Tag: Science Fiction

Review: Earthly Playing Field

Leave a comment

Title: Earthly Playing Field
Author: Radhika Singh
Pages: 320
Release: May 5, 2026

An engrossing and vibrant novel about family, love, revolution, and a strange plant growing in a basement in Queens.

Singh’s impressive debut is a timely and gripping tale about a woman caught between her life in America and the ripples of revolution abroad. Roma is swept into a multi-dimensional entanglement as the revolution gathers force. She longs to contribute while fighting off a deep infatuation for someone just out of reach.

It takes stock of our geopolitical present with a speculative twist, weaving big ideas about faith, homeland, and resistance into an intimate, character-driven story. I found it thoughtful and compelling from start to finish.

★★★★¼

My thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Review: Absolution

Leave a comment

Title: Absolution
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Pages: 443
Series: Southern Reach #4
Release: October 22, 2024

Crossing the border into Area X again feels like slipping back into a strange, hypnotic dream.

A decade in the making, Absolution is the fourth installment in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach “trilogy.” Thankfully, this isn’t an Indiana Jones 4 situation—Southern Reach purists won’t have to hold their noses and pretend this story doesn’t count as canon. Instead, it complements the original three novels nicely, both in tone and by further expanding the mysteries of the Forgotten Coast without feeling like a tacked on, cash grab.

While you won’t find fan service or tidy answers to long-standing questions, you will find a unique story that builds on the lore of Area X in exciting ways. The book is divided into three distinct sections, each offering its own flavor. Your mileage may vary, but for me, Part 1 stood out: Spooky, ethereal, and steeped in disquieting mystery, the story unfolds through captivating first-person journal entries. Part 2 is a slower, more meandering spy tale, while Part 3 goes fully off the rails—VanderMeer at his most unhinged, with intense, creative flourishes. The volume knob is turned up to 11 a bit too long for my liking, but others will find this grand VanderMeerian fireworks show well worth the price of admission.

If you’re new to the series, you will find yourself a bit lost starting here. Even so, VanderMeer’s sharp, electric prose makes it a journey worth taking for anyone craving some madcap science fiction fare. Much like the original trilogy, Absolution isn’t for everyone. Not all of it resonated with me, but the highs are well worth the ride, and this installment is a worthy addition to an already iconic series—which we can now safely call the Southern Reach quartet, without reservations.

★★★¼

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

Review: Authority

Leave a comment

Title: Authority
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Pages: 341
Series: Southern Reach #2
Release: May 6, 2014
Audio Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

As I continue my Southern Reach trilogy reread, I revisited Authority for the first time in a decade. This time, I experienced it in audiobook form. Initially, Bronson Pinchot took some time to grow on me as a narrator, but I ended up really enjoying his character voicing and overall narration style.

While the main thrust of the book is an interesting character study of Control, a new Southern Reach employee with considerable baggage, the book suffers from being on the outside of Area X looking in. The Southern Reach campus feels reminiscent of the Lumon Building in Apple TV+’s “Severance,” but its oddities struggle to measure up to the true uncanniness found within Area X.

★★★★

Review: Annihilation

3 Comments

Title: Annihilation
Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Pages: 195
Series: Southern Reach #1
Release: February 4, 2014
Audio Narrator: Carolyn McCormick

In anticipation of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2024 return to Area X with Absolution, I decided to journey back to the book that started it all. I credit Annihilation with reigniting my love for speculative fiction as an adult, after seeing its bright green, tendrilled cover on an end table at Barnes & Noble a decade ago.

This time, I listened to the audiobook, beautifully narrated by Carolyn McCormick. The book is just as creepy and mysterious as I remember, and McCormick’s mellifluous voice adds another layer of intrigue to the plot.

I’ve yet to encounter another book that captivates the imagination quite like Annihilation does – a compelling mystery, a brilliant setting, and vivid descriptions of nature in its most unsettled form.

★★★★★

Review: Under the Eye of the Big Bird

Leave a comment

Title: Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Author: Hiromi Kawakami
Translator: Asa Yoneda
Pages: 282
Release: September 3, 2024

An imaginative and disquieting take on the future of humanity. An entrancing read.

This was a fascinating read. In a world where humanity is nearing extinction, humans reform into small societies across the globe in a bid to survive, while mysterious and potentially malevolent forces guide them.

The timeline is purposely vague and disorienting, with hundreds or thousands of years passing from one chapter to the next. The aim is to see the broader strokes of the survival effort, but it kept me from fully connecting with any single character or society. 

While the pieces never fully clicked into place for me, I enjoyed the entire ride. Kawakami’s writing (via Asa Yoneda’s translation) is quite moving as it conveys a subtle beauty to the remade world. Fans of Sequoia Nagamatsu’s How High We Go in the Dark will surely find familiarity in form and function here.

★★★½

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

Review: Sky Full of Elephants

1 Comment

Title: Sky Full of Elephants
Author: Cebo Campbell
Pages: 304
Release: September 10, 2024

A bold, high-concept premise brought into sharp focus by Cebo Campbell’s lively and vibrant prose.

