Book #114 of 2020: The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline There’s great potential and a distinctive character voice in this YA First Nations dystopia, but the overall effort is only sporadically effective for me. One of the particular strengths of sci-fi / fantasy as a genre is its ability to allegorically heighten and externalize real-life …
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Book #104 of 2020: This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada (This Mortal Coil #1) I think I could have loved a different story set in this world of biohacking and — so timely in 2020 — a global pandemic shutdown. Unfortunately, this one puts too much attention on the bland YA love triangle over other …
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Book #67 of 2020: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich The most effective parts of this novel are lifted straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and although there’s certainly room for multiple writers to tackle dystopian societies treating fertile women as chattel, we get too little information here about what that actually …
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Book #51 of 2020: Girls with Sharp Sticks by Suzanne Young (Girls with Sharp Sticks #1) Blown away by this series debut, which reads like a wild blend of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Stephen King’s The Institute, with shades of The Handmaid’s Tale and Westworld to boot. Its story of a finishing …
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Book #176 of 2019: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale #2) With this novel, author Margaret Atwood returns to the setting of her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale a decade and a half later on (and ignoring how its recent TV adaptation has imagined what happens after the end of that first book). …
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Book #132 of 2019: The Test by Sylvain Neuvel Let me be the latest reviewer to compare this novella to an episode of Black Mirror. (In fact, I’ll go further: since author Sylvain Neuvel was contracted to write an original piece for an announced Black Mirror book that never did get published, there’s a strong …
Book #45 of 2019: Golden State by Ben H. Winters This dystopian police procedural has a premise that irresistibly recalls earlier sci-fi classics like Fahrenheit 451 or Minority Report: it’s set in a future version of California where lying has been outlawed, and special detectives with the ability to detect falsehood are tasked with preserving …
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Book #11 of 2019: An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King There’s a solid dystopian premise for this story of a near-future China where genetic engineering and a cultural preference for sons has given rise to marriages of multiple men sharing the same wife, but all four of the viewpoint characters — a 40-year-old bachelor, …
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Book #9 of 2019: An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim A bittersweet sci-fi take on the immigrant / refugee experience, this debut novel from author Thea Lim imagines a world in which people can enter into indentured servitude and time-travel to when their services are needed, generally to pay off a loved one’s medical …
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Book #208 of 2018: Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed An arresting blend of The Giver and The Handmaid’s Tale, depicting a dystopian island community ruled over by a patriarchal cult that insists the rest of the world has been destroyed. Girls are brought up to submit to men in all ways, and what they …
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