The Employees by Olga Ravn, in a beautiful translation from the Danish by Martin Aitken, requires a suspension of expectations about science fiction but nevertheless delivers a devastating impact. As a collection of statements by the crew members of a spaceship, both human and humanoid, it has little narrative drive at first, though it does […]
Belladonna Nights and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds
Belladonna Nights and Other Stories is a great way to get into Alastair Reynolds’ short fiction. Ever since reading the beautiful “Nightingale” in Galactic North, set in the Revelation Space universe, I’ve been alert to a theme of personal loss and grief caused by separation from a loved one or because of the imminence of […]
Far from the Light of Heaven by Tade Thompson – A Review
In Far from the Light of Heaven, Tade Thompson, author of the Wormwood Trilogy, constructs a fine murder mystery on board a colony space ship in methodical detail. Step by step he introduces characters and settings, with just enough detail to bring each person to life and give each of their worlds its full reality. […]
Machine (White Space 2) by Elizabeth Bear
There’s nothing like a scary family illness (fortunately all over with now) to take my mind far from blogging for a couple of weeks, and there’s nothing like a compelling Elizabeth Bear novel like Machine to bring me right back. Machine is the second White Space novel, following Ancestral Night, set in the Synarche universe, […]
Divergence and Diversity in Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen
A lot of the SciFiMonth team have featured Nophek Gloss, and as soon as I got into the book I could see why. This first novel in the Graven Trilogy startles with vivid language born of an imagination that is at once hypersensitive to details of change and alive with synesthetic richness. Essa Hansen tells […]
Understanding the Alien in Eden by Stanisław Lem
Is understanding the alien even possible for the human mind? That is the question posed by Stanisław Lem‘s Eden, a 1958 novel translated by Marc E. Heine for publication in English in 1989. And has anyone ever had a more exuberant imagination than this great Polish writer in presenting baffling alien civilizations for humans to […]
