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 […]
Blade – Inverted Frontier 4 by Linda Nagata
In previous novels of the Inverted Frontier series (Edges, Silver and Needle), Linda Nagata often posed the question of what it took to retain humanity in the face of alien power. In Blade Inverted Frontier 4 (out of a projected 5 volume series) she confronts as never before the potential of human destructiveness. Is it […]
Machine Vendetta by Alastair Reynolds: A Prefect Dreyfus Novel
Alastair Reynolds has produced a fine, fast-paced thriller in Machine Vendetta, the third, and apparently final novel in the Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies series. The series, set in the Revelation Space universe, specifically the Glitter Band of ten thousand habitats orbiting Yellowstone, began in 2007 with The Prefect, now called Aurora Rising. We had to wait […]
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
I was late coming to Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, partly because it seemed too Earth-bound a story, partly because I thought it might be too much a novel of ideas, cut off from the flesh-and-blood characters that make a story work. My impressions were completely wrong. The Mountain in the Sea is […]
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh set herself a difficult task in Some Desperate Glory. Present the reader with a young protagonist raised in a militaristic society who is all about duty, war-breeding, xenophobia, homophobia and worse, then draw her through enough world-shattering experiences to make her interesting, flaws and all, from start to finish. And Tesh hits the […]
