Reviews

The Just City and The Philosopher Kings by Jo Walton

BY Jonathan Crowe

Science fiction has often been described as the “literature of ideas,” so it’s no surprise that books have always been arguing with one another about those ideas. Delany’s Triton with Le Guin’s Dispossessed. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers with Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, Haldeman’s Forever War, and Panshin’s Rite of Passage. Each book adds to the genre’s ongoing conversation, generating arguments for the next book to respond to.

A brilliantly rendered cosmic experiment

Philip Jose Farmer’s Magnificent Experiment: Riverworld

BY Duff McCourt

Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, and Neil Armstrong sit down for tea. It’s not the opening of a poor joke, but rather a potential scene from Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld. In Riverworld, the entirety of humanity is resurrected naked and youthful along the banks of a single immense river that winds through an intricate valley on a vast and temperate planet. Peoples ancient and modern mingle in what can only be described as a cosmic social experiment.

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.

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.