Books shelved under “Science Fiction”

Why did no one tell me this book existed until now????!!!!111

Seriously, it took a careful browsing of the library’s New Paperbacks section to discover the second and third books in this series. A quick hop to the nearby computer (which I think is running some kind of locked-down Ubuntu if the font anti-aliasing is anything to go by) to check the library’s catalogue, and sure enough, Phoenix Rising was in the stacks of that…

This summer saw the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge splash onto social media. ALS terrifies me. A deadly disease that slowly robs you of your ability to move but doesn’t affect your reasoning? I’m not particularly fond of physical activities, but I like embodiment; I like being able to engage with the world actively. The idea of being unable to do that but remaining sound of mind sounds like a terrible way to go.

Lock In…

Hi, there! I’m a genetically-engineered intestinal parasite that has migrated into Kara’s brain and taken over his body in order to assert my own personhood. Gee, it’s swell to meet all of you. I hope we become the best of friends!

This is the first book I’ve read by Mira Grant—the first book I’ve ever read, actually. But I’ve looked at some of Kara’s other reviews of Grant’s books—particularly Blackout, and by golly, he…

I’ve had this book on my to-read list for several years now, and I feel like the me who added this book would have liked it more than the me who ended up reading it. One of the nice things about having Goodreads to help me track my reading, what I’ve read and what I want to read, is that sometimes I can remember why I’ve put something on my list. In this case I…

Can a thriller also anaesthetize? Spook Country tries to find out. It has all the trappings of a modern espionage story, with quasi—government agents and a mysterious shipping container being tracked by a paranoid GPS geohacker. Yet William Gibson seems strangely reticent to let the story or the characters off their leash and venture boundlessly into this world. Instead, he escorts the reader on a meandering tour of a possible present (or near-future) which ponders…

Whoa, this came out in 2011? It’s already three years old? I knew it wasn’t a new release, but I thought it had only been a year or two. The hype is so fresh in my memory…. Well, that goes to show how unreliable one’s memory is.

Whether you agree with the hype or not, it’s understandable why Ready Player One has received so much attention. With its supersaturation of 1980s pop culture allusions, it…

What is this I don’t even.

Argh, my brain hurts. Where did it all start going so wrong? Was it when the sexually ambiguous cadre of private female shock troops seized the recreation of the Titanic in order to force its first-class passengers to toil at menial labour in an effort to rehabilitate them? Or was it earlier than that, when the ludicrously one-dimensional antagonists unleash a clone army of aborted foetuses on unsuspecting would-be…

Aliette de Bodard’s Xuya short fiction continues to be a universe that I enjoy reading but don’t hanker to return to very often. “The Waiting Stars” continues her heavily figurative style of writing, something that doesn’t always work for me. So my feelings about this story are ambivalent: I want to like it, but I also have to admit it doesn’t appeal to my personal aesthetics.

Lan Nhen and her cousin Cuc are on a…

I actually read this back when Subterranean Press first published it online. I almost didn’t re-read it when I found it in the Hugo Voters Packet … but then I decided that I wanted to write a review of it, and I wanted to refresh my memory. I’m glad I did this, because “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” is even better than I remember. (I am aware of the irony of this…

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…

Excellent short novelette from Mary Robinette Kowal about having to choose between having children and striking out amongst the stars. Except it isn’t about that at all. It’s about having to choose between watching your husband die, slowly and with less dignity every day, and striking out amongst the stars. Or maybe it’s about growing old, and the way the old are manipulated and treated, trotted out like icons from a fading past. Or perhaps…

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…