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Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – A Review

By John Folk-Williams

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Never having read Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, I picked up her Piranesi with no preconceptions about the sort of book it might be and promptly fell in love with it. It’s a masterful fable about life in this world that introduces us to the mind of a narrator who proclaims himself to […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction Tagged With: alternate worlds, consciousness, fable, identity, memory, Piranesi, psychic powers, Susanna Clarke

Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds – A Review

By John Folk-Williams

Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds brings us back to the Revelation Space universe with the magnificent Inhibitor Phase. It’s a story about sacrifice, redemption, rebirth and basic human bonds of friendship, love and loyalty that builds to a powerful conclusion. Now, a confession here. When I started reading science fiction seriously almost 20 years ago, Alastair Reynolds and […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Space Opera Tagged With: Alastair Reynolds, alien life forms, consciousness, human survival, identity, inhibitors, memory, rebirth, redemption, Revelation Space, sacrifice

Ursula K. Le Guin on What Is Science Fiction?

By John Folk-Williams

What is Science Fiction Ursula K. Le Guin

When I started this blog, I considered having a page offering various answers to the question, What is science fiction? There are so many different, often clashing views that I thought that would be interesting, but I eventually rejected the idea because it seems too pedantic to even suggest that there is or ought to […]

Filed Under: What is Science Fiction Tagged With: art, C.G. Jung, character, consciousness, myth, Philip K. Dick, unconscious, Ursula K. Le Guin

The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar – A Review

By John Folk-Williams

The Escapement by Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar’s The Escapement starts quietly enough: A man who has been sitting with his very ill son in a hospital room steps out for some fresh air and notices a small red flower by the sidewalk. Then we see that flower through the eyes of the Stranger in a surreal, barren landscape. We are […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction Tagged With: clowns, consciousness, giants, Lavie Tidhar, reality, surreal landscape, time

Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review

By John Folk-Williams

Shards of Earth

Adrian Tchaikovsky has an immense imagination, and the scope of Shards of Earth gives it vast space. Literally vast since the novel and its strange crew of salvagers moves from one planetary system to another through the terrifying bent space-time depths known as unspace in what seem to be moments. But those moments are pure […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Space Opera, Taking on My SciFi TBR Tagged With: alien life forms, altered minds, consciousness, family, galactic empires, symbionts

Northwest Smith Stories by C. L. Moore

By John Folk-Williams

Northwest Smith by C. L. Moore

Getting to the end of Vintage SciFi Month, I’m back to the 1930s again with the amazing Northwest Smith Stories by C. L. Moore. Lurid and pulpy though they are, well matching the Weird Tales cover art of Margaret Brundage, each story is a tour de force of riveting intensity. But be prepared. Lurid they […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: C.L. Moore, consciousness, Mars, mind, Northwest Smith, pulp fiction, Siren, supernatural, trance, transhuman, vampire, Venus

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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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