Blog | Eric Hendel

(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, and who is explicitly indicated here to be an entirely different person. It's through Ait...

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

(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. The book's chapters consist primarily of letters produced by two time-traveling spies who write to each other from various eras of history, and gradually form an emotional connection that transcends the fact that they are both working for opposite sides of a war that spans time itself. 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 ch...

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

(Cover Artist: Kaitlin Kall ) One of the most unusual things about Hank Green's 2018 novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is that the book is not a comedy. At its core, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing is a very straight-faced, high-concept science fiction story charting humanity's first-contact with an alien intelligence, and the social and political upheaval this event brings. As a result, as is often the case with other stories in this genre, the driving element of Green's plot is a very carefully imagined examination of how the contemporary world might react to the arrival of something that by its basic nature requires we rethink our place in the universe. However, what Green understands about this material is that first-contact stories thrive not by their realism, but by their absurdity. As a genre, alien first-contact narratives derive much of their tension from how they depict an otherwise realistic world reacting to the arrival of something that defies all conventi...