Reviews

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.

a prime example of non-genre science fiction

STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel

BY Jonathan Crowe

Station Eleven, the fourth novel by the Canadian-born, New York-based writer Emily St. John Mandel, is a prime example of non-genre science fiction — a novel written by an author not normally identified with science fiction, published by a mainstream rather than a genre imprint, but whose subject matter is unquestionably science fiction. Like others of its kind, it has received recognition from both mainstream and genre awards: It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, but also won this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award and is a finalist for the Sunburst Award and the British Fantasy Award (the latter inexplicably in the horror category).

Quantum fiction

MY REAL CHILDREN by Jo Walton

BY Jonathan Crowe

In alternate history there is the concept of the jonbar point: the key turning point in history where, had things gone the other way, the present would be a very different place. The classic examples are usually war-related — if the Confederacy had won the Civil War, if Germany had won the Second World War — and frequently didactic. Rare is the alternate history that posits a better world had something else happened at that crucial moment; alternate histories are fun because they allow us to imagine how awful things might have been from the comfortable and safe vantage point of our own timeline.

a wide-ranging debut collection from an atypical writer with a distinct and interesting voice

ELEMENTS by Suzanne Church

BY Jonathan Crowe

The publication last year of Suzanne Church’s Elements, her first collection of short stories, brought a measure of attention to a writer whose work had appeared mainly in Canadian small-press and semi-professional anthologies and magazines. Church, a Kitchener-based writer who attended the Clarion South workshop in 2005, is perhaps best known for “The Needle’s Eye,” a story from the Chilling Tales anthology that won the Aurora for Best Short Story in 2012, and “Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop,” which appeared in Clarkesworld.

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Disrupting the Publishing Industry, Magic Kingdom-Style

BY Editors

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the kind of first novel any aspiring writer would be proud of. Doctorow’s first sentence exudes confidence; he draws the reader into his vision of the future by running down a rapid-fire checklist of its attributes like so many bullet points. He wastes no time in revealing the broad arc of the story he’s about to tell, and throughout the book he manages a delicate balance of teasing new ideas with one hand and fleshing them out with the other.