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You are here: Home / Archives for alien language

Embassytown by China Miéville

By John Folk-Williams

Embassytown

When I first read China Miéville’s Embassytown, which I now regard as a nearly perfect novel, I didn’t get it. The story seemed to move quite nicely to an anticlimax, I thought, where a potential massacre turns on a dime because of language. My fault – I was expecting the normal sort of adventure and […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: alien language, alien life forms, China Miéville, city, colonialism, communication, rebellion

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

By John Folk-Williams

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

I was late coming to Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, partly because it seemed too Earth-bound a story, partly because I thought it might be too much a novel of ideas, cut off from the flesh-and-blood characters that make a story work. My impressions were completely wrong. The Mountain in the Sea is […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: alien language, androids, artificial intelligence, communication, consciousness, corporate dystopia, octopus, robots, slavery

9 Unforgettable SFF Standalone Novels I Read in 2020

By John Folk-Williams

Human connection in Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

I was surprised in looking over all the books I’ve read this year that the great majority of them belonged to series, but several were unforgettable SFF standalone novels. These were not all published in 2020 – in fact most are older, some quite a bit older, but they were new to me in this […]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: alien language, city, dystopia, fantastika, human emotion, oppression, transhuman, unforgettable sff standalone novels

The Book of Strange New Things: The Alien Language of Human Connection

By John Folk-Williams

Alien Language of Human Emotion The Book of Strange New Things

There is a powerful moment in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, when Peter Leigh, transported across light years to minister to a alien congregation on the planet Oasis, delivers a moving eulogy about a man he has hardly known. The scene captures Peter’s ability to get to the core of the life […]

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: alien, alien language, human emotion, Michel Faber, space colonies

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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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