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 […]
Complexity should be your excuse for inaction
“The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.” This message is passed from a young girl to an elderly, dying Harry August late in his eleventh life. The trick is that Harry August can’t really die, at least not in the traditional sense. Each time he dies, he is reborn at exactly the same time and place to live his life again, recovering all memory of his past lives a few years into childhood. And he’s […]