Asking the Wrong Questions

The first recent reading roundup of the year reflects the reading preoccupations of the first few months of the year. Which is to say, catching up with all the books I mean to get to last year and either didn't have the time, or the access to. Only one of the books discussed here is a 2024 publication (and even that is a reprint from 1844), and there is still quite a lot published last year that I'd like to get to. Orbital by Samantha Harvey - More a prose poem than a novel, Harvey's slim, evocative volume is a minutely detailed description of one day aboard the International Space Station. Divided into chapters according to the station's orbits around the Earth (sixteen in one day), the novel delves into both the personal and the mechanical with equal degrees of sensitivity and emotional remove. We learn about the station's routines, the compromises and indignities of life in zero gravity, and the mechanics of maintaining the station and caring for the—far from pr...

Strange Horizons has published my review of Naomi Alderman's The Power , a twisty, thought-provoking tale about a world in which women suddenly develop the ability to shoot bolts of lightning out of their bodies.  As I say at the beginning of the review, it's the sort of premise that seems designed to get SF fans' motors revving, and I think that it could easily have overwhelmed a lot of authors--in the rush to cover all the possible stories that could emerge out of a premise like this, it would be easy to lose sight of the one you want to write.  Alderman teeters on the verge of this failure mode, but in the end her idea of what she want to say with The Power is too strong.  The result is one of the most satisfying, but also disquieting, books I've read in some time.  There's a lot I would have liked to say about The Power that didn't make it into my review.  Alderman's use of Jewish scripture (including one of my favorite Bible passages , which she u...