Tag: Debbie Urbanski

Review: Portalmania: Stories

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Title: Portalmania: Stories
Author: Debbie Urbanski
Pages: 320
Release: May 13, 2025

Exceedingly dark, with unflinching portrayals of intimate partner violence and the isolating weight of otherness, Urbanski’s prose nonetheless shines as a compulsively readable beacon, propelling us from one uncanny world to the next.

The ever-present portals symbolize opportunities, threats, or escapes, their importance shifting depending on the characters’ perspective and circumstances.

The stories themselves are interlinked, featuring recurring motifs and situations. The characters even feel like carbon copies of the same person, with only subtle differences, as they navigate their respective worlds. These similarities lead to a sense of sameness across many of the stories, yet there is enough thematic variety to make this a bold and satisfying collection.

Favorite stories: “LK-32-C,” “The Dirty Golden Yellow House”

★★★★

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Exordia

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Title: Exordia (January 23, 2024)
Author: Seth Dickinson
Pages: 544

The opening act of Exordia is extraordinary. It’s witty, engaging, and sets up a super intriguing first contact alien scenario. What follows that cracking start is a dense, technobabble bonanza that prioritizes impenetrable science abstractions over story and character. 

It’s frustrating because I’m fairly certain Seth Dickinson is brilliant. But he’s so brilliant that most of what he was writing about went well over my head. Or maybe I’ve just outed myself as an unlearned, poorly-read student of science fiction literature – but that’s for me to grapple with. 

I wish I had put this down and chalked it up as one of the many books that are “just not for me,” but the promise of that opening section left me hopeful that the story would eventually sink its teeth back into me. I lost the plot and never got it back as Dickinson dove deeper and deeper down a cosmological rabbit hole that I just could not follow (literally, figuratively, metaphysically). 

There will be a bloc of readers who love Exordia, and I wish I could count myself among their numbers. But consider me among the lesser mortals who could not connect with the frequency at which Dickinson is operating here.

★★

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: After World

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Title: After World: A Novel (December 5, 2023)
Author: Debbie Urbanski
Pages: 368

  1. What is the best way then for humanity to survive a failing Earth?
  2. What is the best way for a failing Earth to survive?
  3. What if the answers to questions 1 and 2 are radically different?

After World imagines a future that is solely concerned with question 2. In order to save Earth, a deadly pathogen is released that sterilizes the human race – thereby swiftly and efficiently eradicating humans from the planet. Its telling is bleak, grim, and unforgiving – and yet, it makes for incredibly compelling reading.

Author Debbie Urbanski has considered every element of the future down to the most granular detail. Those looking for a fun, post-apocalyptic romp will be letdown, as this story self-consciously subverts the post-apocalyptic trappings that fans of the genre are familiar with and focuses on the cold realities that such an end of days scenario would create.

The AI-human romance angle is a bit oversold in the book’s synopsis and is a bit undercooked in the way it’s implemented in the text, but this book is so rich in its worldbuilding and the way it weaves in its unique metanarrative that it hardly matters. With the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the way it is reshaping our (warming) world – this book is a perfect complement to our modern technological time.

★★★★½

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.