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You are here: Home / Archives for spaceships

Machine (White Space 2) by Elizabeth Bear

By John Folk-Williams

Machine 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, […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Space Opera Tagged With: alien minds, Elizabeth Bear, medicine, sentient beings, space governance, spaceships, Synarche

Divergence and Diversity in Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen

By John Folk-Williams

SciFiMonth Diversity and Divergence in Nophek Gloss

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 […]

Filed Under: Reviews, SciFiMonth Tagged With: alien life forms, divergence, diversity, Essa Hansen, multiple worlds, multiverse, power, privilege, spaceships, trauma

Understanding the Alien in Eden by Stanisław Lem

By John Folk-Williams

Understanding the Alien in Eden by Stanislaw 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 […]

Filed Under: Science Fiction in Translation, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: alien life forms, alien minds, first contact, human, spaceships, Stanisław Lem

Human Connection in The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

By John Folk-Williams

Human connection in Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

Simon Jimenez‘ The Vanished Birds is an amazing novel that takes you from humble beginnings on an agrarian planet across thousand-year time spans, multiple worlds, journeys through folded space, then by instant travel into mysterious dimensions beyond time and normal reality into the depths of human connection. It offers powerful and lyrical testament to the […]

Filed Under: Fantasy Fiction, Reviews Tagged With: colonialism, connection, human emotion, love, music, spaceships, time dilation

Communicating Feelings in Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17

By John Folk-Williams

Communicating feelings in 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, […]

Filed Under: Reviews, Vintage Science Fiction Tagged With: communication, feelings, language, poet, spaceships

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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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