-
Review: Limelight and Other Stories by Lyndsey Croal
Read the review on Shoreline of Infinity. ●●● Chatbots in the flesh, starlets enslaved by industry, victims of malicious marketing, AI entities entrusted with human lives… Lyndsey Croal’s short story collection Limelight and Other Stories is, unmistakeably, an outgrowth of twenty-first century anxieties and (let’s face it) outright fears. The stories are organised into two subcollections. Those…
-
Body Music
Published in Issue 97 of Andromeda Spaceways. ●●● The world is beset by apocalypse: a tree plague and a humanity-threatening disease loom over all. Against this backdrop comes an artist in a midsize city whose particular artform is creating beasts out of synthetic meat and animating them with jazz recordings. But strange things happen to…
-
Residual Suspension; or, Life after Debt
Read the story on Kaleidotrope. ●●● My first story publication! A narrator heads to an appointment about a routine debt reckoning and receives life-changing news. Residual Suspension; or, Life after Debt is part of a long-term research project in which I play out scenarios wherein music or other manifestations of the aural collide with systems…
-
Review: White Plastic Sky, Bodies, 65
Read the reviews on Delano. ●●● This trio of reviews came as part of “Couch University,” a column I write for Delano. This was a special all-sf entry. […] Native to this premise is a deeply interesting quagmire of climate politics: can a government justify killing its 50-year-olds in exchange for the collective survival of…
-
Review: The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz
My review of The Terraformers was published in Issue 36 (autumn 2023) of Shoreline of Infinity. ●●● […] The vengeful catharsis of this scene portends the same tone for the book, but Newitz takes another path. Rather than revelling in a takedown of corporate evil and the social/environmental toxicity it embodies, the author opts for…
-
Review: Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead
Read the review on Shoreline of Infinity. ●●● Life, both animal and vegetable, from the Garden of Eden—the literal Garden of Eden—is still around and scattered throughout the modern world. That’s the premise of Birds of Paradise: that the rose of Eden has been forever blooming through the ages, that “Owl” and “Pig” and “Rook” survive…
-
Review: Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Read the review on Shoreline of Infinity. ●●● What might, in the wrong hands, be elevator-pitched as just another space opera starring a prefabbed complement of misfits (a cyborg, a test-tube baby, a crablike alien, a few wayward humans) is really a triumph of worldbuilding, plot, and tension. Admittedly, I had my doubts: from page…
-
Editorial: Is solarpunk the cure to my ecoanxiety?
Read the editorial on Delano. ●●● This editorial, bolstered by interviews with sf writer Francesco Verso and Solarpunk Magazine editor Justine Norton-Kertson, attempts to characterize the mind-paralysis many of us feel when confronted with news of how (fantastically) the climate catastrophe is doing. It was published in Delano magazine in 2021 and addresses a general…
-
I’m Having a Knippchen: An American View of Luxembourgish Culture
This book is a collection of humorous (I hope) essays about culture, from eating cheese to sitting in saunas. The project was to collect and rewrite pieces from a monthly column that I wrote for the Lëtzebuerger Land between 2018 and 2021. Black Fountain Press published the collection in 2021 and added a cryptic illustration…
Jeffrey Palms 