To finish up my re-reading of Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy, this week I’m looking at his Second Foundation. The novel, published in this form in 1953, is a reprinting of two novellas published in Astounding magazine in 1948-50. This third novel may not have quite the dramatic impact of The Mule (in Foundation and […]
The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao
Having been blogged out, read out, burned out and whatever else I can think of as down and out recently, I was determined to give myself a long summer break, determined that is until I picked up The Surviving Sky by Kritika H. Rao. I could not put this debut novel down. The powerful clash […]
Ethera Grave by Essa Hansen (Part 3 of The Graven Trilogy)
Essa Hansen’s Ethera Grave may be the conclusion of her Graven trilogy (following Nophek Gloss and Azura Ghost), but it does far more than bring to an exciting and powerful conclusion a complex story. The novel expands its multiverse in dazzling ways and probes numerous questions of moral choice, diversity, transformation, time, the power of […]
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 […]
Strange Encounters – 3 Science Books for SFF Readers
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, […]
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse by S.B. Divya
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 […]
