From the beginning of M. John Harrison’s A Storm of Wings (1980), you know you’re entering a shattered world with a diminishing human presence, but it is also a dazzling world captured in densely brilliant and beautiful prose. This second novel of the Viriconium series caught me by surprise. The first, The Pastel City (1971), […]
Neom by Lavie Tidhar – A Review
In the helpful afterward to his hauntingly beautiful new novel, Neom, Lavie Tidhar describes his process of writing it as one of discovery. He wrote about a robot going to the flower market of the bustling city of Neom to buy a single rose. But why? He had to write another story to answer that […]
Amazing Cities in SFF – 3
To round out for now this series on cities in SFF, I’m revisiting a few novels that capture the importance of how people experience urban environments and how the massive structures affect their language and thought. A city, after all, is not just buildings and a way of physically organizing dense populations, but also a […]
Fevered Star and Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse
Fevered Star is the second book in Rebecca Roanhorse’s brilliantly imagined series Between Earth and Sky. Picking up directly after the conclusion of Black Sun, Fevered Star pushes its central characters in new directions while building on their gods-driven purposes played out in a richly imagined setting that draws together elements of many pre-Columbian American […]
3 Great Books about Cities for SciFi Readers
Since I’ve been writing about cities in science fiction recently, I thought it would be helpful to highlight three great books about cities that can give readers a lot of ideas on the growth and transformation of these centers of human life. People have been congregating in cities since they began to trade goods and […]
Dark Theory by Wick Welker
Wick Welker’s Dark Theory (the first volume of a series called Dark Law) poses basic questions about what it means to be human in a far-future poisoned world. The story begins in a junkyard where people have to scavenge the means of survival. Two young women, the generous-hearted Lucindi and the hardened and cynical Miree, […]
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