I first learned about Octavia Butler a few years ago when searching online for innovative novels and Kindred showed up on just about every list I came across. When I went to the bookstore, I had become so enthusiastic about her that I decided to buy not only this book but also Fledgling, and then I read the latter first after a coin toss. That was probably a mistake, because I disliked it so much that I put off reading Kindred indefinitely. I’d finally put […]
Subtle, perceptive speculative fiction short stories
I don’t often go for the short story format, but I needed to pick a book to fit the book challenge prompt “Book for a movie that you’ve already seen.” It almost never happens for me in that order, so I had to do a bit of sleuthing to find Stories of Your Life and Others, which contains the short story that eventually became the movie Arrival. I loved the entire collection of stories a lot more than I expected to. Ted Chiang has both […]
Complexity should be your excuse for inaction
“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.” This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood. And he’s […]
Starting off on the Wrong Spring Heeled Foot
In theory, this book had all the elements that are right up my alley. There’s speculative fiction/alternative history, there’s steam punk aesthetics, there’s camp! In spite of all of the things it had going for it, it was an uninspired mess. It read more as some weird fan fiction of the Victorian era found in some dark corner of the internet than a book that people were expected to pay money for. (Sadly, I did pay money for this disappointment.) Sir Richard Francis Burton (of […]
Did she say yes to the dress?
This is the first Jo Walton book that I have read and only heard about her through reading Cannonball Read reviews (thanks, guys!). Although this isn’t the Walton title that I was looking for at the library (Among Others), it sounded interesting and landed in my TBR pile. I was truly captivated by the first 2/3. The last 1/3? Not so much. A woman suffering from dementia, and now confined to a nursing home, reflects on her life. Pretty straight forward, BUT, she “remembers” two […]
When Utopia Goes Pear-Shaped
Well, my first review of the year, and I have picked a bit of a doozy! Not only is this book series quite unlike anything else I have read, I’m starting my review with book three of four. (But, this is the first book I’ve finished reading this year, so I went with it.) I’m going to have to try to do my best to tiptoe around the spoilers while still giving some kind of picture as to what this series is about. Let’s see […]
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