A compelling novel explores economic inequality in India today
For millennia, the huge peninsula we call India today has been Asia’s pivot. South of the...
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Category: Trade Fiction
Octavia Butler’s prescient science fiction
Octavia Butler was the author of three cycles of science fiction novels—two Parable books, the...
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They killed the king. Will they pay the price?
On January 30, 1649, after seven years of the English Civil War, England’s King Charles I...
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This long-forgotten “classic” SF should stay that way
A reader alerted me to Bob Shaw’s award-winning 1975 novel, Orbitsville, reporting that it...
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The best popular fiction of 2022
For the record, what follows is not a list of the best popular...
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A hilarious novel about a dictionary
No serious student of English language or literature can live long without the Oxford English...
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Shakespeare’s magic rendered into advanced alien technology
At what point does hard science fiction cross the line into fantasy? Read the work of any of the...
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The best science fiction of 2022
To be clear, what follows is not a list of the best science fiction published during the past...
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Rescuing anti-Nazi refugee artists from WWII France
Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany crowded into France in the years leading up to World War II....
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These dinosaurs left something behind
Now, here’s a story that involves dinosaurs, Thai human traffickers, teams of...
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Life in wartime Warsaw before the Ghetto Uprising
The “war girls” of the title are three young Polish women whose lives we follow from...
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This classic dystopian novel is steeped in Catholicism
Author William Gibson famously made the point that any science fiction story, no matter how far in...
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Murder in space on an interplanetary cruise ship
Dashiell Hammett’s murder mystery, The Thin Man, published in 1933, reached the silver...
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A Nobel Prizewinner probes his country’s history
For three decades, the nation now known as Tanzania was a German colony. In 1891, the country and...
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American refugees in a near-future dystopia
Book critics write a lot about unreliable narrators, and no wonder. They’re so numerous in...
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