Blog | Eric Hendel

(Cover Artist: Elena Romenkova ) A review I wrote of Nikhil Singh's novel Dakini Atoll is currently up in the most recent edition of Strange Horizons . This book was a very complex and fascinating story that skips between several different interconnected narratives, all of which are ultimately woven together into a work exploring themes of mass media and the nature of human awareness. The main storyline follows an actress named Delilah Lex, who as the novel opens realizes she has become trapped within the simulated reality of the television program she currently stars in (a virtual TV show called " Good Morning Delilah! "). However, this surreal narrative is also interspersed with the experiences of Anita--a corporate agent working for a quasi-religious organization called "Angelinc." There is also a storyline following a friend of Delilah's--a movie director named Fortunato who unexpectedly becomes drawn into an investigation of a mysterious global plague,...

Myst: The Book of Ti'ana by Rand Miller with David Wingrove

(Cover Artist: The Leonheardt Group) Rand Miller and David Wingrove's 1996 novel Myst: The Book of Ti'ana was a strange story to read, because while there was a lot about this book which I enjoyed, I also finished it fairly sure that the most interesting story the novel has to offer is not the one which the authors have succeeded in writing. Taking the form of a prequel to the prior installment in the Myst Trilogy (1995's Myst: The Book of Atrus ), The Book of Ti'ana is set many decades before the start of that earlier work. Following a woman named Anna who stumbles across the thriving subterranean civilization of D'ni, The Book of Ti'ana details how Anna befriends a citizen of this insular society named Aitrus. This is a character whose name, it should be noted, closely mirrors that of the protagonist of the earlier book except for a slight difference in spelling, but who nevertheless is explicitly indicated here to be an entirely different person. It'...

Arrival by Ted Chiang

The most striking quality of the stories appearing in Ted Chiang's anthology Arrival (which was originally published in 2002 under the title Stories of Your Life and Others ) is the author's ability to use fiction as a rhetorical device. By saying this I don't mean that Chiang's work is comprised only of messages which he seeks to impart upon his audience, or even that his stories explicitly take the form of moral/ethical parables aimed at demonstrating some kind of lesson to his readers. Rather, it's more that throughout this collection, Chiang produces fiction which often strives to explore the tension that exists between two or more subtly contradictory ideas, examining various perspectives on his subjects through the medium of narrative. Via stories as diverse as a very contemporary-minded retelling of a biblical parable, an alien first-contact story that touches on themes of predestination and free will, and a fictional documentary about the ethics of limiti...

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