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Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

By John Folk-Williams

Where the Axe Is Buried

Ray Nayler’s haunting novel, Where the Axe Is Buried, draws us into a dystopian world governed in most countries by AIs, and in one Federation, by a single human mind successively incorporated into different bodies to achieve a kind of immortality. While some of the AI governed countries see themselves as free and the Federation […]

Filed Under: Future History Tagged With: artificial intelligence, dystopia, governing the future, oppression, power, Ray Nayler, surveillance society

She Who Knows and One Way Witch by Nnedi Okorafor #Wyrd&Wonder

By John Folk-Williams

She Who Knows

She Who Knows and One Way Witch are the first two novellas in Nnedi Okorafor’s She Who Knows trilogy. This series, in turn, is part of her larger Africanfuturist epic that reaches back 500 years to The Book of Phoenix. I’ve read three parts of Okorafor’s epic story. Who Fears Death is the story of […]

Filed Under: Secondary World Fantasy, Wyrd and Wonder Tagged With: Nnedi Okorafor, oppression, power, racism, religion, shapeshifter, spirits, transformation

Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus

By John Folk-Williams

Breath of Oblivion Astra Black 2

Breath of Oblivion by Maurice Broaddus is the second novel in his Astra Black series (following 2022’s Sweep of Stars) and moves the story of the Muungano world forward from multiple perspectives, each of which probes the internal struggles of a large cast of characters. While the novel shifts more to deepening our understanding of […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: Africanfuturism, alien life forms, colonialism, community, consciousness, family, Maurice Broaddus, oppression, power, religion

Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope

By John Folk-Williams

Daughter of the Merciful Deep

After yet more downtime caused by, first, the misery of a post-covid illness, something like a cold from hell, and then happy times during a special family birthday gathering, I managed to start reading again with Daughter of the Merciful Deep by Leslye Penelope. I was so impressed with her earlier The Monsters We Defy […]

Filed Under: Historical Fantasy Tagged With: family, freedom, gods, Leslye Penelope, memory, oppression, power, religion

These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs

By John Folk-Williams

These Burning Stars

Before getting into the gripping debut novel, These Burning Stars, by Bethany Jacobs, I need to mention a few things about this blog. After four years of writing reviews for SciFi Mind, I ran into a burnout period earlier this year and took some time off. I’m getting back into review mode again but find […]

Filed Under: Space Opera Tagged With: Bethany Jacobs, colonialism, exploitation, identity, oppression, power, rebellion, revenge, social classes

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

By John Folk-Williams

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

Set primarily in an alternative version of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Kelly Barnhill’s magnificent When Women Were Dragons tells many stories. There is the story of the mass dragoning of April 25, 1955, when over 642,987 mothers and wives stepped out of their human skins to live as dragons, and of […]

Filed Under: Urban Fantasy Tagged With: dragons, family, human emotion, Kelly Barnhill, liberation, memory, oppression, sapphic love

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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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