Chambers’s series illustrates that telling can and should be regarded as a dynamic literary practice, with an expansive toolkit of approaches to building memorable and compelling science fiction tales.

The deployment of tropes within The White City positions it firmly towards the literary end of the spectrum, and not always in ways which I appreciated or understood.

This collection unhesitatingly approaches some very infrequently explored physical and mental spaces, and I was very glad to see that. Yet I felt an unevenness despite the firm voice, a self-assuredness that comes from spending many years addressing complicated topics—but in different formats.

Set in the very near future, the novel is engaged with the road to dystopia, much more than it is with what may be the endpoint of that road.

The structural pattern of Hybrid Child is based on the return and replication of trauma.

As usual, fleshed-out narratives, developed characters, and poetic embellishments aren't Liu's selling points.

Translating the planet-annihilating outcomes of intergalactic warfare from Douglas Adams’s Vogons—a spoof of town councils’ urban planning—to a spoof of Eurovision forces this novel to pick a very delicate path through European war memory itself.

These nine fantastical stories talk about the magic present in relationships, and how sometimes others misinterpret either the relationship, the magic, or both.

This collection's fantastic array of worlds is depressingly, unvaryingly, historically and globally unrealistically het.

This novel isn’t quite a standard piece of science fiction. It’s more a futuristic kind of myth, a speculative fabulation, a knowing entry in the long-running story Irish literature has told about itself.