Content tagged with "science-fiction"
This is the second book of The Murderbot Diaries. Again, it’s a novella – only 149 pages. This picks up right after the first book. In this installment, she helps a group of scientists get some research back, and investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a primetime…
I don’t know where to go with this one. I read it on a recommendation from a friend. It’s…religious science fiction? Is that a thing? The basic idea is that a pastor goes to another planet to try to convert an alien race to Christianity. The author has no history of Christian writing so there’s…
Daniel Saurez writes about the future…but not too far into the future. His books are all about the world in 10-15 years, which is “the future,” technically, but not so far out to be unrelatable. Saurez writes about a future state that feels very real, and he designs it in such a way that you think,…
This is “philosophical science fiction.” It describes a modified reality which raises all sorts of interesting questions. The setting is a post-apocalyptic Earth where most living things have died. The government wants humanity to emigrate to Mars. Life-like androids have been developed, and if you…
This is a classic of science fiction, clearly. By some accounts, it’s the greatest sci-fi novel ever written. I had been meaning to tackle it for years, but this took on increased urgency with the new film coming out . I’m glad I read it, because it’s an important book. But it’s ponderous and…
While it was interesting to see the source of a lot of pop culture references that I’ve grown up with, the book itself is awful. Sorry. It’s an attempt at absurd parody that feels like it was made up as Adams went along and was never edited. It hardly makes sense, isn’t funny, and it took every…
so, here’s the thing: I shouldn’t have read this book. More importantly, I should have stopped reading this book when it became clear that it would never make sense. But I didn’t. Back in the 80s, I was a fan of a card game called “Illuminati” by Steve Jackson Games. I was reading about it one day,…
An entertaining novel about a corrupted political campaign in the then-future year of 1996. A political candidate gets a microchip implanted in his head, which is used to control his actions while at the same time interpreting real-time feedback from the public. Easy reading with a solid amount of…
This is a fun, lightweight science fiction novel about an alternate Earth with “kaiju” exist – essentially large monsters, like Godzilla. It’s a lot like Jurassic Park. The author provides some great science background. The monsters, it turns out, have internal, biological nuclear reactors, and…
The first three chapters which lay out the scenario of mass worker displacement by robots are quite interesting. After that, the book descends into bad science fiction and presents many fundamentally objectionable and downright creepy ideas as obviously wonderful and desirable. The book was written…
Didn’t love it. Was confused for most of it. Lots of characters and some of the summation at the end didn’t make sense. Additionally, a lot of political moralizing.
The definition of an epic sci-fi novel. This a long read, and prepare yourself for the second one, because the first one leaves a lot of questions unanswered. There are a ton of different story threads going on independently, and they don’t come together neatly in the end. It’s almost a geopolitical…
Another page-turner. More horror than science, unlike Airframe. Truly scary in places, with a nihilistic bent. Got me wondering if this is something that could actually happen.
If you were a geek in the 80s, your book has arrived. The author is one year younger than me, and I half-suspect he was simply trying to cram as many 80s geek references into a single book as he could. The result is insanely fun. Everything is there: Wargames, Dragon Magazine, text adventures on the…
I keep buying these Murderbot books for some reason. I tend to get them on Kindle when I travel. They’re short. You can read one in 90 minutes. They remind me all the world of a primetime action show. Every episode has some self-contained story that will never come up again, and every episode moves…
Here are some notes I took on the acquisition of this book:
Alec read this in Florida on vacation in 2021, and had encouraged me to read it since then. He finally bought it for my birthday in 2023.
First, this is not a standalone novel. It’s part one of three, and it ends completely unfinished. Second, I bought this because of Barack Obama. Seriously – I saw it on the shelf of a book and gaming store in Stockholm, and it had a praise quote from Obama on the cover. I thought, “Has a president…
Simply a great read. A very fast-moving account of what a Martian invasion might look like at the turn of the 20th century . The author captures the subtle movement from confusion to outright terror and panic extremely well. When the first Martian cylinder lands, no one knows quite what to make of…
This book is odd but lovable. I can’t imagine how it got written. It’s about Star Wars. But not about any particular aspect of Star Wars. Rather, it’s a meditation about the…ideas of Star Wars? The book was written right after The Force Awakens was released. That was the first film in the third…
