Tag Archives: Science Fantasy
Misfiring Chekhov’s phaser
Bringing the Beamers up to speed on some contemporary fiction, we tackled a newer work by an author not known for her science fiction, Louise Erdrich, who posits that evolution could reverse its course and suddenly leave Earth as a vacant lot waiting to become the Future Home of the Living God. Full of saints …
The magic of science
With the year winding down, the Beamers wound up taking a very pleasant quest in search of a very scary MacGuffin, in the company of four determined folks whose individual instincts help them overcome the isolation imposed by their cultures. We journeyed with this group of unlikely heroes through Elder Race, a novella by Adrian …
A borough is not a hole in the ground
On a steamy Friday in the “dog days” of summer, the Beamers left off some of their accumulated steam at the spectacle of New York City being born, an event that starts as the contractions that collapse the Williamsburg Bridge and then gets stranger, in N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became. A work that …
Innocently tripping across the fourth dimension
In a month confusticated by a switch to a different video conferencing package, the Beamers persevered to escape from the selfless conformity of pop literature with the help of a book that was passed from publisher to publisher as being too different. Instead, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle kicked off a quintet of …
Whom gods destroy, they first make god
In the midst of the summer convention season, just after the Dublin Worldcon, the Beamers held their own confab on the mixing of science, fantasy, myth, religion, and humor, all of which may be found in Roger Zelazny’s 1968 Hugo winning novel of a Buddhist rebel taking on the Hindu gods, under the title Lord …
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a lot of birds!
For a mellow Spring evening, the Beamers turned their thoughts skyward to contemplate all the birds therein, inspired by Charlie Jane Anders’s first genre work, All the Birds in the Sky, a tale of magic and of science, together and in opposition, faced with the End of the World. Would the Beamers prefer science to …
The Norton gateway to science fiction
On Tor.com, Martha Wells, herself a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author (for 2017’s The Murderbot Diaries), confesses to her inspiration for writing coming from Andre Norton (first female winner of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Grand Master award in 1984, and the only founding female member of SAGA, the Swordsmen and …
Catch the pearl and ride the dragon’s wings
Clattering through a busy May day, the Beamers met to take a ride on the backs of dragons on the planet Pern. Like dragons themselves, a curious hybrid of science (as a possible folk memory of dinosaurs) and fantasy, Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey won science fiction awards and helped set off a wave of dragon-focused …
How can you keep them on the farm?
With weather not conducive to raising crops, the Beamers met to discuss Leah Bobet’s novel about life on the farm after the Big Bad has been beaten, An Inheritance of Ashes. Caught up in the family drama of the Hoffmann sisters and their struggles with missing husband, mysterious stranger, and recurring incursions of little monsters, …
Bar the Gate?
On a lovely Spring evening, the Beamers took a wintry journey through the pages of C.J. Cherryh’s first novel, Gate of Ivrel, following, like the disgraced but loyal Vanye, in the footsteps (and hoofprints) of the legendary Morgaine, wielder of the Gate-closing sword, Changeling. While the book, slender as it is (191 pages thin), is …
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