“At times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct….” I just read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the first time, the 1990 novel that inspired the iconic Steven Spielberg film series. The film franchise, with its groundbreaking CGI dinosaurs and star-studded cast, has become so pervasive in the popular imagination it’s hard to imagine a time before T-Rex stalked the nightmares of multiple generations. But the source material is just as terrifying as the blockbuster films that came after. Jurassic Park draws on a long tradition of blending science fiction with horror to explore terrifying possibilities of the future and to warn about the dangerous consequences of misusing new technologies. Continue reading Jurassic Park and Sci-Fi Horror
Category: Sci-fi/dystopia
Review of Womb City—African Sci-Fi Horror
Would you give up your freedom to live in a world without crime? This is the basis for a futuristic Botswana in Tlotlo Tsamaase’s dystopian debut novel, Womb City, which came out earlier this year. With elements ranging from invasive microchips and AI-powered simulations to vengeful ghosts, this book straddles the line between sci-fi and horror, drawing deeply from the wells of both genres. Continue reading Review of Womb City—African Sci-Fi Horror
Review of The Sleepless—A Debut Sci-Fi Thriller
What would you do if you had twenty-four waking hours per day? As tempting as that prospect sounds, journalist Jamie Vega learns that these extra hours aren’t necessarily all they’re cracked up to be in Victor Manibo’s debut, The Sleepless, a sci-fi thriller which came out last year. Continue reading Review of The Sleepless—A Debut Sci-Fi Thriller
Review of The Spare Man—Murder Mystery in Space
Don’t you hate it when someone gets murdered on your honeymoon? To make matters worse, Tesla’s brand new husband gets accused of the crime in The Spare Man, a brilliant sci-fi mystery thriller from Mary Robinette Kowal, which came out last year. Continue reading Review of The Spare Man—Murder Mystery in Space
Review of FINNA and DEFEKT—Retail Terror
Anyone who has ever worked retail can probably regale you with tales of crazy customers, unreasonable managers, and hellish working conditions. Indeed, writer Nino Cipri’s traumatic experiences working retail inspired them to create the bizarre sci-fi horror world of their LitenVerse books. The two novellas in the series, Finna (2020) and Defekt (2021), are set in an IKEA-like big-box furniture store that has a tendency to open up portals into other dimensions…
Finna centers on two LitenVärld employees, Ava and Jules, who recently broke off a romantic relationship. After the breakup, Ava changed her work schedule so that she wouldn’t have to run into Jules on the shop floor. But when “Fucking Derek” doesn’t show up for his shift, Ava is called in to work awkwardly side by side with her ex. Then things start to get really weird when a customer’s grandmother goes missing. The LitenVärld staff is informed via cringey instructional video that the maze-like structure of the store’s showrooms occasionally causes wormholes to spontaneously open up into parallel dimensions—and it’s up to the employees to retrieve any customers who unwittingly wander through the portals. When Jules recklessly volunteers for the mission, Ava can’t just sit there and let them go alone. As the two traverse increasingly strange and dangerous worlds with alternate LitenVärld stores populated by carnivorous furniture and hive-mind clones, Ava and Jules begin to rebuild a tenuous friendship in the ruins of their romance.
A companion novel that stands easily on its own, Defekt slots into the empty spaces of Finna. It tells the story of Derek, whose absence spurred the events of the previous book. Derek is the perfect employee. He studies his LitenVärld Employee Handbook religiously, practices his customer service greetings in the mirror each morning, lives in a shipping container behind the store, and cannot understand why his coworkers don’t share his eager enthusiasm for selling Swedish furniture. It’s almost like he was made for this job…. But after a strange itch in his throat leads Derek to take his very first sick day, management reassigns him to a special inventory shift, locking him in the store overnight. Derek finds himself directed to hunt down defective products—mutant toilets and skittering toy chests that seem to have developed sentience—beside a team of four strangers that seem eerily familiar. But as he sees the brutality with which LitenVärld treats its defective products, he begins to question how his beloved employer might treat defective employees… Continue reading Review of FINNA and DEFEKT—Retail Terror
Review of The City in the Middle of the Night
That which is most alien and monstrous to us might actually have the most to teach us. This is part of the message at the heart of Charlie Jane Anders’s thought-provoking science fiction novel The City in the Middle of the Night, which came out in 2019. I don’t often review sci-fi on this blog, but when presented with a planet where half the world is eternally engulfed in darkest night and inhabited by giant tentacled monsters, I can’t deny how much science fiction often overlaps with horror. This novel in particular plays with how one situation can be experienced as horror by one person, but as something completely different from another perspective. Continue reading Review of The City in the Middle of the Night
Review of Peeps–Unsexy Vampires
These days, we have a tendency to want a scientific explanation for everything—even in our most outlandish fantasy stories. Writers of vampire fiction, in particular, have come up with myriad explanations for how vampires come into existence, whether it’s a genetic mutation or some blood-borne disease. In Peeps, Scott Westerfeld has a particularly unsexy explanation: parasites. Through the eyes of teenage protagonist Cal, Peeps gives us the scoop on being a vampire, including the good, the bad, the awkward, and the gross. Continue reading Review of Peeps–Unsexy Vampires
The Overlap of Sci-fi and Horror
Gothic literature—and thus the more modern horror genre that grew out of it—was initially created as a reaction against the Age of Reason. Over the course of the 18th century, an intellectual and philosophical movement swept across Europe that emphasized logic, rationality, and scientific advancement. Enlightened thinkers sought to banish outdated superstition and believed that all of life’s great questions could be answered through the use of experimentation, observation, and reason. You can see how this philosophy would give rise to science fiction—a genre of literature which predicts scientific advances not yet achieved and imagines how they might change or shape society. But first something else was born: a genre that would look back to a time before the Enlightenment and revel in unexplained mysteries, heightened emotions, and a disconcerting dearth of logic or reason. These two genres at first seem fundamentally incompatible, and yet they are not so separate as you might think. To understand why, we’ll need to take a look at the history of how they overlap. Continue reading The Overlap of Sci-fi and Horror
The Guns Above—A Feminist Steampunk Military Drama
The Guns Above by Robyn Bennis is the humorous, female-led steampunk military drama you didn’t know was missing from your life. This debut novel, which came out last May, tells the story of Josette Dupre, Garnia’s first female airship captain, and her fight to keep her position, her ship, and her crew. The book gives an intimate and unromantic look at the harsh realities of war, while also managing to be an uplifting tale about trust, leadership, and unlikely friendship. Continue reading The Guns Above—A Feminist Steampunk Military Drama
Review of The Dark Nest Chronicles–A Gothic Space Opera
Love paranormal gothic romance? How about paranormal gothic romance in space! In my quest to read and review everything Leanna Renee Hieber has ever written, I recently picked up her first published series, The Dark Nest Chronicles. The Chronicles consist of three novellas, the first of which won the 2009 Prism Award for excellence in Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Romance. A couple years ago, the three novellas were compiled into a single volume and released together. That’s the version I got, and I read them all in one fell swoop. Continue reading Review of The Dark Nest Chronicles–A Gothic Space Opera