CBR10Bingo: So Popular One of my favorite bookstores in the world is Provincetown Books, a tiny space in the center of town, right next to Adams Pharmacy. The owner’s selection is very much my taste, and she always seems to have just what I’m looking for at the moment. This summer, I was on a mission to fill out a few more CBR10Bingo squares, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was at the top of my list. Of course she had it in stock. […]
Speculative extremes of women’s futures clearly demonstrate how everyone loses when inequality wins
I’m reviewing these two books together because despite their opposite takes on speculative futures, they use similar storytelling techniques to describe how women’s lives might be different in both the near, and far future. Naomi Alderman’s The Power imagines a future where women develop an ability to physically harm others with electric shocks. Due to the release and dispersion of an environmental hazard, women begin to develop a “skein” within their bodies which allows them to physically overpower people (men) with a jolt of energy. The strength of […]
A gripping time-travel slave narrative
Kindred was our June Cannonball Read book club selection. I decided to read both the original novel by Octavia E. Butler and graphic novel adaptation by John Jennings and Damian Duffy. Both works focus on Dana, a young writer living in 1970s northern Los Angeles (much like Butler herself). She is recently married and moving into her new home with her older white husband, Kevin. They seem quite in love and happy. Dana is unpacking some books when suddenly and inexplicably she travels through time […]
The future is augmented
I’m combining my reviews for Company Town and Autonomous for a couple of reasons. 1. Both stories happen in the future 2. Both stories take place in Canada 3. Both authors have won awards for their books 4. The authors have appeared together on panels to discuss their work, where they are often likely to discuss human/robot sex, for reasons which will become clear in this review. Writing about the future is a broad topic and goes by a lot of descriptors—science fiction, utopian/dystopian fiction, speculative fiction—there are many […]
The things we take for granted
I first learned about Octavia Butler a few years ago when searching online for innovative novels and Kindred showed up on just about every list I came across. When I went to the bookstore, I had become so enthusiastic about her that I decided to buy not only this book but also Fledgling, and then I read the latter first after a coin toss. That was probably a mistake, because I disliked it so much that I put off reading Kindred indefinitely. I’d finally put […]
Subtle, perceptive speculative fiction short stories
I don’t often go for the short story format, but I needed to pick a book to fit the book challenge prompt “Book for a movie that you’ve already seen.” It almost never happens for me in that order, so I had to do a bit of sleuthing to find Stories of Your Life and Others, which contains the short story that eventually became the movie Arrival. I loved the entire collection of stories a lot more than I expected to. Ted Chiang has both […]
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