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Visions of Future Worlds

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Six SFF Visions of Governing the Future

By John Folk-Williams

Infomocracy Governing the Future

There have been an abundance of SFF novels depicting dystopian conditions coming in the next century but relatively few that have offered a vision of governing the future. What would it be like to live amid the surviving or transformed structures of a different world? Would ordinary people have any say or freedom? Here are […]

Filed Under: Favorite SFF Tagged With: agency, Becky Chambers, Failed State, governing the future, H.G. Wells, Infomocracy, Malka Older, society, William Gibson

Machine (White Space 2) by Elizabeth Bear

By John Folk-Williams

Machine by Elizabeth Bear

There’s nothing like a scary family illness (fortunately all over with now) to take my mind far from blogging for a couple of weeks, and there’s nothing like a compelling Elizabeth Bear novel like Machine to bring me right back. Machine is the second White Space novel, following Ancestral Night, set in the Synarche universe, […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Space Opera Tagged With: alien minds, Elizabeth Bear, medicine, sentient beings, space governance, spaceships, Synarche

Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk

By John Folk-Williams

Primeval by Olga Tokarczuk

Olga Tokarczuk’s Primeval and Other Times, finely translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, is a uniquely fantastical search through the multiple worlds and forms of time found in the life of a fictional village in Poland during the 20th century. I’ve never read anything like it. On one level, it depicts the lives of a group of […]

Filed Under: International Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction in Translation Tagged With: angels, being, multiple worlds, Olga Tokarczuk, Poland, souls, time, twentieth century, war

By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar #WyrdandWonder

By John Folk-Williams

By Force Alone by Lavie Tidhar

I hope no one is so jaded on Arthurian fantasy that they can’t enjoy this glorious retelling and meticulous tear-down of every facet of the over-familiar stories. Every character comes to scurrilous life in By Force Alone, as that title phrase echoes over and over throughout this dynamic, hilarious and strangely moving book. I say […]

Filed Under: Epic Fantasy, Wyrd and Wonder Tagged With: Arthurian fantasy, fairyland, Lavie Tidhar, magic, myth, primal Britain, violence

Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler #WyrdandWonder

By John Folk-Williams

Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler

Ashes of the Sun by Django Wexler is the first book of the Burningblade & Silverye series, and it’s a roaring good adventure. Just don’t expect anything deeper from the story. It focuses on Gyre and Maya, brother and sister, who are violently separated in childhood when a fearsome warrior known as a centarch removes […]

Filed Under: Secondary World Fantasy, Wyrd and Wonder Tagged With: adventure, alien technology, cities, combat action, epic fantasy, magic, rebellion

The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo #WyrdandWonder

By John Folk-Williams

Singing Hills - Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo

Look, I can’t pretend to keep up with the outpouring of fine SFF writing we are now witnessing, so I’m dipping into the recent past to discuss a pair of stories that are so perfect in their way that it’s hard to write about them. Nghi Vo is a storyteller of dazzling gifts, and her […]

Filed Under: Secondary World Fantasy, Wyrd and Wonder Tagged With: Asian fantasy, empire, love, memory, Nghi Vo, nonbinary, shape-shifting, story-telling

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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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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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