Pieces by me about the book(s)
Honest Uplift – SFBook
A case for hope without being soppy. I invent the term gloomerati for those who claim all good literature must be hopeless. I hope it is clear I have no quarrel with writers whose books are deeply gloomy or the readers who enjoy them.
https://sfbook.com/honest-uplift-a-guest-post-by-author-stephen-cox.htm
Trip Adviser
New England and New York – how I wrote an America of the mind and how much I leaned on actual experiences
A Letter to Past Me-Scifi bulletin
I write to 2018 Me about the tricky issue of sequels – particularly close sequels which is asking “what happened bext”
Five American Works that influenced the two books – SCiFiNow
Reviews
SFBook
Cox has a wonderful way of painting a complex family that feels genuine… This is a a book about hope, a hope that things can get better, that we can work it out, but to get to that point Cox puts the reader through a lot of anguish.
https://sfbook.com/our-child-of-two-worlds.htm
Annarella – Scrapping and Playing blog
“Riveting, compelling, and emotionally charged: a page turner I loved”
Robin, GeekDads and GeekMoms
a wonderful conclusion to a very special duology of novels. If ever there was a book written with GeekParents in mind, it’s Our Child of the Stars [and hence, Our Child of Two Worlds]
Kate, Wet dark and Wild
A wonderful sequel to Our Child of the Stars, featuring one of my favourite characters – the strange, kind, alien child Cory, who knows danger is coming.
David, Blue Book Balloon
https://bluebookballoon.blogspot.com/2022/04/review-our-child-of-two-worlds-by.html
Like the best SF, Our Child of Two Worlds is about us, at our best and worst, and how we respond to the best and the worst in others. Cory’s people are from a very different, almost Utopian seeming culture and – as in one of Swift’s novels – we’re judged by that comparison, Cory himself noting it even as his love for his adopted parents and his friends burns bright. Are we worth saving, if we seem willing to destroy ourselves anyway?
A fiercely intelligent, engaged and often angry novel, Our Child of Two Worlds is moving, exciting and deeply readable.
For winternights
Stephen Cox writes beautifully and fills his characters with warmth and self-questioning. I love the incidental characters who debate whether Cory is a hoax. There’s the drama surrounding Molly’s family. There are tensions that play out on an intimate scale against the massive context of aliens, space travel, the potential end of the world. It works brilliantly.
… considerable excitement and tension as the realisation grows that the world truly is in danger. It’s a fantastic story, told so well. Do read Our Child of the Stars first. You need to do that and then Our Child of Two Worlds will be irresistible reading. How I adore Cory, the boy who loved by two worlds!