Archive for the ‘Scifi’ Category

HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY by Audrey Niffenegger

HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY, Audrey Niffenegger’s successor to her immensely popular THE TIME TRAVELER’S WIFE, is a ghost story centered around a London cemetery and the people drawn, both voluntarily and not, to its intimacies. When Elsbeth Noblin dies of leukemia, she leaves her heirs with a strange legacy of demands and unfinished business. Her now-American and estranged twin Edie no longer has the chance to reconcile with her sister. Her lover Robert, who lived in the flat below her, is bequeathed her papers and diaries, although he is too grief-stricken to read them. And Elsbeth’s twenty year old, mirror twin, American nieces, Julia and Valentina, are left everything else, including Elsbeth’s Highgate flat, on the condition that they live in it together for a full year.

October 25, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Family Matters, Reading Guide, Scifi, Speculative (Beyond Reality), United Kingdom

THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT by Tessa B. Dick

Philip K. Dick fans will recognize his unique flavor in THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT, written by his widow, Tessa Dick, but not his writing style. Philip Dick’s novel, VALIS, set forth his imaginings of a hidden reality in which Rome never fell, but continued in a subliminal state beneath what we believe to be reality. Tessa Dick calls upon that theme. The prose in THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT, is lighter and you’ll find more flights of fancy and fewer references to archeological finds and actual history. She has, however, succeeded in writing a touching tribute to Dick.

October 23, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Posted in: Scifi, Speculative (Beyond Reality)

FAR NORTH by Marcel Theroux

The narrator of Theroux’s post-apocalyptic novel, FAR NORTH, Makepeace Hatfield (who lives up to the name), is the last survivor of an immigrant Siberian community – a place Makepeace’s British parents had come to to escape the material world. But the rescue of a starving waif awakens Makepeace’s longing for companionship, love and civilization, spurring the road trip that drives the novel.

October 22, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Literary, National Book Award Finalist, Russia, Scifi, World Lit

THE UNINCORPORATED MAN by Dani and Eytan Kollin

THE UNINCORPORATED MAN has the most unique premise I’ve seen in some time. This debut novel deals with the next evolution in corporate greed. How much are you worth on the stock market? If you were born three hundred years from now in Dani and Eytan Kollin’s vision of the future, you would know precisely. Everyone in THE UNINCORPORATED MAN is incorporated, with shares traded in the stock market.

September 18, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Posted in: 2009 Favorites, Debut Novel, Scifi

THE CITY & THE CITY by China Mieville

Think of the now-passed-into-history segregated American South where Caucasians and African Americans, then called Negroes, lived in the same cities and towns but attended different churches and schools, sat in different areas in theaters, used different doors and water fountains, and often ignored one and other when walking down the same streets. Think once-enforced apartheid in South Africa. Or think of Berlin while the Wall separated it and Belfast’s volatile Protestant/Catholic duality. The citizens of the city states Beszel and Ul Qoma in China MiĂ©ville’s THE CITY & THE CITY live in a somewhat similar situation: they co-exist on the same land, but they have separate facilities and they go to extremes to “unsee” the “foreign” co-residents…

August 15, 2009 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Allegory/Fable, Hugo Award, Noir, Scifi

ENDER IN EXILE by Orson Scott Card

If there can be one criticism of Orson Scott Card’s nearly perfect science fiction masterpiece Ender’s Game, it’s that the ending feels rushed. After destroying the Formics, Ender is carted off across space, where, in just one chapter, he learns to govern a colony and discovers the complex truth about why the Formics allowed him to annihilate them. Over twenty years later, Card has addressed this shortcoming in his most recent endeavor ENDER IN EXILE.

July 31, 2009 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Scifi, y Award Winning Author