Tag Archives: science fiction

Steven Brust and Skyler White’s The Skill of Our Hands

Call it “slipstream”: it’s not exactly science fiction, although it could be; nor is it fantasy, although it has elements of that, in the gritty, contemporary, urban vein; and anything it takes from mainstream fiction is more from the realm … Continue reading

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Connie Willis’ The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories and D.A.

What can I say about Connie Willis, except that she is one of the most consistently engaging writers I’ve ever run across? The Winds of Marble Arch and D.A. reinforce that opinion: they are, in a word, terrific. The Winds … Continue reading

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Connie Willis’ Blackout

Connie Willis has written some brilliant satires. She has a real gift for taking the routines and the personalities we encounter in daily life and, with just a tweak here and there, holding them up to sometimes merciless and often … Continue reading

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Edward James and Farah Mendelsohn’s The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

You know that science fiction has arrived at some sort of respectability when you are confronted by something like The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. This is not really a new phenomenon — science fiction has been the subject of … Continue reading

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James Gunn and Matthew Candelaria’s Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction

There are at least two obvious responses to the statement that Speculations on Speculation, a group of essays on science fiction criticism, is one of the two or three most exciting books, fiction or nonfiction, that I have read recently: … Continue reading

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Glen Cook’s Winter’s Dreams

Glen Cook is known for his series — Dread Empire, Black Company, Garrett, P.I., Starfishers, and the like. What we tend to forget is that he has also written short fiction, which is fully up to the standard set in … Continue reading

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Elizabeth Bear’s All the Windwracked Stars

Take an event that we know from mythology, although it might have really happened. Let’s call it Ragnarok, just to give ourselves a point of reference, the final war when the Children of Light fought their brothers and sisters, the … Continue reading

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Jane S. Fancher’s ‘NetWalkers (Groundties, UpLink, Harmonies of the Net)

My history with Jane Fancher’s ‘NetWalkers trilogy begins a few years ago when, in one of those fits of madness that sometimes overcome me in bookstores, I picked up a copy of Groundties, a book by a totally unknown author … Continue reading

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Kage Baker’s Dark Mondays

Most people know Kage Baker from her novels and stories of the Company, those wonderful folks who discovered time travel and put it to their own uses. Sadly to say, I only recently encountered the Company. Then her newest story … Continue reading

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Jon Courtney Grimwood’s Lucifer’s Dragon

Lucifer’s Dragon is, as the Max Headroom series used to say, is set twenty minutes in the future. It set a century from now with flashbacks to a future not that far from our present. Though marketed as cyberpunk, it’s … Continue reading

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