Book Review: USURPATION by Sue Burke
Unlike in Semiosis with the colonization of Pax and discovery of rainbow bamboo, humans on Earth are too familiar with their surroundings, too occupied with global turmoils, and too full of assumptions based on Terran life to give much deep thought to imports and immigrants from Pax such as the rainbow bamboo plant. The humans of Earth don’t realize the plant is sentient …
Book Review: Fathomfolk, by Eliza Chan
I really enjoy the worldbuilding and the emotional journeys of the (third-person) viewpoint characters, and how well the various elements were woven together. This is Chan’s first novel, and it’s wonderful!
Book Review: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson
Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach is Kelly Robson’s successful leap from shorter fiction into novella format, combining new ideas on the uses of a time machine with a strong character-focused milieu and story. Time Travel is one of the seminal ideas in all of science fiction. Going all the way back to Mark Twain and H.G Wells, traveling outside of one’s own time frame is an idea that has been done and done innumerable times. There have been plenty of novels, stories and movies that explore the idea of time travel, to the past, to the future, to parallel timelines, to alternate worlds. It seems that any long-running science fiction series on television must have a time travel episode. And of course, the longest-running science fiction series in television history is…a show about time travel.
Book Review: Wilders, by Brenda Cooper
Author Brenda Cooper describes herself as a futurist and as being passionate about the environment, and you’d better believe she’s dead serious about it. Which is to say that, unlike most of the books I’ve gotten to review for Skiffy and Fanty this month, Wilders is many things, but fun isn’t one of them. Like so much ecological science fiction (or ecopunk, if that’s a thing? I’m pretty sure it’s a thing), Wilders is written in deadly earnest. Look elsewhere for lighthearted escapism. Refreshingly, though, unlike a lot of books I’ve stumbled across in this genre, Wilders manages not to get too preachy. Herein, Cooper works under the assumption that her readers are proficient singers in the choir, and proceeds to focus on telling us a story rather than trying to persuade us that wilderness matters, that the environment matters, that extinction hurts us, etc., etc.
