speculative fiction

  • Love and the Alien

    SPOILERS! DON’T LOOK FURTHER IF IT MATTERS! Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, deserves more than the brief, unintentionally flippant review I initially gave it on Goodreads. I read it a little over a year ago and its ending still haunts me in a very welcomed way. The end of Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings

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  • My Secret Mol

    What I liked most about Hye-young Pyun’s City of Ash and Red were her observations on the language barrier between her protagonist and his citizens of Country C. Her nameless protagonist has come to Country C for work. He only has an elementary grasp of the language so as Hye-young puts it “he could only

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  • It doesn’t have to be Greek to us

    I needed something to take the weight of Arrival off my mind. Daryl Gregory’s Spoonbenders was a very effective and enjoyable salve. It’s Daryl’s clever observations about life and the poesy he wraps it in that makes Spoonbenders such potent medicine. When we are introduced to Teddy Telemachus, he is cruising for women in the

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  • Sensibility and Discovery in Ted Chiang’s Speculative Fiction

    It’s been months since I finished the stories in Ted Chiang’s Arrival. Before that I had binged Rick Remender’s Black Science comic book series. It was a struggle to get through the opening story in Ted’s book. After the kinetic shootouts and chases of Black Science, it was a challenge adjusting to the slower pacing

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  • Billy Dean Sounds Out War

    WARNING SPOILERS!!! As I read David Almond’s The True Tales of the Monster Billy Dean Telt By Hisself I kept thinking of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. Both stories center around preadolescent boys who have become part of an ad hoc families. Gaiman’s Bod is adopted by the graveyard’s ghosts and Almond’s Billy, while still

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  • Goodreads Review – Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix

    The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor WARNING POSSIBLE SPOILERS! I think the problem is I read the prequel immediately after reading the first book, Who Fears Death? While it is an interesting book that could have potentially explored the ethics of scientific/medical research and discovery, it doesn’t. The question posed but never discussed. The

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  • Goodreads Review – Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon

    Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor This is the third Nnedi Okorafor book I’ve read. The second didn’t really count because it was a prequel to the first. I kept thinking that this is what War of the Worlds would look like if it happened in modern Nigeria instead of 1950’s SoCal. Nnedi constantly reminds you that

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Vincent Young