To round out for now this series on cities in SFF, I’m revisiting a few novels that capture the importance of how people experience urban environments and how the massive structures affect their language and thought. A city, after all, is not just buildings and a way of physically organizing dense populations, but also a […]
The Horizon by Gautam Bhatia
In The Horizon, Gautam Bhatia has written a masterful sequel to his first novel, The Wall, that brings together a close examination of the politics of radical change with the songs and stories that can sustain but sometimes also limit the imagination of what is possible in life. Directly following the climactic ending of The […]
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin – A Review for #VintageSciFiMonth
For me, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a treasure — along with The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven, I think, her finest work in science fiction. It brings together so many of her themes in a complex story that is beautifully written and deeply engaging. Themes like coming home, […]
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s tour de force, Elder Race, we first encounter Lynesse (Lyn), Fourth Daughter of the tough minded Queen of Lannesite, climbing the steep rugged slopes of a mountain to call forth a powerful wizard. As only the fourth daughter, Lyn is never taken seriously, but she is determined to change that by destroying […]
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
With a cascade of luminous and psychologically intricate prose, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace picks up shortly after the conclusion of A Memory Called Empire. It’s another brilliant book that I find even richer than the first volume of this series on the Teixcalaan Empire and its remote satellite, Lsel Station. The two novels […]
Communicating Feelings in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17
I’ve never felt so close to a brilliant mind playing with the possibilities of language and the difficulty of communicating feelings as I have when reading Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17. Of course, this SFF adventure from the early 1960s is all about language, the mysterious one named in its title. It’s up to Rydra Wong, […]
