| Best Science Fiction and Fantasy I've Read This Year |
Click on Title for Full Review:
The Fisherman of the Inland Sea by Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin is the high ruler of sci fi creativity, the master molder of alternative futures filled with new forms of communication, transportation, and procreation. As she proves in this collection of stories, she is a wondrous weaver of magic, myth, and science into one mind-blowing combo of story-telling extraordinaire. Her muddle of bizarrely-named characters and far-flung planets, time-warped places both fixed and unfixed in the universe, and multiplying migratory modes of movement are fantastically engaging, and as her stories overlap and transgress, one tale comes out of many: home is where the heart is, no matter where --and how -- the space traveler may go.
The Simulacra by Philip K. Dick. De-evolution, time travel, Himmler, psychoanalysis, life on Mars, wacky characters, and the enduring power of music all play a part in this futuristic conspiracy. An added bonus to this electrifying read are all the great gizmos Dick thinks up, like the commercial bugs that buzz and irritate and nag with advertising, the reporting machines that have taken over for journalists, the living organisms that play back music better than stereos, and the best of all, the simulacra: the man-created appearances of humans, not robots but more real, more alive, more able to manipulate and be manipulated, so much so that simulacra just might be behind the wild conspiracy.
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler. Butler was a science fiction writer, the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant. Kindred is not really science fiction, although it uses the device of time travel to set up the plot and keep it moving. Butler herself said Kindred was more "grim fantasy" than science fiction, the "grim" being the exploration of slavery in ante bellum South. Her characters, a married couple of a black woman and a white man, are transported back and forth from 1976 California to 1819 Maryland, where all the horrors and inhumanities of slavery are experienced by the couple first hand. The twist is that the black woman must save, again and again, the life of a white boy, then man, who will become her great, great, great, great grandfather. He is white and sometimes mean, sometimes needy, and never quite sure who or what his savior is. Kindred is a fascinating, gripping, and provoking read.
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