Awen Publications

Among my very favourite science fiction novels are those by David Zindell, beginning with Neverness, centred on the eponymous ice-planet city that’s home to an order of starship pilots skilled in the high mathematics of navigating hyperspace. After Neverness came a trilogy with the same setting: The Broken God, The Wild, and War in Heaven. Twenty-five years after War in Heaven, Zindell published a fifth novel in this sequence, The Remembrancer’s Tale. There was an amazing a

The recent heatwave – more intense in North India, with temperatures in the mid-forties in Delhi – has put me in mind of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future, which begins with an extreme heatwave in North India. When I reviewed Sixty Days and Counting, the final volume of Robinson’s trilogy about climate change, in Vector in 2008, I expressed disappointment that he’d shown us only the beginning of both the effects of climate change and humankind’s grappli

In Rob Latham’s Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (2014) the field of ecocriticism was conspicuous by its absence. That gap could have been nicely filled by Gerry Canavan’s Introduction to Green Planets, or indeed Latham’s own contribution to this book. Ecocriticism and SF may have been reluctant bedmates, but in this book we see an explicit insemination of SF criticism with ecocritical thinking. Not only that, Canavan argues that science fiction itself is an ideal means of

The Telling is the last of Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish novels, set in a galaxy in which numerous planets, including Terra, have been colonised over the millennia by the ancient civilisation of Hain and then have gradually been recontacted to become part of an interstellar community of planets, the Ekumen. This milieu gave Le Guin huge scope to explore in many novels and stories her interests in social structures and comparative ethnography, inspired by her father the anthropolog