Ursula K. Le Guin said science fiction is a metaphor of the now. It allows us to defamiliarize ourselves with the issues around us, so we can see everything from a new lens. As someone who worked in tech spaces and once wrote a poetry-generating program, I am interested in how people use language to write about technology, at all levels. I appreciate the blend of older forms of technology like phonographs along with newer forms like ChatGPT. Languages interest me: how we translate to speak to machinery or people, and how translation itself can feel like a kind of wormhole into another world.
In the near future, a young woman finds her mother's body starfished on the kitchen floor in Queens and sets on a journey through language, archives, artificial intelligence, and TV for a way back into herself. She begins to translate an old manuscript about a group of female medical students—living through a drought and at the edge of the war—as they create a new way of existence to help the people around them. In the process, the translator's life and the manuscript begin to become entangled.
Along the way, the arrival of a childhood friend, a stranger, and an unusual AI project, with echoes to ChatGPT, will force her to question her own moral compass and sense of goodness. A queer science fiction book about care in this digital age.
The novel consists of interviews on a spaceship in the 22nd century.
The writing is beautiful and poetic, describing abstract objects in moving ways. I was deeply impressed how one can piece together various narrative threads through these truncated interviews. And it is a novel inspired by a visual arts exhibit. I love the collaborative aspect of it!
By the end, you’ll begin questioning what it means to be human. It’s translated from Danish, so yes, please, everyone read more translated fiction!
Now in paperback, The Employees chronicles the fate of the interstellar Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids. Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.
The novel really captures the nature of memory and what it means to love and care about others.
Frightening stuff happens in the book—things are disappearing—but it’s told with a warm and light tone, almost as if you’re sailing down a river. Ogawa captures quiet moments like friends eating a slice of cake with such luminosity.
Even when the world is falling apart, there is time for conversations with friends and meals together.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, an enthralling Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance from one of Japan's greatest writers.
'Beautiful... Haunting' Sunday Times 'A dreamlike story of dystopia' Jia Tolentino __________
Hat, ribbon, bird rose.
To the people on the island, a disappeared thing no longer has any meaning. It can be burned in the garden, thrown in the river or handed over to the Memory Police. Soon enough, the island forgets it ever existed.
When a young novelist discovers that her editor is in danger of being taken away by the Memory Police, she desperately…
This is a wild, one-sitting read. At first you might not know where you are, but after a few pages, you’re completely hooked.
It’s creepy and visceral about what it means to be a mother when the world is turning more and more toxic. It might be considered an eco-horror book. This story works on your subconscious, leaving you with a sticky, unsettling feeling.
Also, it’s translated from Spanish. The title of the Spanish version is The Rescue Distance.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017
'The book I wish I had written' Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women and Animal
A young woman named Amanda lies dying in a remote Argentinian hospital. A boy named David sits beside her.
She's not his mother. He's not her child.
At David's ever more insistent prompting, Amanda recounts a series of events from the apparently recent past, a conversation that opens a chest of horrors. Together, they tell a haunting story of broken souls, toxins, and the power and desperation of family.
A chilling tale of maternal anxiety and ecological…
The novel feels futuristic and speculative, all at once.
Reviving the idea of reservation schools, the novel imagines even more insidious ways how these schools might be used to strip native people of culture and personhood while also imagining ways of resistance. It’s very much about community and the power of storytelling.
Even in such catastrophic times, there is joy and real hope.
Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden-but what they don't know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.
This novel explores the ferociousness of grief when a couple loses their child.
The mother places a sliver of her dead son’s lung into a jar and it grows into a monster. A tender and horrific book that explores the limits of love. I loved the different perspectives in the book and found it quite moving to see how each character processes grief in their own individual ways.
A "genuinely scary" horror debut written in "prose so beautiful you won't want to rush" about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes (Ana Reyes)
Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio…
Two women, a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives after leaving their homelands. Arriving in tropical Singapore, they find romance, but also find they haven’t left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.
Haunted by the specter of terrorism after 9/11, Aislinn Givens leaves her New York career and joins her husband in Southeast Asia when he takes a job there. She acquires several paintings by a colonial-era British artist that she believes are a warning.
The artist, Elizabeth Pennington, tells her own tumultuous story through diary entries that end when World War I reaches the colony with catastrophic results. In the present, Aislinn and her husband learn that terrorism takes many shapes when they are ensnared by local political upheaval and corruption.
"Aislinn Givens leaves a settled life in Manhattan for an unsettled life in Singapore. That painting radiates mystery and longing. So does Clifford Garstang's vivid and simmering novel, The Last Bird of Paradise." –John Dalton, author of Heaven Lake and The Inverted Forest
Two women, nearly a century apart, seek to rebuild their lives when they reluctantly leave their homelands. Arriving in Singapore, they find romance in a tropical paradise, but also find they haven't left behind the dangers that caused them to flee.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and haunted by the specter of terrorism, Aislinn Givens leaves her…
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