February 2026 Review of Reviews, Part Two

 

At last I am continuing with Part Two of my Review of Reviews for February 2026 (see Part One here). I figured I should post this before February is over. Here are my reviews of Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett, The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan, How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn, Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov, A Few Rules for Predicting the Future by Octavia Butler, and Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany.

Iʻm also reading Michael Harriotʻs Black AF History for Black History Month. Iʻm loving it, but alas, Iʻm not quire done, so maybe Iʻll get that in the next batch.

You can find these and other reviews on my Goodreads.

Review of Reviews: March 2024

 

It's time for another Review of Reviews! Since it's the last day of Women's History Month, I figured I'd include reviews of books by women authors. Is it too cheesy to call it "Women's Future Month" as I have before? I'll let you decide. Anyway, here are my reviews of The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson, Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse, Houston, Houston Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr., and Primary Inversion by Catharine Asaro.

Vacation Revelations: The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay

 

I often find novels written in the present tense to be a bit gimmicky (like the author is trying too hard to make it feel immediate). I also don't always like horror that relies heavily on Christian symbolism (I can appreciate The Exorcist, but I prefer it when authors create new ideas to terrify us rather than riffing on centuries' old preexisting material). Yet somehow I really loved The Cabin at the End of the World, which probably says a lot about Tremblay's skills as an author. 

How the Other Bland Lives: Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman

 

"Slow, but engrossing" is how I would describe my experience reading Halfway Human. There's a lot to think about here, as with Gilman's other work (like Dark Orbit).

"Unfrozen Eons Drown the Future": My New Short Story on The Weird Tales Podcast!

My short story "Unfrozen Eons Drown the Future" is now live on The Weird Tales Podcast! You can listen to it on most podcast services. Check out the details here.

Prey (2022) and Predators

 

Back in the day (the 1980's) I was a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger fan. (To be honest, I still am.) And one of my favorite of Arnold's 80's heyday was Predator (1987). I was a kid at the time, but something about the story intrigued me. Maybe it was that it started as a Rambo-type military story and became a much weirder science fiction story. Maybe it was my nascent love of stories that turn the tables on preconceived notions, a love that has only deepened over time. Maybe I just thought the Predator was cool.

Over the intervening decades I have watched most of the later iterations of the Predator, most of which were okay but none of which quite captured the same feeling as the original for me. Still, I was really excited when I heard that the newest Predator movie would be set in the early 1700's in North America and most of the human cast would be Native American. What a cool idea!

Looking for Hope on the 5th of July

Yesterday was US Independence Day. I have complicated feelings about this holiday, as I have complicated feelings about the country it celebrates. 

I’ve never really been big on conventional displays of patriotism. It all feels so jingoistic and bombastic. And there’s something a bit gauche about pretending a patch of dirt is special because I happen to live on it. 

But this doesn’t mean I don’t love my country in some sense. I love the people here, because I love humanity and part of humanity lives here, the part that most influences me and which I can influence most. 

Cozy Alien Truckstop: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers

 

Reading Becky Chambers is like having a nice cup of hot cocoa under a cozy blanket. As I said about one of her other books, it's not space opera, it's space chill-wave. But it also makes you think and feel new and interesting things. While this isn't the only science fiction book I've read with almost entirely non-human characters (Iain M. Banks's Look to Windward comes to mind), Chambers does really interesting things with this idea, like exploring ideas of otherness and forming relationships across lines of difference, and maybe the most amazing thing is that she does all this without giving up her patented coziness.

Initial Non-Spoilery Thoughts about The Matrix Resurrections

I just finished watching The Matrix Resurrections, one my most anticipated movies of the year (after Dune, of course). The best spoiler-free review is the shortest: Whoa.

Me, watching The Matrix Resurrections

Election Eve Thoughts, 2020

 

My early voting selfie from Oct. 15, 2020

It's the day before the 2020 US election. I’m not sure I can explain everything I’m thinking and feeling right now, but here it goes.

Hugo Results 2020, and Award Ceremony Controversy

The Hugo Awards were announced the other day (Friday night for me in the US and Saturday in New Zealand). You can see the complete run down of voting statistics here. Congratulations to all the winners and nominees!

This year I voted in eight categories. Usually I do more, but ... <gestures toward the world right now>.... You can see how I voted here and here.

There was also the matter of the ceremony itself. I watched most of it live. There was some controversy about it, and rightfully so. I'll come back to that at the end.

But first, how did I do? 

Portals and Puppies: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Alix E. Harrow's The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a beautifully written portal fantasy with some interesting ideas, but it's light on world building for my tastes (don't expect to learn much about the worlds to which those portals lead). I picked this up because it's a Hugo nominee for Best Novel. So far Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire is by a pretty wide margin my #1 pick, but this one might be a distant second.

Almost Philosophical Zombies: Devil's Wake by Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes

Devil's Wake is an interesting take on the zombie genre from horror/sci-fi power couple, Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. It's maybe not the most unique zombie story out there, but it does have something closer to philosophical zombies than most and of course raises interesting questions about the ways in which humans depend on each other. It took a while, but the characters really grew on me, too. This novel is based on Due and Barnes's earlier short story called "Danger Word."

