Blog | Eric Hendel

(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...

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...

Babel by R.F. Kuang

(Cover Illustrator: Nico Delort ) R.F. Kuang's 2022 historical fantasy novel Babel (whose complete title is " Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution ") was a book which I ended up feeling intensely conflicted about. In one respect, the majority of Babel's narrative represents a fascinatingly original work. Set in a partially fictionalized version of Britain during the early 1800s, Babel focuses primarily on the experiences of a boy from Canton, China who is inducted into a world-famous college in Oxford. The early half of Babel's narrative revolves around themes pertaining to the politics of translation, and how colonialist systems of power weaponize language as a tool of oppression. Throughout all of this, Kuang also simultaneously constructs one of the most original and fascinating magic systems I've ever seen in the fantasy genre, and skillfully overlays her story's subtly built supernatural...

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