![]() ![]() ![]() It's built to ask uncomfortable questions and burn stuff down.Īnd that is a revolution. ![]() Of all the genres out there, science fiction is the one that's supposed to cause trouble. Why can't it handle its humans with the same care and weight of detail that it does its warp drives and time machines? I have always wondered why science fiction can't do the same. You see generational stories about families in crisis, about growing up, about growing old. You see a thousand about marriages failing and the carnage that ensues. You see a thousand literary novels about siblings coming back home for a funeral after many years away. The reason Tell The Machine hit me so hard - the reason it settled into my brain like a virus and never really left the reason I count it as one of the most revolutionary genre reads of the past decade, at least - is because it answered a question I've been asking about science fiction for as long as I've been reading science fiction: Why can't it be more normal? I wrote a review of it for NPR that, I think, was remarkably unsuccessful at detailing just how thoroughly this book had blown my mind. I read it straight through, and when I was done, I read the whole thing again - taking my time, dipping in and out, lingering in one of the most remarkably mundane, beautifully believable, heartbreakingly true pieces of science fiction I'd read in longer than I can recall. I lost most of a day to Katie Williams's Tell The Machine Goodnight. ![]()
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