Marlon James’ Moon Witch Spider King (second book of the Dark Star trilogy) impressed me at first as everything I had missed in the first novel, Black Leopard Red Wolf. There was a story of emotional depth I could link into and a brilliant character I could care about, as opposed to the strangely alienating […]
Slipping by Mohamed Kheir – A Review for #SciFiMonth
Mohamed Kheir has written in Slipping a brilliant series of stories that drop their characters out of time and space for brief periods and interweave their narratives to challenge the limits of story-telling. The effect is like a folding of reality itself as the terms of their lives change directions in a stray encounter here, […]
The Singing Hills Cycle by Nghi Vo #WyrdandWonder
Look, I can’t pretend to keep up with the outpouring of fine SFF writing we are now witnessing, so I’m dipping into the recent past to discuss a pair of stories that are so perfect in their way that it’s hard to write about them. Nghi Vo is a storyteller of dazzling gifts, and her […]
Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi
In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, it takes a neighborhood of strange characters, rather than an over-reaching scientist as with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to create a monster. And it takes a good story, whether or not it is true, just so long as it is believed. There are many stories and levels of truth in […]
Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: Dialogue Between Present and Future
When Samuel R. Delany reviewed Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home on its publication in 1985, he referred to science fiction as a dialogue between present and future. That happens to be a good way of thinking about this unique work. It is part imaginary ethnography and part literary anthology of a people, the […]
