Reviews

You can stop reading the news, but you can’t escape politics. Certainly, Aristotle didn’t think so (in his opus, Politics), nor would, I expect, any poli-sci professor you’re likely to meet. And neither does Hayden Trenholm, the editor and publisher of this anthology, who acknowledges those who “[don’t] believe they hold strong political views” only to wryly counter that “acceptance of the status quo ... is as strong a political stance as anything more overt and polemical in nature.”

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS ANTHOLOGY

BY J.J.S. Boyce

An extraordinary collection from Hayden Trenholm

definitive hard SF epic

STARPLEX by Robert J. Sawyer

BY J.J.S. Boyce

According to his introduction from the 2010 edition, Robert Sawyer’s Starplex marked a turning point. Starting with his next novel, the Ontario writer would start publishing the type of present-day or near-future science fiction he is best known for today, with ordinary women and men dealing with perhaps one or two extraordinary changes in circumstance in an otherwise familiar world. But before this literary shift, he would write one final definitive hard SF epic.

Malicious radiospheres and the uncanny quiet of peacetime...

BURNING PARADISE by Robert Charles Wilson

BY AE

To look at Robert Charles Wilson’s Hugo-winning Spin and this year’s novel, Burning Paradise, one might conclude that the author has a fixation with spheres of mysterious origin surrounding the Earth. But the similarity in mechanics is superficial. The more important commonality between the two books is how the focus remains on the characters and how ordinary people respond to extraordinary events.