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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Word Puppets by Mary Robinette Kowal

August 15, 2019

Fantasy Mary Robinette Kowal Reviews Science Fiction Short Fiction Anthologies Speculative Fiction

(Cover Artist: Howard Lyon ) There's a story that appears midway through Mary Robinette Kowal's short fiction anthology Word Puppets whic…

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Eric Hendel

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Absurdism13
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Dystopias14
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Novels37
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Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

(Cover Artist: Daniel Dociu ) Midway through James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes , there was a scene which completely upended my impression of this story, and caused me to realize that I'd fundamentally misunderstood the basic nature of the book I had thought I was reading. Specifically, this was the fact that in addition to being a high-stakes action-adventure sci-fi epic set in space, Leviathan Wakes is a book that also functions as a deliberately inverted reimagining of the story of Don Quixote. In the scene in question, the book's two main protagonists--the internationally wanted spaceship captain James Holden, and the disgraced former police detective Josephus Miller--have narrowly escaped a deadly bioweapon deliberately released on the astroid Eros by the shadowy interplanetary corporation Protogen. Now, as Miller takes refuge in Holden’s stolen space ship (a heavily armed state-of-the-art Martian-built corvette called the Rocinante ), the ch...

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

(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...

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

(Cover Artist: Dan Funderburgh ) Occasionally I'll read a book whose ending completely alters the nature of the story that preceded it, and which as a result requires that I fundamentally rethink my opinion of how that story functions. While this is almost always a good thing (it means that I have a ton to say and think about when it comes to discussing that novel), it also makes writing a review of that book difficult. I can't easily discuss what I feel is the most important aspect of the story without spoiling its effect for future readers, and yet I also can't easily justify not discussing this very element of the book, because doing so risks misrepresenting what I feel is the most important thing that the book accomplishes. Nnedi Okorafor's 2025 novel Death of the Author is this sort of work. Much of Death of the Author is divided between two parallel narratives, both of which at first appear to be seeking to accomplish subtly contradictory goals. In one o...

This Site Does Not Use AI

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