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

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Showing posts from August, 2023

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Strange Horizons review of Kaisa Saarinen’s Weather Underwater

Posted by Eric Hendel August 03, 2023

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Recently Popular Posts

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (Review)

(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 Le Guin's novel follows the story of a man named George Orr, who believes that everything he dreams becomes real. Terrified of this power, George is ultimately 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 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 ...

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Review)

(Cover Artist: Greg Stadnyk) There's something extremely important about Amal El-Mohtar 's and Max Gladstone 's 2019 novella This Is How You Lose the Time War , which is that one of the most interesting stories the book tells is one that only becomes apparent very close to the end. For much of its admittedly brief 198 pages, This Is How You Lose the Time War takes the form of an imaginative but also straight-forward love story developing between two would-be enemies, with the book's chapters consisting primarily of letters produced by two time-traveling spies who write to each other from various eras of history. While skillfully written, these portions of the story sometimes come across as simplistic, with much of the book concerned exclusively with a depiction of the unlikely love that slowly builds between these two characters as they attempt (at first) to erase each other from existence. All of this establishes El-Mohtar's and Gladstone's novella ...

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

(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 fully 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 (a character whose name closely mirrors that of the protagonist of the earlier book except for a slight difference in spelling, and who is explicitly indicated here to be a different person). Through Aitrus's encouragement, Anna begins the ...

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