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The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older

By John Folk-Williams

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

Malka Older, activist, scholar, teacher, international humanitarian worker and author of The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses is one of my culture heroes for her ability to combine multiple activities, any one of which would constitute a demanding career for less gifted people. This is the third installment in her Mossa and Pleiti mystery series (the […]

Filed Under: SciFi Mystery-Thriller Tagged With: city, language, Malka Older, mystery, relationships, ruined earth, sapphic love, space community

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

By John Folk-Williams

Who Fears Death

Who Fears Death (2010) by Nnedi Okorafor puzzled me at first. The central character, Onyesonwu, (whose name means “who fears death”) is an outcast figure, a child of rape, who is avoided by most people and as a result angry most of the time. But the story reveals her life on two levels, the physical […]

Filed Under: Post-Apocalytic Tagged With: Africanfuturism, colonialism, language, magic, Nnedi Okorafor, power, religion, sacrifice, shapeshifter, spirits

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review for #SciFiMonth

By John Folk-Williams

Children of Time

I needed to re-read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky because I was tone-deaf years ago to what the author was doing when I first opened this novel. Yeah, I was a bit turned off by characters who were spiders but more so by the narrative voice of those sections describing their evolution. There was […]

Filed Under: SciFiMonth, Space Opera Tagged With: Adrian Tchaikovsky, alien life forms, civilization, commmunication, gods, language, power, religion, terraforming, war

Menewood by Nicola Griffith

By John Folk-Williams

Menewood by Nicola Griffith

As Nicola Griffith, author of Menewood, second in her Hild series, said in a recent interview, she expects to be writing about this seventh century British saint (the abbess of Whitby in her later years) for the rest of her life. The character of Hild she has created through 20 years of research is unforgettably […]

Filed Under: Great Series Read Project, Historical Fantasy Tagged With: historical fiction, language, nature, Nicola Griffith, power, primal Britain, religion, war

Babel: An Arcane History by R. F. Kuang

By John Folk-Williams

Babel An Arcane History

Babel, the new standalone novel by R.F. Kuang (author of the Poppy War trilogy), has the lengthy subtitle: or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. It may seem strange to talk about violence, revolution and academic translators in one breath, but make no mistake, this is a compelling story […]

Filed Under: Historical Fantasy Tagged With: alternate history, colonialism, empire, friendship, identity, language, power, R.F. Kuang, racism, revolution

Amazing Cities in SFF – 3

By John Folk-Williams

The Wall Sumer Cities in SFF

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 […]

Filed Under: SFF Cities Tagged With: Arkady Martine, city, culture, Gautam Bhatia, language, Lavie Tidhar, memory, myth, poetry, power, religion

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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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  • The Potency of Ungovernable ImpulsesThe Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older
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  • Death of the AuthorDeath of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor
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