First, a confession: it took me much longer than it should have to read this trilogy. My dad bought The Golden Compass in a local children’s bookshop when I was about ten years old (I recall the store fondly because it had the best reading nook I’ve ever encountered: an artificial tree molded into the … More Review: His Dark Materials trilogy
“Think of it as the literature museum,” my father told me when I was fifteen. I was a dually-enrolled high school student at the local college, and frustrated with some of the ideas I encountered in the curriculum’s so-called classic novels. Dad, a veteran English major himself, helped me contextualize the antiquated stories by likening … More The Literature Museum: Sci-Fi and Sexism
As a lifelong sci-fi geek, I thought I’d seen every variant of alien contact narrative the genre had to offer, from the invasion epics to the misadventures of benign visitors to thinly veiled social allegories. Even the enjoyable ones often rely on predictable tropes. But Dawn, the first installment in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, captivated … More Review: “Dawn” by Octavia Butler
1984 is often regarded as the original dystopia, but Orwell himself acknowledged that the novel was somewhat derivative. His inspiration? Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 novel We, evolutionary ancestor of the totalitarian sci-fi stories so popular today. It’s easy to dismiss the book as cliched until one places it on the continuum of speculative fiction and remembers that … More Review: “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
I received a promotional copy of this book from Ellen Szabo in exchange for my honest review: thanks, Ellen! In the preface to this book, author Ellen Szabo writes “I wish someone had told me when I was young that separation of the `hard sciences’ and `creative arts’ was a false duality”. I can certainly … More Review: Saving the World One Word at a Time: Writing Cli-Fi
Reading Hyperion recalled my years in an undergraduate English department: the words mesmerized me, some of the ideas enthralled me…and the suffocating pretension tempted me to switch majors (or novels, in this case). I could tell the author was an English major even before confirming my suspicions on Wikipedia. We can always sense one another’s presence! I … More Review: Hyperion
Wild Type 