The Woman in the Ship, by Sapphira Olson, illustrates both of these concepts: mankind’s ceaseless curiosity for what is beyond the night sky, and the awesome toll attendant to the manufacture of greater and greater AI. It is a story of love and loss, retro and future, hope and fear, and science and humanity. As well, it is steeped in robust feminism, both in terms of illustrating struggle and oppression, and triumph and overcoming.
Category: Speculative Fiction Review
A review of The Voice of Blood by Gabriela Rábago Palafox
The Voice of Blood is an eye opener. (A vein opener, too.) Read this book and you will fly with Quetzalcoatl, in a Cinco de Mayo replete with myth, fable, monsters, and current events. The illustrations by José Guadalupe Posada accompanying each story, are nothing short of outstanding: stark engravings, appropriately stylized, of winged creatures, witches at the stake, demons.
An Uneasy Utopia, Bright yet Bloody: Jordan Rothacker’s The Shrieking of Nothing
The story connects in many ways to its predecessor, 2020’s The Death of the Cyborg Oracle, but stands on its own as a wild, conceptual, playfully written ride. And though hints of Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, and Aldous Huxley abound, it is utterly original—principally because its world is neither utopian, nor dystopian, but somewhere uniquely in between.
A review of Cyborg Fever by Laurie Sheck
Cyborg Fever is a hallucinatory universe of detached disembodied voices and isolated monads – leptons, bosons, black holes, and human beings — forever striving for a ‘unified field’ but forever defeated by entropy and the forces of dissolution, vast emptiness, and disarray.
A review of A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett
In a future where drones diagnose humans, parakeets freely soar, and bananas are a rare delicacy, the idea of altering past events and shaping a better future for everyone captivates the reader. Ess, a member of a network preparing for the end of human life on earth, is primed to travel into the past to help save the present, quietly battling the novel’s villain: the dark side of our collective humanity and the ghosts of what might have been.
A review of The Universe of Lost Messages by Janet Stilton
The plot follows a conspiracy by an organisation called the Fist seeking to harness their charm for nefarious ends. The mad storyline twists and turns so much that Stilson feels the need to explicate every detail.
A review of Tiger Cage by Max Brooks
Brooks is still the master of creating a convincing if fantastical world through the eyes of a minor participant. In broad strokes, he paints a compelling picture of a war-torn Los Angeles, particularly Hollywood, an area he has extensive knowledge of as the child of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft.
A review of Vanished Earth by Geoff Nelder
Nelder’s world building is excellent and his scientific capability is very clear. Everything flows smoothly and makes perfect sense, even when it involves the wryly sardonic artificial intelligence, Can, whose witty missives are no longer quite as futuristic as it was in books 1-3 given the speed at which AI is developing, quantum displacement technology (the “pinch”), or turbojets that are able to descend into Jupiter.
A review of 2 Mini Chapbooks (Cup & Dagger series) by Sword & Kettle Press
I was happy to expand my literary horizons through these samples from a decidedly non-mainstream speculative series. “Good things come in small packages,” goes the old saying, and there’s no shortage of humongous talent here.
A review of The Plotinus by Rikki Ducornet
In effortlessly elegant and comic prose, The Plotinus probes the impulses and desires that bring joy to human life while, at the same time, upending literary conventions that contemporary readers may take as immutable truths. As though she were playing with us from the title, she signals an exploration of The Plot In Us.