There are 48 item(s) tagged with “science-fiction” on this site.
Other tags used by these items: fiction, dystopian, classic, young-adult, fantasy, tech, ai, psychology, cyoa, horror, crime, travel, genetics, philosophy, military, faith, london, history, economics, television, politics, cyber-security, nyc, space, china, media, libraries, theater, environment, terrorism, anthology, chicago, short-stories, comedy, conspiracies, publishing, romance, dna, interpersonal, africa, video-games, murderbot, medicine, spies, middle-east, higher-education, oceans, india, star-wars, war
“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 (1) helps a group of scientists get some research back, and (2) investigates a very bad episode from her past. In this sense, it’s like a…”
“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 (I don’t…”
“Wonderful book about the advancement of science to the point where the human race is absorbed and amused by non-stop pleasure and triviality. Into this comes an outsider, and the examination of how he fits in (and doesn’t) is both beautiful and heartbreaking. The book is a rallying cry to those who…”
“I enjoy Suarez – I’ve been reading him since ‘Daemon,’ which was so good. He has a great ability to envision how technologies we deal with today would be manifested in extremes down the road. The visions of the future that he puts together are scarily realistic. You’re reading it and thinking,…”
“This is the story of a book – a fictional novel by a classic Greek author – and how it moves through the lives of five people over thousands of years. The book tracks through three time periods. 1400s in Europe. A boy is conscripted into The Ottoman Army to sack Constantinople, and a girl in that…”
“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 that they’re unrelatable. Saurez writes about a future state that feels very real, and he designs it in such a way that you…”
“I read this on a friend’s recommendation. I’m trying to read more fiction. I enjoyed it. It’s a young adult novel, so you get the familiar tropes: adolescent facing a major choice, problems with authority, dark forces swirling in the background, a hopeless romance, etc. But it’s put together well,…”
“(This is the book that was the inspiration for the 1982 movie Blade Runner . The association is very loose, through. The movie and the book have little in common.) This is ‘philosophical science fiction.’ It describes a modified reality which raises all sorts of interesting questions. The setting…”
“Great novel. Does not read like it was written 121 years ago. Genuinely terrifying in parts. Suffers a bit in the middle as the characters run around London, and I got a little confused as to what they were doing. It turns into a bit of a detective story. I got the main gist of what was going on,…”
“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 (it was supposed to be this year, but the COVID pandemic has pushed back the…”
“I wasn’t a huge fan of Bradbury’s writing, but the story is quite good. The message of the book is similar to ‘Brave New World’ – in the future, humans are so artificially satisfied that thinking deeply about anything is discouraged, even considered sinister. Thus, books are outlawed, lest they…”
“A shockingly good novel. I normally wouldn’t have read this, because fantasy is a genre I don’t think I’ve read a single page of, but a friend (who is a huge fan – he has tattoos…) recommended it. By page 100, I was contemplating taking the day off work to stay home and read it. What was amazing to…”
“I did not get (almost) any of the stories in this book, and I feel badly about that. The book was recommended highly by Kevin Kelly in Recommendo . They are hard sci-fi, with technically plausible scenarios, played out many levels deep in very consistent worlds, explored by a very fertile…”
“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…”
“As it turns out, this started as a screenplay, then got turned into a novel, with the full knowledge that it would become a movie. The novel was released in 1990, and the movie in 1993, which means movie prep must have begun immediately after the manuscript was complete. Not surprisingly, it reads…”
“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. (‘Kaiju’ is a Japanese word for ‘strange beast.’ It’s become a genre for Japanese monster movies.) The author provides some great…”
“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…”
“I was headed home from Frankfurt, and I needed a book for the nine-hour flight. This was one of the few titles in the shop that was in English. Turns out, it’s a wonderful novel. A mid-30s woman in England has had a life full of regret where things just didn’t work out for her. She looks back on so…”
“I bought this book because I went to Montauk. I had previously only known it as the setting of a couple episodes of Friends , but then I took Annie on a work trip to The Hamptons , and we spent a day with some friends in Montauk, visiting the lighthouse and doing the tourist stuff there. Off in the…”
“ 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…”
“ 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. ”
“I read this because the movie came out, and I wanted to read the book before I watched the movie (I did the same thing with Shogun a couple years ago). I finished the book at 1:00 p.m. one afternoon, and I was watching the movie at 2:30. The book is very good. It’s the story of a middle school…”
“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…”
“An absolutely fantastic novel. Very, very long, but it never slows down. It’s more Tom Clancy than cyberpunk. A MMOPRG does play a part in the plot, but it’s more about globe-hopping and gunfights than computers. You know how when you read about ransomware attacks from Asia, you think, ‘Man, I wish…”
“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…”
“So, here’s the thing – if you know the secret, there’s not much point reading the book. And everyone knows the secret by now – ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has become a common idiom. But back when this was published in Victorian England, no one knew the twist, and it was probably a hell of a surprise in the…”
“An antimemetic is an idea that resists spreading. I read an entire book about this last year. But that was about real antimemtics. This is about monsters. This book was an outgrowth of the SCP Wiki which is a community-edited wiki that represents a fake world of monsters and aliens and such that…”
“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 (it was written in 1898). The author captures the subtle movement from confusion to outright terror and panic extremely well. When the first Martian cylinder lands, no one…”
“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…”
“I don’t normally read horror, but this book has a fascinating format: it’s a fictional ‘oral history’ of a war against a zombie virus that took place about a decade prior. The main character is an unnamed journalist or documentarian who compiles a set of interviews with people who survived the war…”
