Blog | Eric Hendel

(Cover Artist: Raphael Lacoste ) There's a part of me that wants to recommend Paolo Bacigalupi's Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel The Windup Girl to almost everyone I know, just not in a good way. The book means well, and the story Bacigalupi wants to tell--one in which the pressures of climate change and resource scarcity drive humanity to begin segregating itself along racial, national, and economic lines--is perhaps even more valid today than it was when the book was first published back in 2009. Outwardly, The Windup Girl is a story which charts not only the horrors of dehumanization resulting from a hyper-capitalist society, but also the numerous ways in which the repeated experience of emotional and physical abuse which this society creates can become internalized by its citizens. On top of all of that, Bacigalupi's storytelling is informed by a clear and meticulous research into the real-world religious and social traditions that his story's setting re...

Strange Horizons Review of Paul Cornell’s Rosebud

(Cover Designer: Jim Tierney ) A review I wrote of Paul Cornell's novella Rosebud is currently up at Strange Horizons. This book is a surreal story about five characters residing within a space-craft called the Rosebud , all of whom possess an eclectic set of unique backgrounds and personalities. The main plot of the story unfolds when this crew discover an apparently inert alien vessel drifting in Saturn's rings, and in the process of attempting to make first contact with this entity, are forced to confront the true nature of the corporate dystopia in which they live. An excerpt from my review is below:

Strange Horizons Review of Kaisa Saarinen’s Weather Underwater

(Cover Illustrator: Alice M.) Strange Horizons have posted a review I wrote for them of Kaisa Saarinen's novel Weather Underwater , which can be read at this link. This book was an intense story to read, but also a fascinating work to spend time thinking about. The main plot follows two characters who end up on opposite sides of a fascist takeover of a near-future version of Britain. One protagonist, Mia, is an environmental engineer who joins the titular antifascist organization Weather Underwater after the rise of an anti-immigration dictatorship called the Ebbtide party. The book's other character, Lily, is a former romantic partner of Mia's who chooses to work as an undercover agent for Ebbtide itself, but who is unintentionally reunited with Mia when she is tasked by Ebbtide with secretly infiltrating Weather Underwater as a spy.

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.