Arab and Muslim SF: Critical ReviewsMcFarland (2022) 396p. pbk ISBN: 978-1-4766-8523-6 ebk ISBN: 978-1-4766-4317-5 Listen to an interview with co-editor Emad Aysha on Diamond Bay Radio.About the Ed
The collaborative effort to run FutureCon can be proud of their accomplishment: they’ve built upon the first conference one year ago and made it to a second year, full of the same energy and enthusias
You will find yourself inside of multiple points of view in Seb Doubinsky’s City-State novels. You’ll wake up in a strange place, wondering who you are and how you got there. And when you end up in
The reason I wanted to check out Ovid.tv was to watch the documentary about a small town in Southwest China, called Ghost Town. There was a showing of it several years ago that I missed and I was su
The new biography of Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones is a marvel. Published in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction Series from the University of Illinois Press, this book provides a timely and thorou
Lisa Goldstein’s first novel, The Red Magician, won the National Book Award in 1983, in the category for “original paperback novel.” Strangely that is the only year that category existed, which means
There is something fascinating, unfathomable, and mystifying about the Caucasus Mountains, and the peoples there, scattered among the modern nations of Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and spilling acro
What a hullaballoo was kicked up for the recent blood moon. You’d think that a total eclipse occurring when the moon passes closest to Earth only happens, say … once every generation. Oh snap! B
The opening of Jack Womack’s Going Going Gone, injects us into an unpredictable world that wobbles between an alternate hipster-scene of New York City in the 1960s and the seemingly hallucinatory ramblings of a drug-addled protagonist, Walter Bullitt. The story begins in a Washington, D.C. hotel room, where the first person jive talk kicks in: “Soon as I spiked I turned my eyes inside. Setting old snakehead on cruise control always pleases, no matter how quick the trip.” Sprinkled through almost every sentence are hokey metaphors. The phone doesn’t ring, “those jingle bells“ do. And on the other end of the line is a Federal agent of some kind, who is so square that he can’t understand a word of the hipster-narrator. But the narrator is more like one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers than a secret agent, and he himself was so startled by the phone that he almost made for the john to “drown his bagged cat.” To flush his pot down the toilet, get it?
Just finished China Miéville’s _The City and the City_, a very satisfying, even inspiring, book, rich with metaphor and symbolism. It is like a film noir, set in a mythical Eastern European city — I’m convinced it is partly based on Prague — where populations living in mutually incompatible paradlgms “unsee“ each other. The beauty of this idea is that, (quite beyond the metaphor,) it could be almost any *real* city; with populations that are utterly invisible to one another. Old and young, rich and poor, leftist and fascist, black and white: there are, in fact, far too many axes of unseeing in our everyday lives…