The basic plot: teenage girl Kendra is on the run from a zombie outbreak (including some heartbreaking scenes involving her family) when she meets up with a small group of other young adults (with some good representation of characters of diverse races and ethnicities). They go on the road in search of a place where civilization has found sanctuary.

Due and Barnes explain in their postscript that part of what they were trying to do here was to delve into the ways that human beings depend on one another. This may seem at odds with the hyper-survivalist ethos of most zombie tales, but notice that in most zombie stories the protagonists get by with a little help from their friends.

But how do you tell who your friends are? That's the catch, of course!

One of the scariest things about this novel is also one of the most philosophically interesting: even after they are infected (usually through a bite), zombies can still talk like their old selves for a while. Creepy!

Philosophical zombies, as popularized by philosopher David Chalmers, are a thought experiment meant to make a point about consciousness: if you could imagine creatures with all the same physiological processes as humans and who act and talk just like humans but without a sense of first-person phenomenal consciousness (or "what its like"), does this show that consciousness cannot be reduced to or fully explained by physical processes? Or as philosophers would put it, does the conceivability of this type of zombie mean that physicalism is false? (For more on philosophical zombies, see here).

The zombies in Devil's Wake aren't quite philosophical zombies in this sense. Eventually, they reveal their zombie qualities (first by biting people, later by creepily standing still). Let's say they're almost philosophical zombies.  (For something much closer to full philosophical zombies in fiction, see Quantum Night by Robert J. Sawyer).

Philosophy (and philosophical zombies) can be plenty scary, but I think Due and Barnes have made something just as unnerving. While you might be interacting with philosophical zombies every day (and thats plenty unsettling to contemplate), at least they're not going to bite you and turn you into one of them!


See my Goodreads review!

Some Things I Learned in the 2010s

Baby Yoda

Before I begin, let's get this out of the way. There's pretty good reason to think the current decade doesn't actually end until December 31, 2020. About 20 years ago I was one of those people who insisted that the new millennium didn't begin until Jan. 1, 2001. But I'm less insistent about decades. Maybe it's because ending the 2010s a year early doesn't seem so bad, given everything that's happened in the last half of the decade.

Whatever the case, here are just some of the many things I've learned in the 2010s.

The Last Jedi’s Canto Bight Sequence: A Defense

Rose and Finn at Canto Bight

“Failure, the greatest teacher is.”

- Yoda


I love Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I wrote a non-spoilery review soon after seeing it, and in another post on my favorite movies of 2017 I promised to write a defense of a particular part of the movie. In both posts I mentioned the extreme nerd rage directed at the film. Having watched The Last Jedi again recently, I find this rage even more perplexing.

Random Thoughts, Part 5

Made at: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud/

A while back I started posting collections of my random thoughts.  You can see the latest collection, Part 4, here.  You can see Part 5 right here, right now, right below!

Women's History Month Review Roundup: Nalo Hopkinson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kate Manne

March is Women's History Month, so I decided to make a point to read only books by women this month.  Since today is the last day of Women's History Month, I thought it'd be a good time to post reviews of some of the books I've been reading: a short story collection by Nalo Hopkinson, a classic novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, and a detailed analysis of misogyny by philosopher Kate Manne.

On a related note, yesterday I took part in a "visionary fiction" workshop led by Walidah Imarisha, the co-editor of Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements.  She was on campus at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga at the invitation of my colleague Dr. James Arnett.  If you ever get a chance to hear Imarisha speak or participate in her workshops, I wholeheartedly recommend doing so!

Sci-Fi Vampires: Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler

I'm a huge Octavia Butler fan, but somehow I had never read Fledgling, the last book she wrote before her untimely death in 2006.  Vampires aren't usually my thing, and there's always something melancholy about reading books by favorite deceased authors knowing there will never be more (luckily I have most of Butler's Patternist series yet to read).

I recently taught Butler's Kindred in a class on horror and philosophy and I had read and enjoyed Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, so I thought vampires maybe aren't so bad and maybe Butler would do interesting things with the concept.

And she did! Fledgling is an interesting science fictional take on vampires with some deeper thoughts on identity, difference, bigotry, belonging, freedom, and memory.  It's not my favorite Octavia Butler book by a long shot (that's probably Parable of the Talents), nor is it really a horror novel (Kindred is more horrific than this).  But I'm glad I read Fledgling.

Tough Minds, Tender Hearts, Moral Arcs, and Science Fiction: MLK Day 2019

Source: https://angiegreaves.com/martin-luther-king-jr/

“We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.” - Martin Luther King, Jr. , Strength to Love (1963)


January 21, 2019 is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the United States.  It has been my tradition on this blog to write something every year in commemoration of MLK Day, which is my favorite holiday.

But why continue to celebrate a single, complicated man who died more than 50 years ago, a man whose message has been watered down, commodified, exploited, and misunderstood (sometimes deliberately) by many on both the left and the right?  Aren't there more important things going on?

The Queen's Stories: How Long 'Til Black Future Month by N. K. Jemisin

N. K. Jemisin has been having a great few years.  She won three consecutive Best Novel Hugos for her Broken Earth trilogy, a ground breaking (literally) revitalization of the fantasy genre with hints of science fiction.  I recently heard her referred to as The Queen of the Genre, and it's hard to dismiss this as hyperbole.

Many of her fans, including this one, were anticipating her first collection of short fiction.  So, how is it?