris Lessing: Shikasta

In an era when science fiction insists on “showing” rather than “telling”, Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series challenges readers to think differently. In five books, starting with Shikasta in 1979, she produced an epic scale work more in the vein of Olaf Stapledon’s universal histories than current best-sellers, and no less dazzling and […]

Filed Under: Great Series Read Project, Reviews, Space Opera Tagged With: apocalypse, colonialism, Doris Lessing, galactic empires, Shikasta, sufism

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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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The Fiction Addiction 📚 Thank you for following me!!

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A fine review - this book is next on my list: nerds of a feather, flock together: Review: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh http://www.nerds-feather.com/2023/03/review-some-desperate-glory-by-emily.html?spref=tw

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Thanks for introducing me to another fine author: INFINITY GATE by M.R. Carey - Review https://booksbonesbuffy.com/2023/03/20/infinity-gate-by-m-r-carey-review/ via @tammy_sparks

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Sounds like an incredible book: Why You Need to Read: "Assassin of Reality" https://mistyaquavenatus.com/2023/03/18/why-you-need-to-read-assassin-of-reality/ via @AquaVenatus #scifi #sff

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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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