Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

Haters gonna hate, but I don’t care: oatmeal is a fantastic weakness. I mean, think about some of the weaknesses enemies or superheroes have had in other stories. Kryptonite? Water? Tricking them into saying their names backwards? Country music? Oatmeal is a legit weakness—and Applegate very specifically restricts it to maple and ginger instant oatmeal. Throw in the additional snag that it doesn’t kill a Yeerk, just renders the Yeerk mad and keeps it from…

For people who like their thrillers with a heavy dose of depth.

Seriously, The Water Knife is a thriller for “the thinking person.” If you’ve read many of my reviews, you might have noticed that I rail against thrillers on a semi-regular basis. I like to say I’m a semi-reformed literature snob—that is, I don’t like partitioning books into genres, but sometimes they are convenient labels for discussion and critique. Now, I’ve read some good…

Previously, on Kara’s reviews…

… the characterization of the two protagonists is much improved. The other characters? Not so much….

Fridging women is not OK. Joking about fridging dead whores is also not OK.

Yes, this entire book is a sitcom about moving to the apartment down the block.

And now, the conclusion…

Well, I did it. I read Bite Me, because I am a sucker (gaaaaaah, vampire puns again) for punishment. And…

Yo dawg, I heard you like Internet sites.

The plot basically goes like this: Jake is online, back in the days when most of the people online were nine-year-olds and 40-year-olds on the prowl for nine-year-olds. He discovers a Yeerk website and lurks in the chatroom, wondering if these people are for real or if it’s a trap. The Animorphs decide to investigate by raiding the offices of the AOL analogue that holds all the…

There was this show, Chuck, on NBC back in the day. It began as the story of a computer technician at a “Buy More” who receives an email from a former college roommate. The email uploads the Intersect, a CIA/NSA supercomputer, into his brain. So the CIA and NSA send two agents, Sarah Walker and John Casey, to be Chuck’s handlers, to watch over him and keep him safe until the new Intersect is…

These people are oddly obsessed with putting bathrobes on after showering. She used his bathrobe, so he had to settle for a towel—what, you don’t towel off and then put on a bathrobe?

I was hesitant to borrow this from the library—the description screamed “generic pseudo–science-fiction thriller.” Neverthless, I resolved to give it a chance. I swear I didn’t notice that John Scalzi had blurbed it until I started reading. And it makes sense that…

Previously, on Kara’s reviews…

Jody and Thomas. I can’t even.

I find Jody’s characterization hugely problematic…. I just wish Moore hadn’t ruined what might have been a great thing by falling back on clichéd jokes, like, “I could stand to lose five pounds.” We get it: women are obsessed with their weight! Hah-hah, very funny. I’ll pencil in a laugh sometime next week.

I’m going to try the next book, because Moore has earned

…

Marco books might be the best books if you’re looking to jump into Animorphs. After fifteen books that might very well be the case. Applegate, cognizant of course that random books from this series would end up on library shelves the world over, with unconscionable gaps as a result of poor funding and attrition, tries her best to summarize the key points at the beginning of every book. But Marco does it best: succinct,…

Does every science-fiction writer have to write a Big Dumb Object novel? (TVTropes) Is it some kind of rite of passage? That’s basically what Spindrift is, or at least what it starts out as. Later it becomes a novel about first contact and an attempt to evoke that kind of humble, “we are not alone” sensation other such stories play with. Perhaps what sets it apart from similar novels is Steele’s smart decision to set…

I would be lying if I said I read this book for reasons other than a) it's by Elizabeth Bear and b) it's received some good attention, particularly in a few of my Goodreads groups. I know this because I struggle to find something compelling to talk about in this review. There's not really one thing that hooks me about this book. It's not a time period I'm interested in. The whole "wild West" motif…

Meehhhhhhhhhh?

I’m not sure what prompted me to grab a book so obviously in the dystopian YA camp. I guess it’s that bad habit of reading widely—I mean, it’s great in the sense that I discover books I love I might not have read otherwise. But it means I tend to read a lot of books that I find mediocre even when I know others are going to love them. It’s one thing to rip…

I’ve spent a lot of time so far talking about how the Animorphs series is amazing. It deals with complex topics and themes in a way that remains entertaining and accessible for adolescents. It’s a great gateway drug to full-blown science-fiction fandom. Although most of the books tend to feel light and fun, there is a very serious undertone to the entire series, one that finally comes to the fore as Applegate (and her legion…

Woo, non-Western science fiction! I love the opportunity to get out of my ethnocentric mindspace. Liu Cixin offers up a science fiction set (mostly) in China during both the modern day and the Cultural Revolution. As such, he brings a lot of history to the story that Western readers are probably not familiar with. Nevertheless, he and translator Ken Liu do an admirable job spinning an engrossing story about humanity’s responsibilities, and what might happen…

The titles of Animorphs novels might seem mundane, but they are always appropriate. The Change begins as another supposedly simple Animorphs versus Yeerks plot. It turns out to be so much more. Still, an alternative and equally appropriate title might have been The Hope.

Following the revelations from The Andalite Chronicles, Applegate finally returns to the perspective of the most marginalized Animorph, Tobias. Trapped in hawk morph, a nothlit, Tobias can’t exactly contribute…

Do you ever read a book only for it to be exactly what you expected? Not exactly what it promises, mind you, but to have all your expectations confirmed. That’s what happened here with Coyote Horizon. With only vague memories of Allen Steele’s first colonial SF adventures, I was vaguely optimistic about this book. I was looking forward to some politics, some wilderness, some alienness—and that’s what I got. Coyote Horizon, like its…

I first read Fragile Things back in my first year of university, after which I promptly lent it to a friend, who gave it back to me three or four years later—as can sometimes happen when I lend out books. I’ve been meaning to re-read it for a while so I can write a review. Then Neil Gaiman’s newest collection, Trigger Warning came out. So when I bought that, I also picked up his first…

I don’t really know how to start this review, because this is a very important topic for me. It should be an important topic for anyone who loves books. Although Pirate Cinema concerns not-so-exaggerated attempts to stop people from copying and remixing movies, much of the same rhetoric around copyright has been applied to books. Libraries pay insanely inflated prices for ebooks because publishers are freaked out that electronic files exist and can be…

So … yeah. This book made me cry, at the end.

I remember reading the hard copy version of this as a kid and marvelling at how much thicker it was than your typical Animorphs novel. Don’t get me wrong—by that age I was already mainlining The Lord of the Rings and Dune, so I was already acquainted with long novels. Until now, though, Applegate had intentionally been keeping her stories not just short,…

I wasn’t sure how Kasie West could follow up Pivot Point. The dual, parallel narrative structure of the first novel was neat, but I didn’t think it would be as interesting a second time. Fortunately, West approaches the story differently. This time the narrative is split between Addie and Laila.

Since I found Laila an interesting character in the first book, I welcomed the opportunity to get inside her head and learn more about…

World War I is not the sexier World War. The technology isn’t advanced; it didn’t end with a noisy double atomic bang; and it lacks the grandiose operatic tragedy of the Holocaust to offer a thematic background. Indeed, the political quagmire of nationalism and militarism that precipitated and fuelled the Great War might be interesting to historians, but to bored schoolkids, it just prompted us to wonder what we had done so wrong to deserve…