Wood’s stories are clearly founded in the canon of western SF; but they are just as clearly influenced by his personal story, and by his desire to show that all of the world can be part of the future.
The Vanished Birds both honors the space freighter premise and dismantles it—at one point, literally. … But The Vanished Birds nevertheless feels like a quintessential additional to the subgenre, because, perhaps more than any example of it since Firefly itself, it grasps that this is a premise rooted in inequality.
Even though there are hookups and marriages and professional relationships with men, this book is about the relationships women have with other women. Mothers, daughters, bosses, employees, and friends all fail each other in such interesting ways.
Talabi’s fiction embeds Nigerian culture in a way that assumes that there’s value in having one country’s experience be the lens through which we look at human nature
Many works of speculative fiction present contemporary readers with repressive, authoritarian, misogynist, racist, or simply hierarchical societies. Our main guide through the restrictive, patriarchal structures of Throne, however, at times feels less like a character in a fantasy novel, and more like a fantasy herself.
In 2018 Rosarium Publishing passed a milestone of five years in publishing, a remarkable accomplishment in this competitive industry, and Sunspot Jungle is an anniversary gift from the small press to itself
