Results: Jonathan Crowe

philosophical science fiction in the most literal sense

NECESSITY by Jo Walton

BY Jonathan Crowe

Necessity, the third and concluding volume of Jo Walton’s Thessaly trilogy, is not a book that can be read on its own. You really do want to read the first two volumes, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings, first. As I pointed out in my review of those two books last year, this series is philosophical science fiction in the most literal sense. It’s the story of Greek gods creating a real-world city based on Plato’s Republic as a thought experiment, designed to explore concepts of consent, volition and equal significance.

their obsessions, their shibboleths, their literary tricks

IRREGULAR VERBS AND OTHER STORIES by Matthew Johnson

BY Jonathan Crowe

One of the best ways to understand where a writer is coming from is to read all their stories in one go: You can see more clearly what it is they’re up to — their obsessions, their shibboleths, their literary tricks. This can be a challenge when the writer has a considerable body of work behind them. But even young-ish and emerging writers have patterns to their work that can be subject to examination.

A TALE FOR THE TIME BEING

BY Jonathan Crowe

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being has managed the rare feat of winning acclaim on both sides of the genre divide: It not only won the Kitchies’ Red Tentacle Prize, a genre award, it was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. (Something similar happened this year with Karen Joy Fowler’s We Were All Completely Beside Ourselves, which was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Nebula.) It’s what genre readers would call (and possibly dismiss as) a mainstream novel, but it’s unquestionably a work of what John Clute calls fantastika: It incorporates both fantasy and science fictional elements — on one level you could say that this a novel in which Zen Buddhism meets quantum mechanics — but those elements are put to use in decidedly non-genre ways.

quantum consciousness and self-destruction

QUANTUM NIGHT by Robert J. Sawyer

BY Jonathan Crowe

A book by Robert J. Sawyer is always about something. His latest, Quantum Night, mines much of the same vein as his earlier work; like his next-to-last book, Triggers (2012), it’s concerned with the relationship between quantum mechanics and consciousness. It’s a fast-paced thriller in which a psychologist and a physicist must take their discovery about the nature of human consciousness and use it to save the world from self-destruction. But it goes down some very dark paths.