In Nan Fischer’s Some of It Was Real (Berkley), a psychic on the verge of stardom who isn’t sure she believes in herself and a cynical journalist with one last chance at redemption are brought together by secrets from the past that also threaten to tear them apart. Psychic-medium Sylvie Young starts every show with her origin story, telling the audience how she discovered her abilities. But she leaves out a lot — the plane crash that killed her parents, an estranged adoptive family who tend orchards in rainy Oregon, panic attacks, and the fact that her agent insists she research some clients to ensure success. After a catastrophic reporting error, Thomas Holmes’s next story at the L.A. Times may be his last, but he’s…
Comments closedTag: scifi
As modern life and literature focus more on material gains and marshall conflicts, the work of Ursula K. Le Guin stands out for her commitment to depicting pacifism and environmentalism in her speculative fiction. Join Becky Chambers (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy), Juhea Kim (Beasts of a Little Land), and Michelle Ruiz Keil (Summer in the City of Roses, All of Us With Wings) for a discussion moderated by Theo Downes-Le Guin about Ursula K. Le Guin’s literary legacy–and the authors who are carrying it forward today.
Comments closedAnnouncing the in-person return of the annual Rose City Book & Paper Fair! June 17-18, 2022 1000 NE Multnomah Portland, Oregon Friday 2-8 pm & Saturday 10 am-5 pm Admission $5 Booksellers from the Pacific Northwest and beyond will be bringing their best rare and collectible books, ephemera, maps, prints, photographs and more. Click here for a list of our exhibitors. Mark your calendar and stay tuned for updates. Tickets on sale now at Eventbrite!
Comments closedAnnouncing the in-person return of the annual Rose City Book & Paper Fair! June 17-18, 2022 1000 NE Multnomah Portland, Oregon Friday 2-8 pm & Saturday 10 am-5 pm Admission $5 Booksellers from the Pacific Northwest and beyond will be bringing their best rare and collectible books, ephemera, maps, prints, photographs and more. Click here for a list of our exhibitors. Mark your calendar and stay tuned for updates. Tickets on sale now at Eventbrite!
Comments closedSleepwalk (Henry Holt) is a high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near-future America with a big-hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon. Sleepwalk’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At 50 years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and a passion for LSD microdosing, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too…
Comments closedJoin Comics Studies and the Portland Center for the Humanities at PSU for a conversation with John Jennings and Damian Duffy, co-collaborators on Black Comix Returns and the graphic novelization of Octavia Butler’s prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower. John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’ current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York…
Comments closedNeal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world in which the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics. One man — visionary billionaire restaurant chain magnate T. R. Schmidt, Ph.D. — has a Big Idea for reversing global warming, a master plan perhaps best described as “elemental.” But will it work? And just as important, what are the consequences for the planet and all of humanity should it be applied? Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, from the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas to the sunbaked Chihuahuan Desert, Termination Shock (William Morrow) brings together a disparate group of…
Comments closedThe biggest science fiction series of the decade comes to an incredible conclusion in Leviathan Falls (Orbit), the ninth and final novel in James S. A. Corey’s Hugo Award-winning space opera series, The Expanse. The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the 1,300 solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again. In the dead system of Adro, Elvi Okoye leads a desperate scientific mission to understand what the gate builders were and what destroyed them, even if it means compromising herself and the half-alien children who bear the weight of her investigation. Through the wide-flung systems of humanity, Colonel Aliana Tanaka hunts for Duarte’s missing…
Comments closed