For The Book Obsessed
[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
[ad_1] Exploring the problems of the gig economy and pondering the rights of artificial intelligence, S.B. Divya’s debut novel, Machinehood, is packed with ideas. The setting is arguably a dystopia, but the plot is action-packed and character-driven enough that you might not notice. Somewhat hampered by clunky exposition and unexamined assumptions, the novel is nonetheless … Read more
[ad_1] Karin Tidbeck is one of those writers whose work is delightfully hard to pin down to a genre—their work includes fantasy and science fiction, but slips between genres to new and stranger places. In their new novel, The Memory Theater, Tidbeck has crafted a kind of modern folktale. Inventive, surreal, at times violent, the … Read more
[ad_1] In the final story of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s new collection, a soldier in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment expounds a “taxonomy of anger” that grapples with the layers and species of anger living in his fellow Black soldiers, newly and incompletely freed. It’s one of many thorny recurring problems in Reconstruction, a stylistically diverse collection … Read more
[ad_1] A general move that most fantasy has made, perhaps most fiction has made, is to zoom in, to show more, to unpack rather than summarize. Where a fairy tale or earlier fiction might just say “they traveled for a month,” the more modern approach is likely to tell you what that felt like, what … Read more