A twist on a familiar formula (see The Leftovers or The Last of Us) – here, all white people walk into the sea and never return. What follows is the quest of an estranged father and daughter seeking common ground as they trek across a fundamentally altered version of America.

I really enjoyed Campbell’s writing style. It is lively and flows smoothly from page to page, making it a true pleasure to read. It effortlessly conveys the complexities of the new world and the complicated feelings of the characters that inhabit it.

An eyebrow-raising plot development in the latter half of the book recontextualizes the way the story is understood. And while certain plot beats push the boundaries of plausibility, they are grounded in the magical realism that permeates the narrative.

★★★★

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

Reviewer note: Anecdotally, I noticed a batch of 1-star ratings (not reviews) popping up on Goodreads for this title – presumably a blind backlash to the plot description. Please don’t make assumptions about what the book is actually about. At no point do any characters rejoice in the absence of white people. It’s not a wish-fulfillment parable about how to make the world a better place. It’s a fascinating “what-if” scenario that shines a necessary light on the unvarnished realities of the country and who controls the levers of power and influence in our society. There’s no trivialization of the subject matter and the book offers many intriguing examinations of race and racial identity. Give this book a chance, and if you can’t, don’t blindly bomb the ratings.

Review: Toward Eternity

Leave a comment

“Music is as eternal as the universe, it is part of its very fabric, and a musician is only picking at a small corner of the universe, a tiny dot in it, when they turn air and time into sound. A musician’s task is not to create sound from nothingness; a true musician understands that music is the primordial state of the universe, the very first world, and silence is a cloak upon this state, and a musician’s job is to create a tear in that cloak to let out the music underneath. We do not create music, we draw it out from underneath the silence. I draw it out from my cello, my tear in the cloak.”

Title: Toward Eternity 
Author: Anton Hur 
Pages: 256 
Release: July 9, 2024 

Already renowned for his works of translation, Anton Hur demonstrates his prowess as a novelist in Toward Eternity, an engrossing exploration of the essence of humanity.

While the narrative initially embraces a slow pace and interiority for our protagonists, it begins to accelerate through time, challenging readers to keep pace with the plot’s ever-expanding Russian Doll-like recursions. I preferred the start of the story for its more accessible nature, but I understood the choice to jump through time to see how the past had reverberated into the future.

The novel truly shines when contemplating memory, artistry, and what it means to be human in the face of technological progress. Much like the Ship of Theseus paradox, if nanotechnology replaced our cells one by one, at what point do we stop being ourselves? And, from the perspective of artistic expression, if you are an instrumentalist playing notes written by someone else, are you any less an artist? Does your music not draw from your soul? I found these questions to be particularly interesting, especially considering Hur’s prolific work translating the words of other novelists and how that might inform his viewpoint on this.

Ultimately, there’s quite a bit to take away from Toward Eternity – you can latch on to the big ideas and philosophical questions it raises or you can just focus on the fun, sci-fi thriller aspects that make this so readable. Either way, Hur has written something really wonderful and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

★★★★½

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

Review: Lost Ark Dreaming

Leave a comment

Title: Lost Ark Dreaming
Author: Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Pages: 192
Release: May 21, 2024

Within the confines of its short page count, Suyi Davies Okunbowa deploys truly impressive economical worldbuilding to situate us right into this literal fish(creature)-out-of-water tale.

The narrative unfolds within a massive skyscraper that towers above the flooded African coast, where societal classes are physically stratified – akin to turning the train from Snowpiercer vertically – the higher class residing above and the lower class below the ever-rising sea level, a literal manifestation of social hierarchy.

What sets this novella apart are the deeply felt interludes scattered throughout. These reflections delve into the complexities of humanity, trauma, displacement, class, intergenerational oral tradition, immigration, and more. It’s a tapestry of themes carefully woven throughout the narrative.

Lost Ark Dreaming is not only profound, but also approachable and exciting. It left me wanting more, and I look forward to seeing whatever Okungbowa writes next.

★★★★

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

Review: Floating Hotel

Leave a comment

Title: Floating Hotel
Author: Grace Curtis
Pages: 304
Release: March 19, 2024

What a fun read to kick off the new year! Each chapter of Floating Hotel features a different passenger or crew member on board the hulking Grand Abeona Hotel as it saunters through the galaxy and Grace Curtis paints vivid portraits of the ragtag cadre of characters. While spending limited time with and shifting through each person’s perspective may be disorienting for some, there is a captivating mystery at the core of the book that provides a compelling thread connecting each distinct section.

The tone of the book vibrates on a similar frequency as Josiah Bancroft’s “Books of Babel” series — there are airships, class divides, a dash of whimsy, and a hodgepodge of peculiar characters, each aboard the vessel for a different reason.

There were some deliciously dark details that might make some question the “cozy” genre classification, but the story and characters exude charm, Curtis’s writing flows beautifully, and I raced through each chapter until reaching the final page. All in all, I greatly enjoyed my time spent aboard the Grand Abeona Hotel.

★★★★

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