Mining the Genre Asteroid: Another ambiguous Utopia: Stanislaw Lem’s Return from the Stars
So you see, Return from the Stars is a most ambiguous Utopia, indeed, and anyone who reads The Dispossessed (and if you haven’t yet, you should go fix that, too) should also read Return from the Stars and ponder its questions.
Review: She who became the Sun
The style of how Parker-Chan writes all of this is vivid, immersive and striking. She uses a variety of imagery and metaphors that describe individuals, gestures, actions and maneuvers that bring the writing to life. Everywhere, the text is rich in detail.
Short Fiction Review: December 2023
My four favorite stories from December are all quite different. While the first three stories all do something interesting with the perspectives used to tell the story, the fourth story doesn’t. Instead, it just tells a good story with good characters.
The Measure of an Artificial Person: Stina Leicht’s Loki’s Ring
In Loki’s Ring, the inciting incident that kicks off a series of characters’ journeys and adventures is an artificial intelligence named Ri on board. Ri and her ship have crashed on a ringworld, the titular Loki’s Ring. …
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.
Book Review: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson’s THE HIGH SIERRA: A LOVE STORY is a large and somewhat rambling depiction of the favorite place of SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson, through a variety of lenses.
