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

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Showing posts from March, 2022

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Strange Horizons Review of David Bowles’s The Blue-Spangled Blue

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Strange Horizons Review of Adam Oyebanji’s Esperance

(Cover Designer: Adam Auerbach ) I have a review of Adam Oyebanji's novel, Esperance , out in the most recent issue of Strange Horizons , which can be read at this link . Oyebanji's first novel, Braking Day , was a book which I was lucky enough to review for Strange Horizons back in 2023, and it was exciting to have the opportunity to return to this author's work and discuss what ultimately turned out to be a very different narrative. While Braking Day was a hard SF space opera that dealt with the social upheaval experienced by the crew of a decaying generational starship, Esperance is more of a surrealist modern-day crime thriller with sci-fi elements. The book's plot in part follows a police detective named Ethan Krol who, as the story opens, is assigned the task of investigating a bizarre murder. Concurrent to this story however is what at first seems an unrelated narrative following an enigmatic woman named Abi Eniola, who as her half of the novel begi...

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'...

Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang

(Cover Designer: Kelli McAdams ) Jumpnauts is exactly the opposite of the sort of novel which I expected Hao Jingfang to write, initially in a bad way, but also ultimately in a good one. Hao's debut novel, Vagabonds , was an extraordinarily subtle work of science fiction. Taking the form of a slow-paced and contemplative narrative, that earlier book detailed the deceptively complex story of how two seemingly analogous characters from human settlements on Earth and Mars voyaged to one another's worlds. Eventually, these characters came away from their experiences with wildly contradictory views not of the planets they had just visited, but instead their respective homes. The result was that Vagabonds represented a novel whose dense and intricate plot wove together the lives of multiple generations of individuals, all of whom struggled to navigate an enduring political and social conflict surrounding how utopian societies should define themselves. By contrast, Jum...

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