Ray Nayler’s haunting novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, draws us into a dystopian world governed in most countries by AIs, and in one Federation, by a single human mind successively incorporated into different bodies to achieve a kind of immortality. While some of the AI governed countries see themselves as free and the Federation […]
The Folded Sky (White Space Book 3) by Elizabeth Bear
Elizabeth Bear’s The Folded Sky, the third novel in her White Space series, tells a stand-alone story, full of grand space opera tropes, including Alcubierre-White drives that fold space for faster than light travel, space pirates, sentient ships, a diverse crew of “syster” species, and a star about to go nova. But it’s not just […]
Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
Death of the Author marks the second time (the first being Who Fears Death) Nnedi Okorafor has led me through a reading experience that felt interesting but not overwhelming only to deliver an ending section that made me wonder how she does it. For that ending delivers a powerful impact that changes my view 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 […]
Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
I once read that most novel plots could be reduced to two great starting points: a stranger comes to town, and someone goes on a journey. In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s comic and thought-provoking Service Model, the one-time valet robot named Charles embarks on a journey to discover the source of a fatal error in his routines. […]
Convergence Problems by Wole Talabi
Wole Talabi, in his brilliant story collection Convergence Problems, offers an intriguing idea about how stories can be told. It contrasts sharply with the method made famous by James Joyce in Dubliners where characters reach a climactic moment of epiphany in which they grasp some great truth about themselves. That approach has been done to […]
