Matt Ruff’s The Mirage (2012) brilliantly realizes its high concept premise, but ultimately it feels like less than the sum of its parts. This one takes place in a geopolitical mirror universe. Here, the War on Terror begins on 11/9, when Christian terrorists fly jetliners into Baghdad skyscrapers, and the “United Arab States” retaliates by [...]
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Tobias S. Buckell’s Arctic Rising (2012) is a swift, smart, and thought-provoking future thriller that wrestles with the consequences of global warming on the arctic north. Anika Duncan is an airship pilot for the United Nations Polar Guard, her job to monitor shipping traffic in the newly opened, ice-free waterways of the Northwest Passage. When [...]
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After the trauma of Antichrist, I went into my next Lars von Trier experience with reluctance, but Melancholia (2011) definitely rewarded my “bravery.” Like most von Trier films, it’s moody, atmospheric, and decidedly bleak, but it’s also a meticulous, beautifully composed film, and a rather astonishing science fictional metaphor for coping with depression. It’s a [...]
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I went into The Hunger Games (2012) with an open mind…or so I thought, at first. I’m naturally skeptical of pop culture phenomenons this bloody popular, maybe even a little snobbish. But after fending off a subconscious urge to dislike the film for the first half hour or so, it eventually won me over, thanks [...]
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Greg Bear’s Mariposa (2009) re-gathers the cast of Quantico, pushes them deeper into the future, and entangles them in a skein of desperate operations to save the United States from the brink of total collapse. While structurally and conceptually more ambitious than its predecessor, I found it a somewhat tougher read. But after a rather [...]
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Every once in a while I’ll read a collection that reminds me why I fell in love with short stories in the first place. Maureen F. McHugh’s After the Apocalypse (2011) is one of those collections. Often short fiction, particularly in the SF and fantasy genres, requires an entirely different set of reading eyes – [...]
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Being largely unschooled in young adult and middle-grade fiction, I decided to add some to my rotation. And since I trust Ian McDonald’s track record, I thought what better place to start than his YA debut Planesrunner (2011), a colorful science fiction adventure, first in the Everness series. Everett Singh is the hero, a precocious, [...]
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I’m not going to pretend that I can review this novel objectively. But I can’t help but join in the celebration: today is the release day for Jenn Reese’s Above World! This is Jenn’s middle grade debut, and it’s a wonderful book, a far future science fiction adventure full of invention, thrills, friendship, and heart [...]
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One of my favorite science fiction novels of the past ten years is Geoff Ryman’s Air, a rich, vivid tale of a future China transformed by world-changing technology. His collection Paradise Tales (2011) proves to be similarly rich, a diverse selection of intriguing genre stories. I came away finding I prefer Ryman at longer lengths; [...]
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