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 […]
Linda Nagata Silver: Holding on to Human Identity
Linda Nagata has always dramatized complex ideas about human identity, but her new novel, Silver, second in the Inverted Frontier series, pushes this exploration to a new level. She combines two story-worlds to achieve this. Edges, the first book in this new series, brought us back to the world of the Nanotech Succession universe, while […]
Linda Nagata Edges: Contending Human and Alien Minds
“Against a starscape, a smudge of white light. A faint gleam, devoid of detail.” With those few words Linda Nagata begins Edges, picking up a story of human survival in a hostile universe she last explored over twenty years ago. Nagata published six science fiction novels between 1995 – 2003 but then took a long […]
