Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

The seemingly inevitable retreat from a human presence is space is as disappointing as it was probably predictable … space just isn’t an hospitable environment for humans. Or, more to the point, we’ve finally become capable of constructing machines that do the job much better than we could ever do. In “The Exchange Officers”, Brad Torgersen posits a retro–Golden Age future in which soldiers remote-operate robot proxies on the skin of space stations and do…

The liminal space between science fiction and fantasy is one of the most fertile confluences of genre. Hard science fiction kind of wraps around on itself; when your technology becomes indistinguishable from magic, suddenly you’ve entered a world of nanotechnological fantasy. “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly” echoes these sentiments. Benjanun Sriduangkaew, a nominee for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, plays in a world where technology has advanced…

So you invent a time machine, and what’s the first thing you do? You go back in time and kill Hitler, of course! Except you can’t (TVTropes), because either it doesn’t work or it screws up the timeline even more. Thus resolving one of the burning questions surrounding time travel: if it’s possible, why do we still have Hitler? Stephen Fry tackles this in a best-of-all-possible worlds way in Making History, where his protagonist…

You don’t need to read Oryx and Crake prior to reading The Year of the Flood. The two novels take place concurrently (though this one does extend slightly beyond the other’s narrative, wrapping up the cliffhanger of Snowman discovering that other humans have survived). However, I would recommend you read them close together. I only read Oryx and Crake back in March, but even a short span of two months has obliterated a…

I had no idea what to expect from Tigerman. All I knew is that Nick Harkaway has a new book out, and so I wanted to read it. At first it seemed like this was a pleasant, slightly uneven postcolonial story of an old soldier bonding with a boy on a doomed island. Gradually, I came to understand that there is much more happening beneath the surface. Tigerman lacks a lot of the flamboyant…

I exist in an uneasy state of ignoring Robert Silverberg and the Majipoor stories. It’s not that I don’t want to read them—in fact, I am certain I have read at least one, but don’t ask me which one…. It’s just that I’ve never had the time or inclination to get into the series through any of its entry points. I always seem to have something else to read or do….

The Desert of Stolen…

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that stories about robots, and in particular stories about love between robots and humans, are actually just stories about humans. Most stories are—about humans, that is. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is no exception. It’s right there in the title: this is about the daughter Cat, and not so much about the robot, Finn. He’s absent for much of the novel—though never gone. His presence throughout Cat’s life, from her…

I picked this up while nosing around an antique shop. My copy is battered: its front cover is torn and disfigured; its spine is bent into a sadistic and perilous curve; its pages are bloated and distorted from what I can only guess is water damage. If it weren’t such a thick book, I’d have scoffed at the £2 I paid for it.

As it is, there is something familiar about The Mammoth Book of…

As of this review, I’ve read six books by Larry Niven (some coauthored by his frequent collaborator, Jerry Pournelle). That’s a hefty number for any single author on my bookshelf. I’ve another three books by him on my to-read shelf, but part of me wonders why: my average rating is just over 2 stars, and I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I’ve found most of his books too flimsy and poorly written…

The Moon Goddess and the Son, this anthology helpfully informs us, is a novella that was later turned into a longer novel (not all that uncommon an occurrence). And after reading this I wonder what the novel is like, because the novella, at least, demonstrates some of the shortcomings of the shorter-length form of fiction. Donald Kingsbury has an interesting story to tell, but even making this novella as long as he does, he…

Like some of the other entries in this anthology, Enemy Mine feels like a prototype that defines the mould for an entire subgenre of science fiction. In this case, Barry Longyear uses the plight of two individuals to highlight the folly of the blind hatred taught to them by their respective species. With a human and a Drac soldier stranded together on an inhospitable world in the middle of a war, they must work together…

I mean, really. It’s called Time Safari. Do I really have to explain it to you? It’s “A Sound of Thunder” but without the butterfly and with more sexual tension.

At some point in the future, the Israeli government has developed time travel. With a margin of error plus or minus 5000 years, it is useless for rewriting the recent past, but hunting expeditions to the Cretaceous provide a useful source of funding for…

I was struck by a feeling of déjà vu while reading Who Goes There?. In retrospect this isn’t surprising, since it is a novella whose shockwaves continue to be felt throughout science fiction. John W. Campbell, Jr. elucidates this basic horror-story concept for its first, and perhaps best, iteration. Science fiction’s ties to its speculative cousin of horror are quite clear here. The ingredients are simple: an isolated research station in Antarctica; a startling…

If I didn’t know that Profession is an Isaac Asimov story, I would be inclined to say that it resembles very much an Isaac Asimov story. It is a textbook example of the kind of basic, fundamental social science fiction that Asimov made so popular and that had such an influence on the field at large. Asimov takes a single idea—that we could educate people by downloading the knowledge into their brain instead of devoting…

So, back when The Year of the Flood, Oryx and Crake’s contemporaneous sequel, came out, the great Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in The Guardian that she must honour Margaret Atwood’s wish not to have her novels labelled science fiction. She claims this restricts her ability to praise the book in the way she wants:

I could talk about her new book more freely, more truly, if I could talk about it as

…

The Large Hadron Collider is doing pretty well this early into its life. It has already produced compelling evidence for the existence of a Higgs boson. And it hasn’t produced a microscopic black hole that would sink into the centre of the Earth and devour us all. Yet.

David Brin wrote Earth around the same time I was born, long before the LHC was being built and its doomsayers were crying disaster. Even then, however,…

Sometimes I wish I had the power to checkpoint my life, much like one can in many video games. I’d like to index certain times and be able to rewind to them and then make a different decision. For example, this morning I noticed that I was running low on brown sugar, and I hadn’t bought any more last time I bought groceries. It made me wish I could go back to the point where…

William Gibson once said, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I’m starting to think this is the case with the Singularity as well. By its very definition this would seem to belie the idea of a Singularity at all, but bear with me.

Singularity generally deals in two closely related concepts: artificial intelligence and posthumanism. Once we get an AI that no longer relies on humans to improve its own processing…

Can you imagine being in two places at once? It’s a common image to conjure, but actually imagine it. Weird, huh?

Now try imagining being two people in two places at once. Or two people, in the same place. That’s even harder, and even weirder. But it’s exactly what Ann Leckie asks of us in Ancillary Justice, a book about a person who was once and is still but isn’t any more a ship, …

The librarians at my school alerted me to this book. I knew Neil Gaiman had written a special short story, “Nothing O’Clock”, for the 50th anniversary, but I hadn’t been particularly bothered about finding it. Aside from the fact that I tend not to read fan fiction, the state of ebooks these days is still deplorable enough that finding a non-DRM copy would probably have been tricky.

Luckily, I was clever and made sure I’m…