I don’t normally post reviews or do anything beyond silently note it on Goodreads when I re-read something, but for some reason a week ago I was seized with the impulse to re-read this specific Iain M. Banks novel set in his “Culture” universe — which I originally read somewhere between 10 and 20 years …
Sci-fi. Late 22nd century. On an earth ravaged by nuclear war and climate change, after the richer and whiter nations have largely left for space-based colonies while retaining a neocolonial role in affairs on earth. Set during war between the newly-independent Igbo people of Biafra and the Nigeria from which they seceded. According to the …
Sci-fi. Time travel. Near-future (and near-past, and distant-past, and really-distant-past) almost-Earth. Feminist. Very clever – in world-building, in how it deals with time-travel, in its politics. Quite liked the writing too. But it was a bit disappointing in terms of storytelling. In particular, there were a handful of scenes, mostly early on but a couple …
It is early winter in an Ojibwe community in northern Ontario, and all of the external infrastructure – electricity, internet, phone – goes out, all at once. Though all of these systems are relatively recent and precarious this far north, it soon becomes clear that this was not some random, localized blip but something general …
Third book in the series started by the charming gang-of-misfits-in-a-small-spaceship novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. As was true of #2, this is not exactly a sequel but rather another story set in the same universe. In this case, it is mainly set among the fleet of massive ships that set out …
Third and final book in Nnedi Okorafor’s *Binti* series. (I believe in my review of #2 earlier in the year I said there were four books in the series – not sure where I got that idea.) I won’t say anything about the plot of this one, because spoilers, but the series features a young …
Sci-fi short stories. The author is a physics prof whose current work and activist focus is climate change, and whose way of seeing the world reflects a deep and compassionate humanism. Clever, thoughtful, well-written. Many of the stories have a melancholy vibe – some quite directly linked to humanity’s actual bleak future as understood by …
Sci-fi. Two agents on opposing sides of a time war, skipping up and down different versions of history and covertly intervening, trying to ensure that their side wins the future. Except, this is not the sort of massive, ponderous tome that would result from trying (and inevitably failing) to capture that whole massive story in …
A chunky sci-fi graphic novel. Picked it up after hearing several people describe it as similar in feel to Becky Chambers’ novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, in that both are space-based gang-of-misfits found-family stories. The trippy graphics don’t necessarily work by the laws of physics but they certainly work for the …
Sci-fi. Set on a planet on which one side is always day and the other is always night, ten or twelve generations after the arrival of a massive ship bearing the remnants of humanity from a dying Earth. Only the narrow strip of twilight between the two halves of the planet is suitable for human …