The Best of All Possible Worlds is a beautiful shape-shifter. It reads like smooth jazz comfort food, deceptively familiar and easy going down, but subtly subversive. … [It] is in part a declaration of pedigree, a dual love letter to science fiction/fantasy and to African diasporic cultures and realities. The novel explicitly invokes Ray Bradbury and Indiana Jones, echoes writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin, and filters it all through a creolized landscape.
Sprinkling salt
Seeking the beauty of truth
Karen Lord’s first novel was a well-received magical realist fable based on African folklore; her second is a complete change of pace. … an engrossing picaresque quest, a love story, and a moving character study of two very different people coming to understand themselves and empathise with others. In her depiction of plurality, diversification and gender, Lord is on a par with Ursula K Le Guin.
Karen Lord: Redemption in Indigo - Books and Authors - Browse - Big Ideas - ABC TV
Me at the Adelaide Writers’ Week talking about Redemption in Indigo.
(Correction – Oxford was after teaching physics, not before.)
Writing different means you don’t settle for building a book around a wild idea or a big explosion. It means totally rethinking the world from the ground up.
(Source: thekitschies.com, via thekitschies)
E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
R.I.P. one of our greats.
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
(Source: pigmenting, via rumshop)
Richard Fidler interviews Karen Lord
“Folk stories from around the world have had a major influence on writer and academic Karen Lord.
“The stories she heard growing up captured her imagination and have now infiltrated her own writing.
“As a former soldier, scientist and diplomat, and with an academic background in theology, Karen explores big ideas about what it means to be human, where we came from and where we are going.” - ABC
The Tiptree Award for 2012 goes to Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl and Kiini Ibura Salaam’s Ancient, Ancient. Congratulations to both winners and all the other titles on the Honors list. This year’s judges included Golden Tentacle winner Karen Lord.
The best recent science fiction: March 3 - Telegraph
Galactic life is calmer in Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds(Jo Fletcher, £20), despite the opening planetary genocide. Now male survivors of that once-great colony need women. An episodic quest through a Caribbean-flavoured mix of societies – many having psi powers – leads to romance. Ahhh.
In brief - FT.com: The Best of All possible Worlds
It’s refined, meditative and life-affirming, and its exploration of gender politics and ethnology confirms Lord as the natural heiress to Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin.
