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Blog | Eric Hendel

Personal blog devoted to long-form book reviews and criticism.

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Strange Horizons Review of N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became

September 15, 2020

Absurdism Articles Horror Humor Multiverse Stories Novels Science Fantasy

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(Cover Designer: Lauren Panepinto ) My review of N.K. Jemisin's The City We Became was just posted at Strange Horizons . This novel is a surre…

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Popular Posts

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

(Cover Artist: Ernst Haas) There's a way that Ursula Le Guin's 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven is often described, and I want to start this review by talking about why this is a summary of this book which I disagree with. Generally, the way I've seen The Lathe of Heaven characterized is that it is the story of a man named George Orr, who believes that everything he dreams becomes real. Terrified of this power, George is assigned therapy with a psychiatrist named William Haber, who sets out to cure George of these (supposedly) delusional beliefs in his brain's ability to change the world. In time however Haber reveals himself to actually be a mad scientist with a god complex--a man obsessed with finding a way to manipulate the reality-bending power of George's dreams so as to remake the world in his own image. Soon, George realizes that he must do whatever he can to keep the power of his dreams from Haber's control, and in so doing protect the universe from h...

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

(Cover Artist: Daniel Dociu ) Midway through James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes , there was a scene which completely upended my impression of this story, and caused me to realize that I'd fundamentally misunderstood the basic nature of the book I had thought I was reading. Specifically, this was the fact that in addition to being a high-stakes action-adventure sci-fi epic set in space, Leviathan Wakes is a book that also functions as a deliberately inverted reimagining of the story of Don Quixote. In the scene in question, the book's two main protagonists--the internationally wanted spaceship captain James Holden, and the disgraced former police detective Josephus Miller--have narrowly escaped a deadly bioweapon deliberately released on the astroid Eros by the shadowy interplanetary corporation Protogen. Now, as Miller takes refuge in Holden’s stolen space ship (a heavily armed state-of-the-art Martian-built corvette called the Rocinante ), the ch...

Strange Horizons Review of Paul Cornell’s Rosebud

(Cover Designer: Jim Tierney ) A review I wrote of Paul Cornell's novella Rosebud is currently up at Strange Horizons. This book is a surreal story about five characters residing within a space-craft called the Rosebud , all of whom possess an eclectic set of unique backgrounds and personalities. The main plot of the story unfolds when this crew discover an apparently inert alien vessel drifting in Saturn's rings, and in the process of attempting to make first contact with this entity, are forced to confront the true nature of the corporate dystopia in which they live. An excerpt from my review is below:

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This blog does not use generative AI. All of the articles and reviews posted here were written by me, and I have done my best to block web crawlers used in training commercial Large Language Models from accessing this material.

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