Duncan Lawie

Sep 27, 2024 | strangehorizons.com | Catherine Leroux |Duncan Lawie |LeeAnn Perry |Jennifer Mace

A stranger comes to town, and everything changes, including the stranger. It’s an old story. But before that change can happen, we need to know what is. We need to grasp the sense that the characters in this novel don’t feel they can change—or, at the least, that they have insufficient agency in their own lives. This sense of stuckness makes the first section of The Future a frustrating read.

May 3, 2023 | strangehorizons.com | Duncan Lawie |Avra Margariti |Angela Liu |Julie Shiel

Paul McAuley once described his pair of Jackaroo novels as a trilogy without the difficult middle volume. It may be that he has gone one better in Beyond the Burn Line by condensing two parts into a single book. The transition between these halves might have been easier, though, if there had been a set of covers or a publishing gap between them. As it was, I found the switch between the novel’s two sections,“Archaeologies of Memory”and “The Other Mother,” quite disconcerting.