18 May, 2025
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
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Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a science fiction novel.
Fireman Guy Montag and his wife Millie live comfortable, middle-class lives. Millie finds purpose in an endless stream of television entertainment. Guy burns books.
16 May, 2025
Doing the WFC's Homework
2022’s A Quiet Teacher is the first of Adam Oyebanji’s Quiet Teacher mystery series.
To the students and staff at Pittsburgh’s prestigious Calderhill Academy, Greg Abimbola is a language teacher whose good looks are made piratical by his eyepatch. Staff and students might be surprised to learn that Greg Abimbola is not the teacher’s real name and that his skill set extends far beyond teaching spoiled children Russian.
15 May, 2025
Special Requests
Warby Picus’ Sky Pride, Volume One is the first volume in Picus’ ongoing cultivation fantasy webserial.
As her entire family is being cut down by assassins, Madame feeds her sickly son a pill, hoping to usher him into a better life. Scarcely has the boy eaten the pill than the assassins break in, killing Madame.
Accepting doom1 does not mean forgoing revenge. Madame is dead but as the assassins soon realize, her incendiary bombs are perfectly functional. The entire household, dead and living, goes up in flames.
A badly burned, maimed boy wakes up on a garbage heap.
14 May, 2025
Translation
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Hiromi Kawakami’s 2016 People From My Neighborhood is a collection of novellas and.. um… something like vignettes. The 2020 English translation is by Ted Goossen.
The narrator lives in a town filled with marvels, marvels they are determined to share with the reader.
13 May, 2025
Miscellaneous Reviews
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2025’s Murder by Memory is the first of Olivia Waite’s Dorothy Gentleman science fiction mysteries.
Ship’s detective Dorothy Gentleman wakes. This is a surprise as she intended to remain as stored memory for the time being. This is simply the first of a series of surprises, the next one being that she is in the wrong body.
But first! Background exposition!
11 May, 2025
Because My Tears Are Delicious To You
William Pène du Bois’ 1947 novel The Twenty-One Balloons is a Newbery-award-winning juvenile comedy adventure.
How did Professor William Waterman Sherman, late of San Francisco, end up floating in the North Atlantic on a raft composed of the wreckage of a flotilla of balloons? The question holds 1893 America1 in thrall!
9 May, 2025
Doing the WFC's Homework
Wen-Yi Lee’s 2023 The Dark We Know is a stand-alone horror novel.
Isadora “Isa” Chang grew up in the isolated mining town of Slater. The community was repressive, her father was abusive, and two of her three close friends died. Isa fled, enrolling at a distant art school. She left the town, her sister and mother, and her best friend Mason Kane behind.
Art students are often short on money. Thus, when Isa’s father dies, the promise of a small inheritance is enough to tempt Isa back to Slater.
8 May, 2025
Miscellaneous Reviews
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Chana Porter’s 2020 The Seep is a stand-alone science fiction novella1.
A world ended the day the aliens arrived2. A new world began.
Surviving the end of a world gave Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka valuable coping skills she will need the next time her world ends.
7 May, 2025
Translation
2021’s Touring After the Apocalypse, Volume Three is the third tankōbon in Sakae Saito’s post-apocalyptic iyashikei manga. Touring has been serialized in in ASCII Media Works’ seinen manga magazine Dengeki Maoh since September 2020. Amanda Haley’s English translation was published in 2023.
Youko and Airi are living the dream… if what one dreams about is touring Japan after an unspecified disaster has (almost) entirely eradicated the human population1. Disaster tourism is a delightful experience.
Or it would be, if Airi didn’t keep falling into something like a coma.
6 May, 2025
Meetpoint
C. J. Cherryh’s 1981 Wave Without a Shore is a stand-alone science fiction novel set in the Alliance-Union universe.
Sculptor Herrin Law is Freedom’s foremost artist, a creative genius without parallel on the thinly populated, backwater planet. Waden Jenks (friend) and Keye Lynn (occasional lover) might consider themselves his peers, but surely Law is superior to Jenks and Lynn.
At least, that’s how Law sees it. If there is one thing the people of Freedom are good at, it is perceiving reality the way they want it to be.