With a cascade of luminous and psychologically intricate prose, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace picks up shortly after the conclusion of A Memory Called Empire. It’s another brilliant book that I find even richer than the first volume of this series on the Teixcalaan Empire and its remote satellite, Lsel Station. The two novels […]
City in Time: Tade Thompson’s Rosewater Redemption
Tade Thompson begins Rosewater Redemption, the concluding volume of his Wormwood trilogy, with a kind of fugue, an almost musical prelude in which the major characters re-enter the story, each changed by what has gone before. We see Rosewater in all its multiplicity, through the eyes of each character, as a city in time, experienced […]
SciFiMonth: Colonizing the Mind in Tade Thompson’s Rosewater Insurrection
With #SciFiMonth getting underway, and a certain election holding our fates in the balance, my reading has turned to more political scifi themes, or maybe I’m just more attuned than ever to that dimension of so many recent books. I’m in the midst of Tade Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy and find it more engrossing with every […]
Alien Cells in Mind: Rosewater by Tade Thompson
Tade Thompson, a psychiatrist who is also a prolific writer, has created an original interpretation of a classic science fiction theme in his Rosewater, the opening novel in the Wormwood trilogy – that of first contact on earth as alien cells enter human minds across the world. An alien mass hits the earth in Hyde […]
Understanding the Alien in Eden by Stanisław Lem
Is understanding the alien even possible for the human mind? That is the question posed by Stanisław Lem‘s Eden, a 1958 novel translated by Marc E. Heine for publication in English in 1989. And has anyone ever had a more exuberant imagination than this great Polish writer in presenting baffling alien civilizations for humans to […]
Red Desert Series by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli: A Review
Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli’s Red Desert four-part series reads like a single captivating novel with a fascinating character named Anna Persson at its core. She’s an exobiologist sent on a mission to colonize Mars, yet her impulsive, angry, headstrong nature breaks the psychological mold of an astronaut and plunges her into one difficult situation after […]
