Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

Full disclosure: the author was my landlady when I lived in the UK! Despite our age difference, we got along quite well because of our penchant for watching science fiction and humorous British TV shows, or documentaries with luminaries such as Lucy Worsley. Julia first gave me a copy of Lifesong to take with me on my final flight back home, telling me not to read it until I was on the plane. More recently,…

Tfw you’re too lazy to write a review because Julie’s is literally word-perfect.

I’m actually just going to quote stuff I like from her review and add a few thoughts of my own in order to pretend I’m doing work here and justify counting this as a “review” of my own….

Ax's characterisation is pitch-perfect

So much yes! Ax is a fun narrator because of his alien perspective, but in the wrong hands that…

Is there a name for the situation where you keep thinking you like a certain genre, but you’re almost unfailingly critical of every book in that genre you read? That’s me and the superhero novel. I want to like superhero novels, desperately. Superheroes fascinate me. But most superhero novels I’ve read don’t quite capture whatever ineffable quality of superheroics that I’m looking for. (To be fair, I also don’t read superhero comics or watch much…

My friend Julie’s review pretty much nails why #37: The Weakness is, coincidentally, so weak. I’m just going to pile on with a few more observations.

This is Rachel’s chance to lead while Jake is away. She bungles it, but not as badly as the ghostwriter of this book (Elise Smith) bungles Rachel’s characterization. Her portrayal as an insecure megalomaniac gives me flashbacks, as it did Julie, to aggressive Rachel from #32: The Separation;…

Reading Iron Sunrise has been a long time in coming, ever since I read Singularity Sky. I finally got around to ordering a copy and dug into it when I realized I needed a good science fiction read. As usual, Charles Stross delivers on all sorts of quixotic ideas that I love in my science fiction. I like the posthuman parts of Iron Sunrise even better than its predecessor, and its action scenes are…

I am officially whelmed by this book. Exoveterinary studies sounds like a cool field, and all the strange animal descriptions reminded me of Animorphs, which I guess is always a good thing. Zenn Scarlett is a very whelming book, however: it is competent in every technical respect, but it does not inspire me or grab me. Christian Schoon’s imagination is rich, but his rendering of it on the page leaves something to be desired.

…

Yay, Ghüs is back for a bit!

For the third year in a row I bought Saga for my friend for a Christmas gift. As long as they keep releasing one of these volumes every year, I’m golden. Volume 6 jumps ahead four years, so Hazel is in kindergarten, and Alana and Marko are kind-of together again, searching for their daughter. Meanwhile, Prince Robot is enjoying being “off the grid” and away from the court,…

Last year I picked up my first Holly Bourne book with Am I Normal Yet?. I had been hearing so much about Bourne and her Spinster Club trilogy from people I follow on Twitter and YouTube that I ordered all of her books—yes, all of them—on faith. I deliberately deferred her debut, Soulmates. Not only did I want to see what all the fuss around the Spinster Club was about, but I know…

These “Chronicles” special volumes are always a delight. Visser is the story of Visser One, aka Edriss 562, whose host body is also Marco’s mom. Visser One is on trial by the Council of Thirteen, the ultimate governing body of the Yeerks, subject only to the whims of the Yeerk Emperor, whose identity is known only to the council members. Visser Three is prosecuting the trial, and his rivalry with Visser One is a major…

Over seven years and four books later, I have finished the Hyperion Cantos. What a journey. I’d be lying if I said I remembered much about the first three books at this point (that’s why I write reviews). I kept putting off reading The Rise of Endymion; it has been sitting in my to-read pile since I bought the last three books from the used book store. But Dan Simmons’ science fiction is…

Spoilers for the first two books but not this one, except maybe a minor not-quite spoiler at the very end.

Hey, SyFy executives who totally spend their time reading some rando’s reviews on Goodreads when they should be doing Important Executive Things™: you need to option the Linesman series and develop it for TV like you did with The Expanse. You did a really good job with The Expanse, by the way; I’m…

How do you even review a 760-page book comprising 52 short stories that is meant to offer a comprehensive look at the genre for the purposes of teaching? I don’t know.

The Kara of seven years ago would have rated each story out of 5 stars and taken the average, but ain’t nobody got time for that these days. It took me over a year to read this anthology—because if I had torn straight through…

It’s strange, because Neuromancer is over 30 years old and relies on concepts of technology that have diverged from our own world (Gibson’s cyberspace and the visualizations it birthed seem remarkably quaint these days)—yet in almost every respect, it holds up far better than Zero History, which is only 6 years old.

It was the constant use of the word iPhone that got to me. Every character kept taking out their iPhone—not their phone,…

OK, been a while since I’ve dropped one of these into the rotation. The Mutation is the first Jake-narrated book since #31: The Conspiracy. Whereas the previous book focused heavily on the tough decisions Jake must make as a leader, The Mutation instead explores more broadly the toughness required of all the Animorphs. This book is like a bizarre mash-up of James Bond and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The Animorphs discover that…

I’m not sure I should have read this book this week, the week of that infamous election, of all weeks. All the Birds in the Sky is somewhat apocalyptic, and this week feels much the same. Although this book is entertaining, I can’t say it gave me much in the way of hope that humanity might find a way to pull itself together, either through science or magic or some combination of both. This was…

The Bloodline Feud is an omnibus edition of the first two books in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series. You can read about the origins of the omnibus from Stross himself.

Suffice it to say, even though I already read the first two books, I decided to pick up this one and start reading the series in its rebooted form. I don’t remember enough of the original books to catch what (if any) substantial changes Stross…

It’s difficult to overstate how much I loved Laurie Penny’s Unspeakable Things. You should read it, full stop. So when I heard she had a novella coming out, of course I pre-ordered it right away. Whereas some science fiction speaks so optimistically to the potential for technological innovations to make our world better, Everything Belongs to the Future falls decidedly on the opposite side of that scale. The dystopian world that Penny imagines here…

What happens when the Singularity leaves you behind--or worse, forcibly uploads a copy of your mind state and then goes off and builds a wormhole using your mind as forced labour?

The Cassini Division asks just these sorts of mind-boggling posthuman questions. Ellen May Ngwethu is a few centuries old, thanks a telomere hack, and living in a post-scarcity society, thanks to nanomachine manufacturing. She has chosen to live on the front lines, literally, and…

What’s that? Sorry, I got distracted by how I’m leaving horrific fingerprints every time I touch the cover of this book because of that slick finish some fancy paperbacks have.

I’ve been listening to Of Monsters and Men’s latest album, Beneath the Skin, obsessively lately (even though it came out last year, I only just discovered it recently, because that’s how plugged into the music scene I am!). It is pretty much the perfect…

Somebody’s getting married!

It’s not Marco. That would be weird. Applegate has a lot of messed up stuff in Animorphs, including child soldiers, but not child brides (or grooms).

No, Marco’s dad has a new love interest, and it’s serious. Marco doesn’t know how he feels about this, what with his mother still being alive but playing host to an evil alien bent on killing or subjugating all humans. Unfortunately, the Animorphs have a…