As I was starting to take notes for this review of Gene Wolfe’s novel, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), and went back to check on a passage, I would often find that I had missed something and wound up rereading not just that one part but a long or even complete section of this […]
Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter
It’s been a while since I discussed science books for scifi readers, and that’s due to all my down time, not any lack of great books. But then I found something different: Lunar, A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter, edited by Mathew Shindell, who is Curator of Planetary Science at the […]
Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky takes on familiar themes in Alien Clay, but, as always, he shuffles the cards of his imagined realities to create a story that is also uniquely powerful. Arton Daghdev, an academic revolutionary who transgressed the rules of orthodoxy imposed by the dictatorial Mandate on Earth (similar to the Perfection ideology in Days of […]
Days of Shattered Faith by Adrian Tchaikovsky
In his afterward to Days of Shattered Faith, Adrian Tchaikovsky makes the self-evident statement that this third novel in a projected series of five secondary world fantasies, known as The Tyrant Philosophers, is not a work of history. But he says that he owes a lot to a couple of historians, notably Anita Anand and […]
Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus
Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus is the second novel in his Astra Black series (following 2022’s Sweep of Stars) and moves the story of the Muungano world forward from multiple perspectives, each of which probes the internal struggles of a large cast of characters. While the novel shifts more to deepening our understanding of […]
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafur #SciFiMonth
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafur adds to the great Africanfuturist epic Okorafur began in Who Fears Death (and which she continues with her new novella, She Who Knows). This is a prequel that describes the destruction that led to the world of the first novel, with its sharp division between light and dark […]
