On E.K. Johnston's Queen's Hope, the third and final novel in a YA trilogy that recovers the story of Padmé for a feminist-minded audience, follows the senator's journey in the immediate aftermath of Attack of the Clones.
Tag: Genre: Science Fiction
Star Wars: Reading “Queen’s Peril” by E.K. Johnston (Queen Trilogy 2)
On E.K. Johnston's Queen's Peril, the second novel in a YA trilogy that recovers the story of Padmé for a feminist-minded audience and retells portions of The Phantom Menace from the Queen's perspective.
Star Wars: Reading “Queen’s Shadow” by E.K. Johnston (Queen Trilogy 1)
On E.K. Johnston's Queen's Shadow, the first novel in a YA trilogy that recovers the story of Padmé for a feminist-minded audience and wrestles with the state of democracy.
Ballantine Adult Fantasy: Reading “A Voyage to Arcturus” by David Lindsay
The eighth essay in my Ballantine Adult Fantasy reading series, which looks at David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920): a philosophical science fantasy novel about big existential questions, like “who the fuck is Crystalman?!”
Reading “Out There” by Adrien Stoutenburg
Adrien Stoutenburg’s Out There (1971) is an interesting early environmentalist sf novel about the dangers of unchecked pollution and ecological devastation, wrapped up in young adult melodrama, and harshly critical of capitalist exploitation.
Reading “I AM AI” by Ai Jiang
Ai Jiang's I AM AI is a powerful, multi-award-nominated novelette that reawakens the cyberpunk ethos of an earlier sff generation and makes readable a whole host of issues composing our polycrisis, not the least of which is generative AI and its impact on (and abuse of) human creative labor.
What Was “World Science Fiction”?
A very thorough (and probably pedantic) answer to the question of a major Cold War-era science fiction anthology's purported global reach, and whether it could rightfully be called World's Best SF, complete with charts and quantitative data.
Reading “The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters” by Katie Goh
Goh's The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters—a brilliant and fun exploration of (post)apocalyptic narratives across a range of subgenres and political concerns—is academic in rigor, creative in style, journalistic in accessibility, and activist in energy.
Watching “No One Will Save You” (2023)
Brian Duffield's directorial debut, No One Will Save You, is a brilliant film that utilizes conventions from several genres, including alien horror and home invasion thrillers, to play out the psychodrama of a character whose isolation and unspoken traumatic past call out for audience identification.
Reading “Redshirts” by John Scalzi
John Scalzi's Redshirts is a sometimes smart, mostly fun, and occasionally critically interesting novel that sits rightfully, and awkwardly, at the center of recent debates about the origin, aesthetics, and political value of so-called "squeecore" genre fiction.
Genre Fantasies 