Blog | Eric Hendel

(Cover Artist: The Leonheardt Group) Some books end up succeeding not necessarily by the skill with which they were written, but instead the dedicati…

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Eric Hendel

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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 its main character 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...

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

(Cover Artist: Hanna Vedenpää) Early on while reading John Scalzi’s novel The Kaiju Preservation Society (which is a book about a secret organization whose members travel to a parallel universe where they study giant monsters), I decided that this book was actually a story about the Covid 19 pandemic. This is not just because The Kaiju Preservation Society is literally a novel set in 2020, with the events of the book's main plot unfolding in parallel to the ongoing crisis that Covid represents. It's also because, more than any other novel I've recently read, The Kaiju Preservation Society struck me as being a book that was very overtly about the experience of watching a global catastrophe unfold from a place of relative comfort and safety, with the story coming to be defined by the real-world crisis that is perpetually unfolding off-screen, and which Scalzi's protagonists remain continually aware of despite only rarely mentioning.

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

(Cover Illustrator: Estudio Tlalli) A review I wrote of David Bowles's science fiction novel The Blue-Spangled Blue is currently up at Strange Horizons. This book was originally published a little over ten years ago, but was recently rereleased by Castle Bridge Media in preparation for the publication of the final book in the novel's series ( The Swirling Black , which is set to be released next year). The story of The Blue-Spangled Blue takes the form of a far-future space opera in which humanity has recently invented a faster-than-light drive system that allows previously isolated human colonies to begin reconnecting with one another. Much of the plot of the book focuses on the experiences of a linguist from Earth named Brando D'Angelo, who travels to an unknown world called Jitsu after his family disowns him. In the process, Brando quickly becomes entangled in a political and religious struggle taking place between two factions within Jitsu's society. Below is an...

This Site Does Not Use AI

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