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The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

By John Folk-Williams

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 […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: alien language, androids, artificial intelligence, communication, consciousness, corporate dystopia, octopus, robots, slavery

Strange Encounters – 3 Science Books for SFF Readers

By John Folk-Williams

Under Alien Skies - Strange Encounters

Strange encounters with alien places and intelligences are the staple of science fiction and fantasy, yet it’s not only in fiction where these can be explored. Many recent popular science books look with great sensitivity and imagination at forms of intelligence on Earth that have been overlooked in the past and at the real environments, […]

Filed Under: Science and Related Books for SFF Readers Tagged With: alien life forms, black holes, consciousness, forests, galaxy, memory, octopus, Peter Wohlleben, Philip Plait, spaceships, Sy Montgomery

Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse by S.B. Divya

By John Folk-Williams

Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse

Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse and other Possible Situations by S.B. Divya, author of Machinehood and Meru, is a deeply interesting collection of fourteen stories, many quite short, all of them posing life-changing choices for each central character. The prose is supple, ranging from lushly sensuous description to stripped down action. The author perfectly matches […]

Filed Under: Short Fiction Tagged With: choice, consciousness, cyborg, evolution, love, neurodiversity, pain, S.B. Divya, transhuman, uploaded minds

Robotic Ambitions Kickstarter from Apex

By John Folk-Williams

Robotic Ambitions Apex Book Company

Apex Book Company will begin a Kickstarter campaign on February 21st to raise funds for a new anthology, Robotic Ambitions. I don’t usually join in campaigns like this, but Apex is an important institution in the SFF world. I’d like to help make this book possible — I have to add that I have no […]

Filed Under: Short Fiction Tagged With: androids, Apex Books, artificial intelligence, consciousness, robots

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

By John Folk-Williams

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds is a key book of short stories for understanding many aspects of the Revelation Space universe. The novels and stories within that universe follow human settlement of many star systems over several centuries. In the course of this future history, humans adapt in many ways, especially through the use of […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: Alastair Reynolds, consciousness, love, memory, neural network, Revelation Space, space colonies, spaceships, transhuman

A Storm of Wings – A Novel of Viriconium by M. John Harrison

By John Folk-Williams

A Storm of Wings Viriconium

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), […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction Tagged With: alien life forms, city, civilization, consciousness, human survival, M. John Harrison, memory, rebirth

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Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. This blog is my small way of exploring the half-perceived … Read More about About

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