Sci-Fi and Fantasy
1. Severance by Ling Ma
10 Rave • 7 Positive
“Joining a pack of survivors led by a charismatic IT guy named Bob—’He was Goth when he felt like it,’ Ma writes, with the kind of sharp, offhand characterization that makes Severance a pleasure to read—Candace realizes that her survival may be more difficult with others than apart from them … movement between past and present…makes the novel work: As Candace’s future becomes increasingly uncertain, and her path more dangerous, we come to realize what she’s already lost—long before the pandemic hit. This feat of pacing and plot is also what makes Severance stand out among recent works of millennial fiction: The whole novel is, in a way, about how we are but an accretion of everything that’s ever happened to us … Tense and elegant, Ma’s writing…masterfully treads the line between genre fiction and literature. Part bildungsroman, part horror flick, Severance thrillingly morphs into a novel about self-worth, about the kinds of value we place on our own lives.”
–Larissa Pham (The Nation)
*
2. Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
11 Rave • 3 Positive
“In Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written a powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read right now … Friday Black is an unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice. This is a dystopian story collection as full of violence as it is of heart. To achieve such an honest pairing of gore with tenderness is no small feat … In Friday Black, the dystopian future Adjei-Brenyah depicts—like all great dystopian fiction—is bleakly futuristic only on its surface. At its center, each story—sharp as a knife—points to right now.”
–Tommy Orange (The New York Times Book Review)
*
3. Spinning Silver by Naomi Novak
8 Rave • 5 Positive
“Spinning Silver is billed as a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, and you can see the bones of that story poking through … What is truly marvelous thing is that, rather than writing against these narrative expectations, Novik embraces and complicates them, leaving the well-worn framework glittering with new meaning and unexpected implications … This is an affirming, uplifting, multilayered, and wholly original novel, filled with indomitable women … a story I will hold closely in my heart for a long time.”
–Kelly Chiu (The B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog)
*
4. Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
8 Rave • 2 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Imagine, if you will, a Pynchonesque mega-novel that periodically calls to mind the films Inception and The Matrix, Raymond Chandler’s quest romances about detective Philip Marlowe, John le Carré’s intricately recursive Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the dizzying science fiction of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, Iain Pears’s hypertextual Arcadia and Haruki Murakami’s alternate world IQ84 and even this week’s Washington Post story about China’s push for ‘total surveillance’ … Harkaway divides up and parcels out these four narratives over the course of Neith’s investigation. Each, I should stress, is genre-novel exciting just on its own … Despite the richness of its invention and virtuosic tricksiness, Gnomon is probably a bit too long. Still, it means to dazzle and it does, while also raising serious questions about identity, privacy, human rights and the just society.”
–Michael Dirda (The Washington Post)
*
5. Destroy All Monsters by Jeff Jackson
5 Rave • 7 Positive • 1 Mixed
“.. [a] wild roar of a novel … Writing about music is tricky. Ninety-nine percent of the time hearing the actual song or going to the actual concert is far more revealing than any paragraph describing it. But Jackson pulls off this near-impossible feat, pulling the reader past the velvet ropes into the black-box theaters and sweaty, sticky-floored stadiums … The prose can feel as cool as Rat Pack-era Sinatra and as sad as Lou Reed singing about a perfect day … For all his insider knowledge and passion for music, Jackson is also at ease writing about the odd details of the everyday.”
–Marisha Pessl (The New York Times Book Review)
*
6. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
8 Rave • 2 Positive
“There are really no words to describe Space Opera, Catherynne Valente’s new novel. Know why? Because she used them all in writing it. I can say that it is square-ish. Made of wood pulp. Composed mostly of sentences. I can say that it’s a wicked-fast read (if you can handle the whiplash and the pure, 12-gauge crazy-pants nonsense of it all) and enjoyable at speeds unsafe for upright mammals … In between it’s all big ideas written in glitter. It’s surprising tenderness on a galactic scale. It’s about loneliness and nerdliness and acceptance and making fun of the old, frowsy powers that be. Valente offers up a universe in which the only thing of true value is rhythm. Not guns, not bombs, not money, not power, but sex and love and pop songs.”
–Jason Sheehan (NPR)
*
7. Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
8 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed • 1 Pan
“This fictional tapestry weaves together five female characters scrabbling with the expectations and constrictions of a country where reproductive rights are severely curtailed. What could’ve been didactic instead becomes an enchanting ramble through the myths and mundanities of womanhood … Red Clocks ends up feeling like an enjoyable puzzle that is fundamentally unsolvable, some of its pieces playfully misplaced along the way. The fractured narrative leaves us to connect the dots between these disparate characters, all of whom make bleak compromises because they — like so many women throughout history — have so few options available to them.”
–Joy Press (The Los Angeles Times)
*
=8. Scribe by Alyson Hagy
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“Though setting, identity and motivations are shrouded in Blue Ridge mist, Hagy’s language is intense and crisp. What she allows us to see is striking … Hagy does a splendid job of intertwining the strange threads in her novel, and readers with a taste for magical doings will not be disappointed. Scribeis ultimately an odd but very engaging mixture of the creepy and the redemptive, with a resolution that dispels the murkiness in a clever and startling way.”
–Tom Zellman (The Minneapolis Star Tribune)
*
=8. Rosewater by Tade Thompson
6 Rave • 3 Positive
“Tade Thompson’s debut novel, published in the US in 2016, is brilliant science fiction, at the cutting edge of contemporary genre … Thompson expertly juggles all his disparate elements – alien encounter, cyberpunk-biopunk-Afropunk thriller, zombie-shocker, an off-kilter love story and an atmospheric portrait of a futuristic Nigeria. The book is sharply plotted and well written, with Kaaro’s narration achieving a sort of louche, disengaged charm … [a] stellar debut.”
–Adam Roberts (The Guardian)
*
10. The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
4 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The poles between which Tawada oscillates are thus, not quite independently of her choice of language, the interplay between seriousness and frivolity. The result, in which farce is played as tragedy and tragedy as farce, is a big part of what makes Tawada one of the best and most unique writers working today … The book’s vision of closed states, xenophobia, mass extinction, and the gulf between the undying adults and their feeble progeny makes it one of the few literary futures that makes you sit up and say ‘Oh yeah, that’s totally going to happen’ … From this description, you’d probably imagine Tawada’s book to be a gloomy dystopic nightmare. Instead, it is charming, light, and unapologetically strange, with a distinct ‘indie cinema’ feel … Tawada finds a way to make a story of old men trapped in unending life and children fated to die before their time joyful, comic, and—frankly—a huge comfort.”
–J.W. McCormack (BOMB)
***
Our System: RAVE = 5 points, POSITIVE = 3 points, MIXED = 1 point, PAN = -5 points
