For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Stories about story-telling itself always risk a kind of self-congratulatory triteness. As lovers of narrative, we’re already aware of the power of story, and hopefully self-aware enough to see how stories change our perception of ourselves, of the world; breathless paeans to the medium itself generally leave me, pardon the pun, uninspired. Tautology bordering … Read more
[ad_1] An appropriate response to biosphere collapse is screaming, and Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is screamingly, bleakly funny. Beauman has a superlative knack for quotable, witty, and wince-inducing lines, stuffing every page with the kind of exhilarating humor borne of both despair and empathy. A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a … Read more
[ad_1] Five years after the death of her husband, visual artist Feyi Adekola is starting to come out of her shell, wondering if it’s possible to love again. After some casual dating, she starts a mostly platonic—but possibly more serious—relationship with Nasir Blake, a well-connected consultant. Feyi’s personal and professional lives are suddenly thrown into … Read more
[ad_1] We are surely—hopefully—nearing some kind of peak of cultural reboot fatigue, awash as we are in retellings, re-adaptations, and perpetually rebooting expanded cinematic universes. So it’s either an odd or an apt time to recommend a new entry in King Arthur stories, much-reinterpreted and pieced together from older traditions as those legends are. Fresh, … Read more
[ad_1] It’s a tricky thing to infuse a story set in our actual, current world with giant supernatural problems and potentials. Call it “the problem of allegorical interference.” If we’re aware of actual injustices in the world—and their often-thorny causes—then it becomes, at best, weird to blame them on vampires or aliens, to focus on … Read more
[ad_1] It’s always challenging to sum up a short story collection: each story can be as idea-rich as a novel, and good collections show off an author’s range at least as much as they gesture towards recurring themes. Charlie Jane Anders is an inventive writer with a dazzling skill for short stories, and her new … Read more
[ad_1] A while ago there was that obviously bad take that “horror cannot be set in space,” which, if nothing else, gave folks an excuse to revisit the space-horror splendors of films like Alien and Event Horizon. Space is a great setting for written horror, as well—the brutally unforgiving vacuum, the possibility of alien monsters, … Read more
[ad_1] Set about 200 years in the future, Neil Sharpson’s When the Sparrow Falls is narrated by Nikolai Andreivich South, a low-ranking state security bureaucrat in the Caspian Republic. Earth has been transformed by the emergence of super-powerful artificial intelligences and technology allowing people to transfer their consciousness to the digital realm. The Caspian Republic … Read more
[ad_1] Science fiction has a longstanding interest — a sub-genre, even — in using technology and far-future settings to think about gender. Classic feminist SF from the 1970s on, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, imagined worlds with gender roles reversed, complicated, or erased; almost all far-future, post-scarcity works, like Iain … Read more
[ad_1] By looking beyond the surface clues to deeper and more unsettling realities, the detective story lends itself well to horror, even cosmic horror. There are no elder gods or supernatural terrors lurking in Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff VanderMeer’s newest novel, but I found myself reading with that kind of dread. A grippingly-paced and paranoid eco-thriller, … Read more