Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

What is it that drives us to pick up and complete a novel? A plot that carefully mortars brick upon brick, each clicking neatly together giving us no choice but to wonder “but then what?” until we look up surprised to find ourselves at the end? A character so intriguing we feel compelled to follow along wherever their thoughts and actions lead us? The range and depth of emotions that buffet us as we’re swept along? Any one or two or all of these?

What in the world, then, is Kate Atkinson thinking in her newest work, Life After Life? In giving us Ursula Todd, who struts not just one life on the stage but dozens... Read More

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon 

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

It’s 1999. In January, the Jewish enclave in Sitka, Alaska will revert to the US government, and the Jewish community that settled there in 1948, when an attempt to create a Jewish state in Israel failed, will once again be cast to the four winds, homeless. This isn’t even the plot, really, of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The plot revolves around a murder mystery, the death of a man in the same Single-Resident-Only hotel that the main character, police detective Meyer Landsman, has lived in in since the collapse of his marriage.

With The Yiddish Poli... Read More

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

We get precious little science fiction, fantasy and horror in translation, which means most of our reading is Eurocentric and a lot of it, though enjoyable, is anything but challenging. That’s why, when I saw Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, Yoko Ogawa’s book of linked, strange stories, on my library shelf I snatched it up. And I’m glad I did, because these stories are odd, elegant and exciting.



The book begins with “Afternoon at the Bakery,” which starts prosaically enough with a description of a beautiful Sunday in a park, complete with a... Read More

The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson is the story of three young women in academia, all of whom become involved in a particular type of game that combines urban exploration with LARPing (live-action role-playing). Logical Ruth is primarily interested in games as teaching tools. Anna, a more right-brained sort, prefers visceral games that effect a psychological transformation on their players. Their more reserved friend Lucy is along for the ride. The novel is primarily narrated by Ruth and Lucy, with occasional Internet posts from Anna interspersed.

The novel begins slo... Read More

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is a romp of a first novel by Robin Sloan. It’s a perfect book for booklovers who lean toward the mysterious and fantastic, blurring genre lines throughout to afford readers a marvelous time.

The novel begins when Clay Jannon, the first-person narrator, is responding to an advertisement for a clerk in a 24-hour bookstore in San Francisco. Clay was educated as a graphic artist, but he’s finding jobs scarce since his work designing a logo and a website for a bagel bakery and acting as the “voice” of @NewBagel on Twitt... Read More

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Kate Mosse's Labyrinth has one of the best premises for a novel I've heard in a long time: two women, one from the past, one from the present, both caught up in a search for the Holy Grail. The former is entrusted with one of three books leading to the Grail's hiding place, whilst the latter becomes entangled in a conspiracy concerning its rediscovery.

In 2005, Alice Tanner is volunteering at an archaeology dig in the Sabarthes Mountains when she is drawn to a hidden cave in the hills. There in a concealed chamber she finds two skeletons, one of which is clutching a book in a leather bag and a ring with a labyrinth design engraved upon it. Soon... Read More

Blood Eye by Giles Kristian

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Depending on the period being portrayed, historical fiction novels are often too graphic and too depressing for me to enjoy. The Viking era is a popular one for authors, and, until Blood Eye, I have always been unable to get into books set in that period. The difference is that Giles Kristian seems to understand that a story can be more about the characters and less about the fighting without losing the flavor of the era.

Osric is a teenage orphan living in a small English village that is attacked by Norse raiders. The exact how of Osric’s orphanage is something of a mystery, and he has no memories from before he was found by ... Read More

Understories by Tim Horvath

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Tim Horvath has an amazing imagination. He can take his work in academe (as a writing teacher) and turn it into a story about a dying department of umbrology, the study of shadows, complete with all the political scheming for promotion and infighting about ancient scholars (Galileo or Socrates?) you might expect in such a story. But then he can also imbue it with poetry when describing a lunar eclipse, or with whimsy, as in relating his experiences watching shadows on a ski slope, or even the nature of love (“she told me once she preferred rainy days because on them I looked at her more directly”). The entirety of “The Discipline of Shadows” is so strange... Read More

Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Gods Without Men, by Hari Kunzru, has at its center a mystery: what happened to the autistic child of Jaz and Lisa Matharu who went missing in the Mojave Desert. To get to that point though, as well to its subsequent effects, we’re treated to a kaleidoscopic history of the area in which young Raj disappeared, a barren place whose flat landscape is marked by a rock formation known as The Pinnacles, which seems to draw to itself those seeking something beyond what they’ve found in their lives, a sort of lodestone for the lost. Though perhaps that description works for all of us in this world.

In the late 1700s, a Spanish Friar has a vision... Read More

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker, one the surface seems one of a spate in recent years of the “end of days” books, with its premise of an Earth whose rotation suddenly starts to slow, causing worldwide devastation. But it takes a relatively meandering route to its genre, so much so that at times one wonders if the end of the world is really all that big a deal. More YA than adult, more coming-of-age than post-apocalyptic, more quiet domesticity than action-adventure, it’s an interesting take on the end-of-the-world theme, one that succeeds in places, but overall I liked the... Read More

Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Islandia is a keeper. It’s one of those books that lives on your shelf and which you gaze at lovingly from time to time, considering whether this is the time to crack it open again or not. You don’t want to do it too often for fear that you might dilute some of its power (and let’s be frank: it’s a looong book), yet you don’t want to let your immersion in its world go too long between visits. This is one of those books that I would use to refute M. John Harrison’s argument that world-building is the death of good fiction. This work by Read More

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us. Today we have two reviews of A.S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye.]

Winter’s coming and I can’t think of a better way to spend a frosty evening than snuggled under a quilt with a copy of A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

The centerpiece of this small collection of short works is the title story, but Byatt leads us off with four fairy tales. Two are retellings of Victorian-era tales and two are Byatt originals. “The Glass Coffin,” a retelling, follows the adventures of a humble tailor who uses... Read More

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A.S. Byatt

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us. Today we have two reviews of A.S. Byatt's The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye.]

The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye is a collection of five stories, or more accurately, four stories and a novella, since the title story is actually quite long; it takes up half the book.

First we have "The Glass Coffin," which is excerpted from Byatt’s stellar novel Possession. It's a fairly standard princess-rescuing sort of fairy tale, starring a young man who chooses adventure over good sense, and is rewarded for it.

Then c... Read More

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

[In our Edge of the Universe column, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Kurt Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden during World War II. He only survived the allies’ bombing of Dresden because the Germans housed the American prisoners in a meat-locker in a building they called Slaughterhouse-Five. For years afterward, Vonnegut attempted to write a book about his experiences, and in 1969 he eventually produced Slaughterhouse-Five, a fictional biography of one of his fellow soldiers who he calls Billy Pilgrim. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut explains that his nov... Read More

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

[At The Edge of the Universe, we review mainstream authors that incorporate elements of speculative fiction into their “literary” work. However you want to label them, we hope you’ll enjoy discussing these books with us.]

Language is dependent on the society that uses it. We weave into our idiom words and phrases that explain our history and our present. Similes and metaphors embed themselves so deeply into our sentences that we don’t even notice them. Some are slang: we didn’t get the memo, we watch situations go sideways and we compare apples to apples. Some are beyond slang. Fifteen years ago no one would have “texted” a friend, but they would have “okayed” a plan without thinking twice. Language is dynamic, fluid, responsive and reflective, changing constantly.

Take this concept, conjure a society thousands of years after a world-destroy... Read More