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I appreciate the craft in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Crossroads. Franzen can make complicated sentences live on the page. He excels at weaving flashbacks into narrative. Much of Crossroads takes place over one day, following five members of a […]
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Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor weaves two plotlines that are related, though owing to a twist at the end (no spoilers here), are related in a surprising way. The heart of the book is the power […]
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I have arrived late to the party in reading Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton. I may not provide anything new in this review, therefore, but only my personal reactions to the book. The book, which borrows its title […]
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Science fiction challenges our assumptions about the world and gets us to think about the world and our place in it in a new way. That’s what good science fiction should do. Invisible Things does exactly that. The […]
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The Magic Circle by Barry Ryerson takes the reader on a twisty, exciting ride through a post-apocalyptic world. I’d call this a techno-magic-thriller. Is that a genre? If not, I just made it up. The devastation wreaked by […]
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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow started out to write a book about the origins of social inequality, according to the authors (an anthropologist and an archeologist). However, they […]
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In the near future, a billionaire businessman aims to change the climate of the planet. What could go wrong? This is the Big Idea tackled in Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. The novel is huge, featuring multiple intertwined […]
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Kim Stanley Robinson has written a lot of books, but The Ministry for the Future is the first of his that I’ve read, largely because of the topic. I know quite a bit about climate change and the […]
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Knowledge comes into the world by many paths. The Knowledge Machine (subtitled How Irrationality Created Modern Science) has a lot to say about the process by which scientists since the 17th century have created scientific knowledge. The book […]
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Queen of Hearts is the first in a series of fantasy books that follow the young Princess of Wonderland. Colleen Oakes has taken Lewis Carroll’s work as a starting point to build an interesting and coherent world. This […]
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