(Revised 3/31/2024) It’s a month since I came down with covid, and I’m still dealing with weird aftereffects. But an excellent way to get my brain going again came to hand in the form of The Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon. A lot of collections refer to their stories as “unforgettable” but this set of […]

The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August is the winner of the second Self Published Science Fiction Competition, and it’s easy to see why it came out ahead of the hundreds of other novels. But before I get into my review, I’d like to say how grateful I am that SPSFC exists. Without […]

The Blue, Beautiful World by Karen Lord, the latest in her Cygnus Beta novels, is unlike any science fictional work I’ve recently read. It depicts familiar elements: a vast scale of galactic politics, a humanoid diaspora in space, a climate-changed Earth where cities are being enclosed in protective globes and many current nation states have […]

From the moment an enemy fighter squadron breaks out of the sky for a sneak attack on a key industrial park, Kate Elliott’s Unconquerable Sun delivers an intricate yet fast paced adventure like few I’ve ever read. The 20 year-old Princess Sun, heir to Chaonia’s terrifying queen-marshall, Eirene, is put to the test again and […]

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. […]

Keith Cooper’s The Contact Paradox is a brilliant probing of the motives and technologies behind the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). If you’re like me, you might know that SETI has been going on for sixty years and that no signals have turned up pointing to an advanced civilization. And not much more. You probably […]