Adrian Tchaikovsky’s gripping novel Shroud reworks one of the oldest stories in the world of a hero lost in a hostile world and trying to get home. Facing the unknown, those who are cast adrift have to use every resource at their disposal and their own wits and training to survive. Of course, in Tchaikovsky’s […]
The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
As I was starting to take notes for this review of Gene Wolfe’s novel, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), and went back to check on a passage, I would often find that I had missed something and wound up rereading not just that one part but a long or even complete section of this […]
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky takes on familiar themes in Alien Clay, but, as always, he shuffles the cards of his imagined realities to create a story that is also uniquely powerful. Arton Daghdev, an academic revolutionary who transgressed the rules of orthodoxy imposed by the dictatorial Mandate on Earth (similar to the Perfection ideology in Days of […]
Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus
Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus is the second novel in his Astra Black series (following 2022’s Sweep of Stars) and moves the story of the Muungano world forward from multiple perspectives, each of which probes the internal struggles of a large cast of characters. While the novel shifts more to deepening our understanding of […]
Future’s Edge by Gareth L. Powell, A Review for #SciFiMonth
OK, I’m glad to be part of SciFi Month again, and I will get to my review of Gareth L. Powell’s Future’s Edge, but I have to say how hard it is to write anything in the wake of the US election. I guess you have to be a US citizen of strong liberal values […]
Embassytown by China Miéville
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 […]
