Walter Mosley, Nalo Hopkinson

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The Wave, and Blue Light, by Walter Mosley. I've read a couple of Walter Mosley's mysteries and enjoyed them, so I thought I'd give his science fiction a try. Honestly, I disliked both of these books immensely. I enjoyed the first third of The Wave, but then most of the interesting characters drop out of the story until close to the end. Blue Light simply never drew me in enough to care about any of the characters.

The New Moon's Arms, by Nalo Hopkinson. This book was slow to start, but every time I thought I would put it down, I found myself caught up in the characters' lives and swept along. In the end, I was very pleased to have kept reading. It's much more of a 'family drama with fantastic elements' than a fantasy, but the characters are interesting and incredibly well-drawn. This is one of my favorite reads, so far.

So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, eds. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. This book has been reviewed here once before, but I have to add that this is one of the best science fiction short story collections that I have *ever* read. It's the first time I've read a collection in which I loved all of the stories, not just one or two.

I noticed an interesting pattern in this book, of characters who have no control over the larger circumstances of their lives but who still manage to pursue a better life on their own tems. I hadn't realized how much of an embedded idea it was, for me, that characters without power had to seize it in order to make the story work. That *isn't* the framework for most of these stories, and I am just blown away by how many possibilities open up once that assumption disappears.