Lucas Stoffel

Book Review: On grief, witness, and the perilous tenderness of loving another person without trying to reorganize their soul in “Boy, Refracted At Wat Xieng Thong after rain, a solitary figure, a phone, and the Tree of Life hold the book’s central tension in one suspended image: grief on the verge of becoming witness, fracture, and form. Most novels about AI ask whether a machine can feel. “Boy, Refracted” asks a nastier question: what does it look like when love arrives as

Children of Ruin Book Review: Adrian Tchaikovsky looked at his Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel about uplifted spiders and thought, "You know what this universe needs? Intelligent octopuses." He was right. He was also determined to make readers deeply uncomfortable, and he was right about that too.

Speaker for the Dead: it's not a sequel to Ender's Game. Not really. It shares a protagonist and a timeline, but it's a completely different kind of book. Ender's Game is a military science fiction novel about a child prodigy fighting an alien war. Speaker for the Dead is a slow, philosophical novel about a middle-aged man trying to understand an alien species by telling the truth about the dead. The fact that the same author wrote both of these is genuinely remarkable.

Here is the pitch: aliens show up, flatten every building on Earth, and kill everyone who was outside. The survivors get dropped into a massive underground dungeon — a multi-floor death game broadcast live to the entire galaxy for entertainment. Carl, our guy, was outside in a bathrobe walking his ex-girlfriend's cat when the world ended. The cat, Princess Donut, gains the ability to talk. She immediately becomes the most famous celebrity in the known universe and demands to