I suppose one little month can’t get much worse than this past November. Following soon after the depressing election came a bureaucratic nightmare threatening health insurance, a case of shingles and, by far the worst of all, the death of a close relative after a long illness. But the one book that brought back a […]
Otherlands and More Science Books for Science Fiction Readers
Here are three excellent books about science that I’ve found helpful for updating ideas about the origins of life, the nature of the mind and the vanished worlds of extinct creatures and environments that preceded our present precarious moment. Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday is one of the most extraordinary […]
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction – 2021
The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021), edited by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, reprints 29 gripping stories that test the limits of everyday reality. As diverse as the stories are, most of them push their characters across boundaries between this world and the spirit world, between past and present, human and robot, the living and the […]
Philip K. Dick on What Is Science Fiction? #SciFiMonth
Philip K. Dick on What Is Science Fiction? continues an occasional series exploring how writers have thought about their craft and what it means. Instead of looking for pedantic definitions, I’m examining the ideas about science fiction that some of the best writers have offered, not as definitions but as reflections on their chosen genre […]
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – A Review
Never having read Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, I picked up her Piranesi with no preconceptions about the sort of book it might be and promptly fell in love with it. It’s a masterful fable about life in this world that introduces us to the mind of a narrator who proclaims himself to […]
