Book Review: Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer
I think Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance justifies its size and then some.
And for the genre reader, this is a chonky, valuable book for showing that the past is a different country…and yet the people in it are awfully human. One can get a real appreciation for authors like Jo Graham and Guy Gavriel Kay by reading the full-on history that Palmer provides here…
Book Review : City of Last Chances
… And so we come to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The City of Last Chances. With the recent publication of the third book in this ‘verse, Days of Shattered Faith, I thought it would be good to take a look at how the series began.
Mining the Genre Asteroid: Kingsley Amis’ THE ALTERATION
Maybe you want a dystopia of a different sort, a dystopia that gets less play, less attention, a world less visited. A world less seen but no less dark than the usual dystopic alternate histories.
Book Review: Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang (translation by Ken Liu)
Jumpnauts, in the end, is a very ambitious and interesting novel.
Review: The Siege of Burning Grass by Premee Mohamed
The Siege of Burning Grass is a book that rewards patient and slow reading rather than skipping merrily through it. The author is engaging with weighty subjects here and you want to take this patiently and think about the central themes again and what is going on.
Book Review: Son of the Storm/Warrior of the Wind, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
The two books really feel like to me a study and critique of decaying imperial power, and what happens when that eroding power slips to the point where the imperium is visibly decaying, and starts to overcorrect and do truly shortsighted and ill-advised things in the quest to not only maintain the decaying status quo, but to reach back to a mythical golden era before that never really existed in the first place.
