Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

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…

It has been almost two years since I read the first book in this series, and nearly a year since I bought books 2 and 3! I’m very glad Michael Cobley includes a brief synopsis of the first book; it helped with my terrible recall. The Orphaned Worlds is probably better than Seeds of Earth in terms of both story and organization. As with the first book, there were elements that made me want to…

Sunday, the beginning of my week off at the end of the summer. What better way to start it off than with a golden oldie? As with many authors, I’ve been gradually collecting any Samuel R. Delany books that show up at the used bookstore in town, and I haven’t read any for a while. So I picked up The Fall of the Towers, an omnibus of a trilogy that Delany wrote in his…

Oh my god give me all these books I want this entire series on my shelf right now. Alliance builds on the exciting promise made by S.K. Dunstall in Linesman to bring us a new space opera series that is bold both in its vision of interstellar politics and its cool SF technology. After a long time avoiding space opera (except to catch up on the good stuff I’ve missed) because of the overgrown…

Paolo Bacigalupi brings his unique style and science fiction sensibility to young adult fiction with Ship Breaker. If you were all, “I want my kid to read some socially conscious SF about the future of our society as global warming slowly takes hold” but were also all, “Holy shit The Water Knife has a lot of swearing and death in it!” then Ship Breaker is the book to recommend. It reminds me a lot…

At this point in the Animorphs series, the team has been fighting the Yeerks long enough that each of them must come to terms with how this war is changing them. The Prophecy is Cassie’s turn, as she suddenly finds herself riding shotgun with the personality of Aldrea (remember her from The Hork-Bajir Chronicles?). The Animorphs need Aldrea’s personality to help them retrieve a cache of weapons on the Hork-Bajir homeworld. With it, the…

Damn but the cuts keep coming.

This is probably one of my favourite books of the series. The Illusion is Tobias’ moment. Although early books in the series address the challenges Tobias faces living as a hawk, this book drives home the incompatibility of his life with human lives. Red-tailed hawks don’t live as long as humans. Tobias can only assume human form for two hour intervals, assuming he doesn’t want to lose his morphing…

Extracted was originally published a few years ago, but this edition is apparently “expanded” and contains “bonus material”. I don’t know about that, but I do know that I had never heard of this series until now, and that makes me sad. I’m glad that I got a copy of this to review through NetGalley, because Sherry D. Ficklin and Tyler Jolley have written some fun and original time travel here.

The setup is easy…

My one-sentence review might be: if you liked Leviathan, then you’ll like Behemoth. It’s a worthy sequel that notably doesn’t suffer from the dreaded “middle book syndrome” of a trilogy. Once again Scott Westerfeld plays fast and loose with the events leading up to World War I, and it pays off with an intense story in which our two protagonists have to decide what to prioritize: their duties, or their friendship. It’s the…

I’d like to gush over this one and give it five stars because it’s Rachel and my bias for her awesome/tragic character arc knows no bounds. Except. Except. The Separation is just not a very good novel. It has a cool (albeit unoriginal) idea that is squandered on a dull threat-du-jour.

Have you seen Superman III? What about the TOS episode “The Enemy Within”? The Voyager episode “Faces” (even more so than the TOS…