Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

Alastair Reynolds never fails to dream up interesting science-fictional premises, and Slow Bullets is no exception. This novella is creative, tragic, and philosophical—exactly everything I want from my science fiction.

Scur is a grunt soldier fighting in a religious war that just ended. Left for dead by an enemy who tortured her, Scur awakes from hibernation on a prison transport ship that has malfunctioned. She and the other inhabitants of the ship—fellow prisoners from both…

What’s that, did Kara wait four years to read a sequel again? Yes, yes she did. My bad. I enjoyed Victories Greater Than Death enough to buy Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak because the library didn’t have it. Clearly, though, I have dragged my feet on reading it, and I am regret. Charlie Jane Anders’s young adult science-fiction series about queer teenagers leaving Earth to discover an interstellar society at war is … wow.

This book…

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., this book is not. I didn’t make this comparison—the book’s promo does, along with comps to Neil Gaiman (booooo, by the way), Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett. Indeed, when you see a book compared to so many heavy hitters, you should probably increase your skepticism rather than you hype. Acts of God is an inchoate mess of a novel, though I rather suspect Kanan Gill might welcome such an excoriating statement, and…

First times for everything; the post-facto titled “Bridge to eQualia” currently only exists as a Bluesky thread (though the author has promised to post it on its blog; I will try to remember to update this review with a link later). I awoke this Sunday morning to see this on my feed, courtesy of a quote-post from someone else. I tapped on the first post, expecting a thread a few posts deep, and instead was…

Time travel, like any subgenre of science fiction, shifts in response to the anxieties of our time (pun intended). These days, a lot of time travel focuses less on visiting the past or fixing one’s personal past and more on the existential anxieties we have about where humanity is going. Travelers, a Brad Wright series on Netflix, capitalized on this idea quite expertly. Hive, by D.L. Orton, reminds me a lot of Travelers…

Hot on the heels of writing about why space is awesome, it feels fitting I turn around and consider the downsides of space travel. Well, in this case, it’s more like space labour. Sunward Sky offers a near-future, hard science fiction take on the perils of spending too long away from Earth’s surface. Henry Neilsen weaves social commentary in with mystery, conspiracy, and action. While not entirely successful, in my opinion, this book raises…

Most of you probably know already: Star Trek is my first science-fiction love. Before Stargate, before Buffy, before even Supergirl, I grew up in the nineties watching the bright primary colours of TOS on a 13-inch CRT TV. I eschewed for a long time the muted, overly polished sequel series—the simplicity of the 1960s original made more sense to my kid brain. Yet I eventually succumbed (DS9 is my favourite, though TNG…

A few weekends ago, I discovered the first season of Halo was on Netflix and virtually binged it. It was better than I expected—for my expectations were low—and exactly what I craved: something visually stimulating, with a clear story, yet ultimately not all that … meaningful, I guess? “Mid” is probably the right term all the kids are using these days. Anyway, The Third Rule of Time Travel is just like that. Like the Halo…

When I found Gareth L. Powell a few years ago, I was excited. More space opera, just as I was starting to bend back towards the subgenre! Yet the two books I read by him, while they have become fonder memories in my mind, didn’t stay with me the way I thought they might. Future’s Edge seems doomed to repeat this fate, for it has all the makings of an excellent space opera without…

Ambiguous antiheroes and antivillains are always my jam. Give me a book from the point of view of the bad guy. Give me a repentant antagonist—hell, give me an unrepentant one. Memoir of a Mad Scientist is exactly what it says on the tin, albeit with a tongue-in-cheek, slightly absurdist twist. Erin Z. Anderson has crafted a tale that gets you thinking about where to draw lines. How far is it OK to go in…

My ride or die and I finally caught up on For All Mankind, the latest season of which sees an incipient society on Mars against the wishes of the suits back home. So it felt like a good time to pick up Emergent Mars—I received a copy of this book far too long ago in exchange for a review—and see Russell Klyford’s take on a similar idea. Unfortunately, while Klyford’s storytelling is competent,…

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and mortality lately. I’m only thirty-five, but as I head into this next phase of my life and ponder what I want from it, I find myself focusing a lot on what life will be like when I am much older. Lifers is a thought experiment asking us to imagine what would happen if we suddenly had even more time. In a world where the richest are obsessed…

Have you wondered what would happen if we lived in a world where Elizabeth Holmes was actually competent? Or if she somehow managed to fail upwards, like Elon Musk, despite being a woman? You’re Safe Here posits a wealthy female supervillain, a disgruntled coder, and a pregnant girlfriend chasing solitude in lieu of enlightenment. Leslie Stephens looks to draw together the disparate threads of quantified wellness, middle-class yuppie obsession with individualism, and the classic trope…

Last year I took a chance on reading Devil’s Gun, the sequel to You Sexy Thing, even though I hadn’t read the first book. This was a big chance, for Cat Rambo’s fiction up to that point hadn’t worked for me. Fortunately, I loved Devil’s Gun enough to accept the offer of an eARC of the first book as well, and now I’ve read it too. With the amount of time that has…

Damn but William Gibson can write! I realize this might feel like a contradictory pronouncement to the one I made at the start of my review of The Peripheral, but I assure you the statements are compatible. I wasn’t aware of this sequel, Agency, until recently, but it was nice to pluck it from my library’s shelves. While you don’t need to have read the first book—this is a very loose sequel, with…

Years and years ago, I said that my love for space opera was dimming. Space opera has always been one step away from science fantasy, of course, but I was getting bored with how same same all the nanotech-fuelled, AI-high stories seemed to feel. In the last couple of years, something has changed. I don’t know if it is me or the field or both, but I have been loving space opera again! When I…

Look, I knew The Rules would be a long shot from the moment I laid eyes on it, but I was bored and plucked it from the obscurity of the YA stacks at my library because why not. I feel like I have fallen off the YA wagon lately; I have only read three in the past year, so I was rather starving. Stacey Kade is not a name I recognized, but the plot…

As mentioned in my review of the first book, I ordered A Desolation Called Peace from my indie bookshop about thirty pages into A Memory Called Empire. The result? Arkady Martine is one hell of a writer. This sequel forms the conclusion of a tight duology.

Spoilers for the first book but not for this one.

Mahit Dzmare has returned to her home, Lsel Station, after barely a week as the Lsel Ambassador…

This book worked its way into my brain. I’m not sure how else to describe it. I slept on this one, but when I finally started reading it, I did not want to put it down. So what did I do? I put it down to save it for a road trip later that week—but I immediately messaged my local indie bookshop so they could order the sequel for me, which I will read…

Some good reviews by people I trust brought this new standalone novel from Ann Leckie to my attention. Translation State, similar to Provenance, is set in the universe of her Imperial Radch trilogy but tells a different story. This one enlightens us ever so slightly as to the nature of the Presger, but really, of course, it’s about what it means to be human.

The story alternates among three viewpoint characters: Enae, Qven,…