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Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir, Translated by Robin Moger

By John Folk-Williams

Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir

Mohamed Kheir’s Sleep Phase, beautifully translated by Robin Moger (who also translated Kheir’s story collection, Slipping) brought to mind related neurodivergent conditions that I once wrote about on my mental health blog, Storied Mind. To experience the world as derealized is the feeling that the world around you is not quite real or completely strange […]

Filed Under: International Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction in Translation Tagged With: city, consciousness, identity, memory, Mohamed Kheir, neurodiversity

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

By John Folk-Williams

Death of the Author

Death of the Author marks the second time (the first being Who Fears Death) Nnedi Okorafor has led me through a reading experience that felt interesting but not overwhelming only to deliver an ending section that made me wonder how she does it. For that ending delivers a powerful impact that changes my view of […]

Filed Under: Post-Apocalytic Tagged With: artificial intelligence, family, identity, imagination, love, Nnedi Okorafor, robots, story-telling

Dissolution by Nicholas Binge

By John Folk-Williams

Dissolution by Nicholas Binge

At its core, Dissolution by Nicholas Binge is a love story about a fiercely determined 83 year-old woman who is trying to recapture the memory and hence the identity of her husband whose selfhood has mostly disappeared. But Dissolution feels nothing like a romance. It is a tense thriller in which the titular phenomenon threatens […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: horror, identity, love, memory, Nicholas Binge, time travel, transhuman

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe

By John Folk-Williams

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

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 […]

Filed Under: Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien life forms, clones, colonialism, Gene Wolfe, identity, indigenous culture, memory

The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

By John Folk-Williams

The Sentence by Gautam Bhatia

Much like his earlier novels, The Wall and The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has created a secondary world with action taking place within a single city in his deeply interesting new book, The Sentence. On one level, this is a story about two sections of a divided city, Peruma, one ruled by a Council of corporations […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller, SFF Cities Tagged With: anarchism, capitalism, class structure, Gautam Bhatia, identity, justice, law, revolution

The Great When by Alan Moore

By John Folk-Williams

The Great When by Alan Moore

I suppose one little month can’t get much worse than this past November. Following soon after the depressing election came a bureaucratic nightmare threatening health insurance, a case of shingles and, by far the worst of all, the death of a close relative after a long illness. But the one book that brought back a […]

Filed Under: Parallel World Fantasy Tagged With: Alan Moore, alternate worlds, city, identity, London, magic, surreal landscape

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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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